Giants’ offense: San Francisco bats quiet against Atlanta.
Donovan Solano’s pinch-hit homer that tied Friday night’s game with Atlanta with two outs in the ninth inning produced one of the most dramatic moments of the Giants’ season.
In the 19 innings after that drive over the left-field wall, the Giants’ offense didn’t produce much: nine hits, just one for extra bases.
The only runs they scored in that stretch came via a gamewinning, pinch-hit sacrifice fly by pitcher Kevin Gausman in the 11th inning of Friday night’s 6-5 thriller and a fisted twoRBI single by catcher Curt Casali in the fourth inning that accounted for all of the scoring in Saturday night’s 2-0 victory.
Those offensive struggles are out of character for San Francisco, which leads the National League in OPS (.770) and slugging percentage (.442) and is second in runs (736).
“You don’t often see us get shut down the way we got shut down today, but it has happened,” manager Gabe Kapler said after Atlanta’s Max Fried and two relievers held the Giants to four singles in a 3-0 decision Sunday afternoon.
Kris Bryant had one of the Giants’ three hits off Fried, a left-hander who struck out five, walked one and threw 99 pitches in seven innings.
Bryant said Fried’s success came from “changing the speed from a 94-97 mph fastball and a big breaking curveball. It was a good combo today, and (we) tip our cap to him.”
The Giants rank second in the NL with 560 walks. To receive a lone free pass Sunday afternoon also was out of character.
“I thought we maybe could have done better working the counts to get that pitch count up a little bit and get to the bullpen earlier,” Bryant said, “but some games don’t go that way.”
To own the best record in baseball (97-53), you can’t have too many stretches of offensive droughts, but as Kapler said, it has happened to his team.
Two of the most notable? A four-game series in Washington in June in which the Giants scored a total three runs but still managed to pull out two wins, and a four-game losing streak from Aug. 29 through Sept. 1 in which they scored a total of five runs against Atlanta (one game) and Milwaukee (three).
The good news for the Giants is that they rebounded quite well after each of those unproductive offensive stretches.
After the June swoon, they won 10 of their next 11 games and scored at least five runs in 10 of the 11. Beginning Sept. 2, they won 11 of 12 games and scored at least six runs in each of the final nine, all of which they won.
“We have continually demonstrated that (offensive droughts are) not going to stay that way for long,” Kapler said, “and I would push a lot of chips in that our offense is going to be just fine.”