Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
D-backs damper Bumgarner’s day
DIAMONDBACKS 6, GIANTS 5 NATIONAL LEAGUE
PHOENIX — Two big swings from Madison Bumgarner were undone by another bullpen meltdown in a wild opener for the San Francisco Giants that looked an awful lot like last season.
Chris Owings singled home the winning run and the Arizona Diamondbacks scored twice with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning off new San Francisco closer Mark Melancon for a 6-5 victory Sunday.
Derailed by a dreadful relief corps last year, the Giants started this season the same way — even after trying to fix the problem by bringing in Melancon on a $62 million, four-year contract.
Bumgarner retired his first 16 batters and became the first pitcher to hit two home runs on opening day. He struck out 11 with no walks in seven innings — all for naught.
Arizona got a double by Jeff Mathis and three singles after Melancon (0-1) retired his first two batters in the ninth. A.J. Pollock singled in the tying run, and Owings dumped a base hit into right field to end it.
“We never expect anything negative to happen with Mark out there,” Giants Manager Bruce Bochy said. “It happened. You are not going to be perfect. We had our chances to put the game away a couple of times and couldn’t do it.”
The Giants had 32 blown saves last season, including nine in September. In their final playoff game, Bochy went through five relievers in the ninth inning against the Chicago Cubs, and San Francisco was eliminated from its NL division series after allowing four runs for a 6-5 defeat.
That led to an offseason overhaul in the bullpen, headlined by the arrival of Melancon as a free agent. He saved 98 games over the past two seasons, most in the majors.’
“You never really want to start it off this way, especially after a heck of a performance by Madison,” Melancon said. “This was one of the more impressive games I have seen by anybody. I really wanted to cap off a good start by him. Obviously, it didn’t go that way.”
It was an emotional debut for new Arizona Manager Torey Lovullo, the former Boston bench coach who had many family members in the crowd and thought often of his father, television producer Sam Lovullo (Hee Haw), who died earlier this year.
“It couldn’t have been scripted any better,” Lovullo said. “The walk that we’ve been walking, the concepts that we’ve laid on these guys, they went out there an earned every part of that victory.”
The Diamondbacks lost 93 games last season.
San Francisco took a 5-4 lead when Joe Panik led off the ninth inning with a triple and scored on pinch-hitter Conor Gillaspie’s sacrifice fly.
Bumgarner’s linedrive home run off Zack Greinke put the Giants ahead 2-0 in the fifth. The pitcher’s second solo shot, off lefty Andrew Chafin, broke a 3-3 tie in the seventh.
“That is obviously pretty special, having the chance to do that and for that to happen,” Bumgarner said, “but my job is out there on the mound. That is where my concern is at.”
Bumgarner has 17 career home runs.
Mathis broke up Bumgarner’s perfect-game bid with a one-out triple into the left-field corner in the sixth. Mathis scored on Nick Ahmed’s pinch-hit single, and Pollock — who missed almost all of last season with a broken elbow — followed with a two-run home run just over the left-field fence that tied it at 3.
Greinke was limited to five innings because of a high pitch count. He allowed 2 runs on 4 hits, striking out 4 and throwing 92 pitches.
CARDINALS 4, CUBS 3 Randal Grichuk hit a two-run homer in the eighth inning and a game-ending RBI single in the ninth, helping the St. Louis Cardinals top the Chicago Cubs in a wild prime-time opener. Jose Martinez sparked the winning rally with a pinch-hit double against Mike Montgomery, who closed out Chicago’s World Series championship in November. Yadier Molina then was awarded the first no-pitch intentional walk in major league history, part of baseball’s offseason rule changes designed to speed up the game. With two outs and the bases loaded, Grichuk lined a 1-2 pitch into the gap in left-center for his second career game-ending hit. He was mobbed as he rounded first in the rain, and what was left of a sellout crowd of 47,566 cheered wildly.
AMERICAN LEAGUE
RAYS 7, YANKEES 3 Chris Archer pitched seven solid innings and the Tampa Bay Rays won the
first game of the season, roughing up Masahiro Tanaka and beating the visiting New York Yankees. Evan Longoria and Logan Morrison hit home runs and drove in three runs apiece before a sellout crowd of 31,042 at Tropicana Field on opening day. Tanaka, who had baseball’s ERA in spring training, was tagged for a career-worst seven earned runs in 22/3 innings. A first-time All-Star in 2015 who lost an AL-leading 19 times last season, Archer limited New York to two runs and seven hits. He narrowly escaped a bases-loaded
jam and turned a five-run lead over to a revamped bullpen. Closer Alex Colome replaced rookie Austin Pruitt with the bases loaded in the ninth, yielding a sacrifice fly to pinch hitter Chris Carter before finishing for the save.