SAN FRANCISCO — At about 6:45 p.m. on Saturday evening, the Giants were feeling pretty good about their situation.
They took the field knowing the New York Mets had lost an eighth straight game then immediately went out and put four runs on Clayton Kershaw, whose path to Cooperstown is paved in part by years of dominance at Oracle Park. With their own ace on the mound, the Giants had a real opportunity to take control of the NL wild-card race.
Life, however, can come at you pretty fast this time of year.
At 4:15 p.m. on Sunday, the Giants walked off the field having lost a second straight game. Their two co-aces, moved up a day so that they both could face the Los Angeles Dodgers, combined to give up 11 runs over the weekend. Across the country on Sunday, the Mets got a walk-off homer from Pete Alonso, the type of swing they have been missing for weeks.
After a 10-2 loss to the Dodgers on Sunday, the Giants are 1.5 games back of the Mets, who hold the tiebreaker. They once again are chasing, hoping for a little bit of help, and also a lot more success next weekend at Dodger Stadium.
“It’s disappointing,” manager Bob Melvin said. “We were just talking about that [in the clubhouse]. We win the first game, we score four runs in the first inning yesterday — it feels pretty good. To be where we are today, it’s disappointing. It got away from us in a hurry.
“We gave up a lot of hits and a lot of runs to a team that makes you work. If you don’t throw it over the plate, they end up wearing you out.”
The Dodgers had 35 hits and 23 runs over the final two games of the series, and it appears they finally have flipped the switch after an inconsistent summer. That would be bad news for a Giants team that has four games at Dodger Stadium next weekend and once again will have to find a way to get to what right now is the hottest starting staff in the game.
Tyler Glasnow had allowed just one hit until the seventh on Sunday and ended up giving up one run on three hits. On Friday, Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up one hit and struck out seven over 10 innings. His dominance wasn’t rewarded because Justin Verlander matched him and Patrick Bailey hit a walk-off grand slam.
The Giants used Thursday’s day off to move Logan Webb and Robbie Ray up a day to follow Verlander, and it didn’t pay off at all. Like Webb a day earlier, Ray was knocked out after allowing the first three runners to reach in the fifth inning.
Ray said he feels great physically and noted his fastball was as firm as it’s been all year. But he sprayed the ball around early, and the Dodgers will always make you pay for a lack of command.
“I felt, out of the stretch, a little bit like my front side was getting a little too quick. I was missing a lot arm-side,” Ray said. “I just wasn’t able to really get on top of it like I was out of the windup. I was just kind of fighting that all day, really.”
The Giants hoped that moving Webb and Ray up could lead to a huge weekend. Instead, they’ll now try to figure out how to get through a series at Chase Field, where the Arizona Diamondbacks are still very much alive. They were the only team in the jumbled wild-card mess to win their weekend series, and they’ll enter this week just half a game behind the Giants.
None of this will be easy, at least until the Giants get to their final series against the Colorado Rockies. To make sure that one counts, they’ll need to fare better against Dodger pitching. They’re going to see Yamamoto, Kershaw and Glasnow again next weekend, and also could face young right-hander Emmet Sheehan, who is throwing well and has had plenty of success against the Giants early in his career.
Melvin said the staff would get together and discuss whether a change is needed next weekend. There’s not much you can do when Yamamoto is hitting his spots, but Glasnow was wild in the early innings on Sunday and the Giants couldn’t take advantage.
“You’re always in between, whether or not you want to make him work or try to get that fastball early in the count. Nothing really worked today,” Melvin said. “We’ll talk about changing our approach. We have to do something different.”
It goes without saying that the Giants also will have to pitch a lot better next weekend. Webb and Ray will get another shot at the Dodgers, and the latter didn’t think there would be any carryover. He has been in this division a long time and had good starts at Dodger Stadium as well as rough ones.
Next week’s games were always going to be huge, but there’s a bit of added pressure after a rough 48 hours at Oracle Park. The Giants didn’t lose any ground to the Mets this weekend, but they did lose three days on the calendar, and right now that’s just as important.
“It’s frustrating obviously, but we’re still in it,” Ray said. “We’re a resilient team. We’ve shown that we’re able to bounce back from stuff like this. We’ve just got to put this behind us, go on the road and win one game at a time.”
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