San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Win streak ends with a whimper
Hear that silence?
“It’s a little weird,” Jeff Samardzija said. For the third time in 17 games, there was no postgame music. The strobe and smoke machines were off and the lights were on. The Giants did not win.
Games like Saturday’s 114 loss to the Mets were the norm not that long ago. Now they are an anomaly.
The Giants’ sevengame win streak ended in a rare noncompetitive game at Oracle Park that dropped them below .500 after they reached it for the first time this season Friday night.
In May, a game like this would have been met with a “here we go again” eye roll. Now, when manager Bruce Bochy calls it a “bump in the
road,” as he did Saturday, the fans — and especially the players — believe it is.
“We’ve been finding so many different ways to get the job done. It’s been a lot of fun,” Samardzija said after his threegame win streak ended with another loss to a team he has not beaten in his career. He is 06 with a 7.30 ERA against the Mets.
“We talk about it all the time in here, how much we enjoy it,” Samardzija said of the run, not necessarily this game. “We need to have that mentality that that’s the norm and we’re going to come to the field every day with that expectation of winning a ballgame, or winning a series, and doing what we have to do to make a run in the fall.”
The Giants can win the series Sunday when they get a reminder that this is a development year, too.
Drew Pomeranz will go to the bullpen after one of his best starts of the year and give way to lefthander Conner Menez, the 24yearold Hollister native who will be promoted from TripleA Sacramento and make his majorleague debut against Steven Matz.
Menez was at Oracle Park on Saturday and saw what everyone else has the past three games. The Mets swing the bat as if they don’t know they actually get three strikes before they have to sit down.
That’s easy to exploit for pitchers who can command the ball, as Madison Bumgarner and Tyler Beede did in the Giants’ victories Thursday and Friday. Against a pitcher who is “tick off,” as Samardzija was in Bochy’s words, the Mets’ aggressiveness can pay off. “They were hacking and they got a couple of them,” Samardzija said.
Samardzija allowed four runs in five innings, including one on a homer by Dominic Smith and two on a blast by Jeff McNeil.
Smith, a first baseman by training, had a fourRBI game, to apologize to his mates for dropping Pablo Sandoval’s flyball to left field in the 10th inning Friday night to let the Giants win 10.
New York hitters breathed fire all afternoon after the Mets held the Giants to four runs over 26 innings in the first two games and lost both.
Rookie of the Year frontrunner Pete Alonso hit a threerun home run in the sixth, one of two blasts in the inning against Derek Holland. Todd Frazier also hit one.
Meanwhile, after outlasting Noah Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom in the two wins, the Giants had the bad fortune of facing a rookie they had not seen who owns an ERA that looked more like a touchdown, twopoint conversion and a field goal.
Guys like Walker Lockett usually destroy the Giants.
Lockett earned his first bigleague win by holding them to a Joe Panik RBI single in five innings. This was his sixth bigleague start. The other five over this season and last were not good: four losses, a fifth team loss and a 10.45 ERA.
The Giants’ offensive spigot has been off the entire series. They had five runs in 34 innings before Alex Dickerson and Mike Yastrzemski homered in the ninth, which began with the Mets leading 111.
Sandoval singled four times and scored on the Dickerson homer.
Bochy was asked whether fatigue has set in after a physically challenging trip that yielded the offense 62 runs.
“It probably looked like it today,” he said. “It’s been a tough schedule there for the guys. Not taking anything away from Lockett. We couldn’t figure him out.
“You’re going to have games like this.”
Just not as many as before.
Henry Schulman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: hschulman@sfchronicle. com Twitter: @hankschulman