Rare offensive outburst yields 1st 3-game streak
When a team reaches Mother’s Day 10 games below .500 and still has not won three in a row, it cannot be choosy about whom it beats and how. But there is such a thing as pride.
So, yeah, the Giants really wanted another crack at the Reds after taking a 31-5 keelhauling over three games on the last trip. The schedule obliged the Giants, who did not squander their chance to slap the Reds with a painful rejoinder.
“After a while, when you play like we did, you start to take things personally,” Brandon Belt said after the Giants swamped Cincinnati 8-3 on Sunday to get that elusive threegame win streak.
The Giants also completed their first winning of week of
2017 as they took three of four from the team that slapped them around Great American Ball Park the previous weekend.
“We got pummeled pretty good to the point of getting embarrassed,” manager Bruce Bochy said. “Then they won the first game here, a tight game. To win three games in a row, pitching the way we did and executing, it was a good bounce-back against a club that’s been pretty good against us.”
Pitching indeed led the way. After allowing those 31 runs in the three games at Cincinnati, the staff held the Reds to eight runs over 44 innings in the four games at AT&T Park. Jeff Samardzija allowed three of those in 61⁄3 innings Sunday for his first win.
But pitching was not the main story Sunday.
The Giants scored a series’ worth of runs over the first two innings to take a 7-0 lead, forcing Bochy to try to remember how to manage a game like that.
The Giants got their injured center fielder and shortstop back for the series and looked like a different team with Denard Span raking at the top of the order and Brandon Crawford flashing his Gold Glove.
Span reached on a two-base error by right fielder Scott Schebler to start a four-run first against starter Tim Adleman, who had to leave after the inning with a neck injury, then tripled to start a three-run second against Barrett Astin.
For the series, Span was 9-for-21 with four runs, a double, a triple and two home runs, matching his extra-base-hit output for the nearly three weeks before he hurt his shoulder crashing into the wall at Coors Field.
Span could not explain why he came off the disabled list so hot after just two rehab games in the minors, other than a lot of hard work that included standing in for bullpen sessions.
“It wasn’t like I was in Cancun or Cabo,” he joked. “Once I got put on the DL, I told myself I want to take advantage of the time and I made sure my legs were fresh, doing conditioning and working out every day. I just wanted to stay ready so when I did come off the DL, it wouldn’t take me long to get in the swing of things.”
Span scored the game’s first run on Joe Panik’s double. Buster Posey singled Panik home and Eduardo Nuñez started his best overall game with a tworun single. Nuñez also stole two bases and saved two runs with a diving, backhand catch on an Adam Duvall liner.
Panik added a second-inning sacrifice fly after Span’s triple. Crawford, who has been rusty at the plate since returning from a groin injury, hit a two-run double after Belt walked and Posey was plunked on the elbow.
Belt added a solo homer, his third of the series, a power show the Giants would love to see him continue with the Dodgers visiting for three games. The Dodgers have won seven of nine since the Giants took a series in Los Angeles to start what became a 3-6 trip.
“It seems like we’ve played the Dodgers 20 times in the last week, doesn’t it?” Span said. “We know the crowd is going to be into it. This was just a huge series for us. We need to take it into the next series against L.A.”