Dubón’s strong game wasted as S.F. falls
Mauricio Dubón slammed the longest home run of his young career and first of the year well up the leftfield bleachers at Coors Field, giving the Giants a seventhinning lead. Dubón turned toward his dugout and screamed, which was hard to miss in a stadium sans fans.
The Rockies’ Daniel Murphy heard it, and when he hit a pinch tworun off former teammate Rico Garcia a half inning later to restore a Rockies lead, on their way to Thursday’s 64 victory, he twice gave Dubón the stankeye as he trotted.
Manager Gabe Kapler had no issue with Dubón testing his 26yearold lungs.
“I think that baseball needs and will benefit from players who express themselves and benefit from players who are emotional like Mauricio is,” Kapler said. “There’s room in this game for quiet assassins who put their heads down and run around the bases like Matt Williams did, and there’s plenty of room for players to get really excited.
“As long as the excitement is directed toward our dugout, not theirs, I’m in favor of players expressing themselves.”
Dubón, Garcia and Caleb Baragar had big roles in the Giants’ third loss in four games at Coors, Dubón giving the Giants three runs, the two fellow rookies subsequently surrendering five. The three symbolize the 2020 season paradox.
On one hand, the Giants clearly are not done with their rebuild, so it seems wise to put rookies in important situations to gauge their mettle and abilities.
On the other hand, a .500 record could sneak the Giants into a fattened postseason bracket. At 67 before the game, they actually held a playoff position. If Dubón, Garcia and other rookies struggle, what’s the right move? Let them learn and bring up even more prospects, or let older players try to win ballgames?
“We’re all aligned on that,” Kapler said, meaning him and the front office. “Right now, we’re in a playoff race and we’re in August. We’re all treating it as such. We can manage development and winning simultaneously.”
The race takes them from a 93 Colorado team to another visit to Los Angeles for three against the 94 Dodgers.
Kapler removed starter Tyler Anderson, the former Colorado lefthander, after five shutout innings in a move that contradicted a winatallcosts mentality, but that was a special case. Anderson had not thrown more than 49 pitches in a game and was up to 66 after five. He was on that kind of a limit.
Kapler said keeping Anderson healthy trumped any other factor. Anderson said he was down with it.
“I’d be the first person to fight for more innings, but to me, it felt like the right time,” Anderson said. “I hadn’t thrown more than threeplus. There have been a lot of injuries around baseball, so I thought it was the right move.”
Garcia, who had not allowed a run in six games, started the seventh by allowing two doubles for one run and Murphy’s tworun homer, which gave Colorado a onerun lead. That grew to three later in the seventh when Baragar allowed a David Dahl single and tworun homer by Charlie Blackmon, who did more damage in the series (6for14, five RBIs) than Nolan Arenado.
Dubón said he did not see Murphy’s glares but enjoyed hearing about it as much as giving the Giants a lift after he started the year .240 and had to sit for several games in what Kapler called a “mental reset.”
Dubón already had made his mark Thursday by leaping at the wall in center, in his second career start there, to rob Matt Kemp of extra bases.
“That’s something that’s been going on around the league for a while,” Dubón said of Murphy. “He was probably trying to get me grounded, I respect him a lot. I enjoyed what he did, too.
“I had a lot of emotion, knowing where it came from, knowing the start of the year and not playing every day right now, then not having a good first few atbats and finally breaking through like that.”
Dubón also singled in the ninth before Austin Slater ended the game by hitting into the Giants’ fourth double play. Henry Schulman covers the Giants for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: hschulman@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hankschulman