How SF Giants’ playoff chances evaporated over disastrous 10-game road trip
LOS ANGELES — When the Giants embarked on this trip 10 days ago, they were firmly in the playoff race.
Riding high off a 5-1 homestand, their postseason odds, according to FanGraphs, stood at 47.5%. As recently as the last day of August, their chances were as high as 67.1%. Walked off Sunday night by the Dodgers, 3-2, they had fallen to 0.2% by the time they boarded their charter flight home.
It was their eighth loss in 10 games on this disastrous trip, sending them two games below .500 for the first time since May and into a tie with the Padres, and it played out similarly to many of their previous 79. There wasn’t a pitcher who completed five innings, the little offense they produced came on one swing of the bat, and they left the bases loaded twice, including in the top of the ninth when Mitch Haniger went down swinging.
In a cruel twist of irony, Patrick Bailey bounced into a double play to end the top of the 10th on a play that was nearly identical to the one that scored the winning road against them in the first game of this trip, last Friday in Colorado. Bailey’s grounder up the middle deflected off the glove of closer Evan Phillips, like Elehuris Montero’s did to Camilo Doval a little over a week ago, but this time, Chris Taylor snatched it, stepped on second and fired to first.
It took only two batters in the bottom of the 10th for Taylor to drive home the winning run against Doval with a line drive to right field.
There are still scenarios, however outlandish, that end with the Giants sneaking in to the postseason, but Gabe Kapler said before Sunday’s game, “I haven’t even looked at it in five or six days, with what has to happen with other teams because I know we just have to win every game.”
It has been a collapse for the ages, one that dwarfs even the 20-36 September record that led to Kapler’s ouster in Philadelphia.
Things started to go south almost as soon as their charter flight departed for Denver. They dropped their first three games, allowing a Rockies team with the worst record in the National League to clinch its first series win over a divisional foe all season. It should have been a prime opportunity to pick up wins, against a team they had beaten 16 of 17 times entering the series, but instead acted as the start of their downfall.
“Obviously things didn’t go the way we wanted them to there,” outfielder Mike Yastrzemski said. “I think we kind of let that affect our mentality and aggressiveness. That’s probably why it’s transpired the way it has.”
The Giants’ offensive woes persisted for the first three games at hitter-friendly Coors Field. They scored nine runs over the first three games and were no-hit for eight innings in the opener. Even exploding for 11 runs in the finale, they came a run away from being swept.
“It was a pretty big dagger not even splitting or taking that series,” left-hander Alex Wood said. “We went in with pretty high energy, expecting to take three of four in Colorado and head into a tough series against the D-backs and LA. That was a big missed opportunity, for me.”
Still, the Giants boarded their flight to Arizona in good spirits, celebrating their first win of the trip with half the roster dressed up in various ‘Ken’ costumes in a ‘Barbie’ movie-themed dress-up day. They had faltered but understood they could make up for it against the team directly ahead of them in the wild card standings.
They were swept in Arizona and weren’t particularly competitive in either game.
“I think it was tough for us to rebound there,” Yastrzemski said. “Sometimes you play good teams, too. They played well. We didn’t. That’s what happens.”
They committed three errors between the two games and 12 on this road trip. Their pitchers allowed 49 earned runs, tied for the fifth-most in the majors over this stretch, but it was the mistakes that killed them. They also allowed 10 unearned runs, two more than the next-worst team.
While advanced metrics tell a different story, their 113 errors are by far the most in the majors this season, 13 more than the next-closest team.
“I still think as much emphasis and as much as we continue to try to tune up defensively, I think if we played better defense, our pitching staff had a chance to be a really good pitching staff this year,” Kapler said. “Like top five in all of baseball. … We still haven’t protected them enough.”
Their inability to score consistently put them in a compromised position defensively. On most days, it meant one of Flores or Joc Pederson had to play the field when both were better-suited as full-time designated hitters. After being shut out Saturday night, Kapler said he weighed starting Flores or J.D. Davis at third base Sunday.
“You get shut out, you get two-hit, the next day you probably have to find a way to scratch a run across,” Kapler said. “OK, let’s find a way to make sure Wilmer’s in the lineup. This is my calculus. J.D. or Wilmer? J.D. or Wilmer? J.D. or Wilmer? We can’t score runs. We have to have Wilmer in there.”
It would be easy to place blame for the Giants’ collapse solely on this last road trip — disappointing and demoralizing, to be sure — but cracks began to show as early as the first week of the season. The team was striking out at a record pace and improved only marginally as the season progressed. Those swings and misses and taken pitches were supposed to pay dividends when they made contact, waiting for a pitch to drive, but their power stroke evaporated.
LaMonte Wade Jr.’s two-run homer in the fourth inning Sunday was only their 63rd since the All-Star break, third-fewest in the majors.
“As much as I know it’s a business and people want to look out for their careers,” Yastrzemski said, “I think we could’ve done a better job of showing offensive discipline in terms of just trusting the guy behind us and moving one at-bat to the next and not trying to be the hero every time.”
Like the Rockies series to start this road trip, there were also numerous missed opportunities early in the season. The Giants are only 37-34 against teams below .500, including series losses to the Royals, Tigers, Nationals and Pirates before the season was two months over.
“I can think of so many games we should have won in April, May. Teams below .500. We got swept by them, lost series,” Flores said. “I know it’s 162 games, but we’ve got to keep our foot on the gas. … I feel like when we played teams we should beat, sometimes we lost focus. We were like, OK, we got this. … I feel like we got beat by so many pitchers that we should have scored more than zero or three runs. … It’s unacceptable with the players that we have here.”
The Giants will end the season without having won any of their final 11 series away from Oracle Park. They went 6-28 over their final 34 road games, a historic stretch of ineptitude that got the attention of Eduardo Perez in the ESPN broadcasters’ meeting with Kapler before the final ‘Sunday Night Baseball’ telecast of the season.
“He was like, can you explain your road and home records and why do you think you guys have been so bad on the road?” Kapler said. “Like, I just think we’ve been bad. I don’t think we’ve done anything different on the road. I just think we haven’t been as good of a team as we expect ourselves to be.”
Flores has been their one consistent offensive performer and finished with two more hits Sunday before leaving in the fourth inning with right knee discomfort. In front of his locker before the game, he reflected on their fall over the past two weeks and asked a reporter about their dwindling playoff odds.
“What, we’ve got a 1% chance now?”
Sure, if you round up.
“I mean, we had it there,” Flores said. “We had a chance this road trip to make something good happen. But we put ourselves in this situation where we had to press.”