No comeback necessary: SF Giants’ winning streak reaches 10 games against Padres
SAN FRANCISCO — Nothing, not another bullpen game, not the Padres’ star power, nor Fernando Tatis Jr.’s powerful right arm, can stop the Giants’ winning streak.
It reached 10 games Wednesday with a 4-2 win over San Diego, matching the club’s longest unbeaten stretch since it was Barry Bonds, not Mike Yastrzemski, dropping walk-off splash hits into McCovey Cove. Their win Wednesday night didn’t require any such heroics, thanks to the efforts of six pitchers in a bullpen game and a crucial overturned call that turned their lone scoring rally from a one-run inning into four.
San Francisco clinched a series win over the Padres — they will have a chance at a four-game sweep with Alex Wood on the mound Thursday — the first time the Giants have won a series at Oracle Park since the third weekend of May, despite owning the majors’ best record since Mother’s Day (25-9). Somehow, they don’t own the majors’ longest active winning streak, which belong to the Cincinnati Reds, who won their 11th in a row Wednesday. It is, nonetheless, the longest string of wins the Giants have put together since they won 10 straight from May 20-31, 2004, under manager Felipe Alou.
The game turned on a lengthy and controversial review in the bottom of the fifth, which Padres manager Bob Melvin was ejected for protesting.
The Giants broke through in the fifth against Yu Darvish, putting their first three batters of the inning on base, but it appeared they would have to settle for one run. After what would have been an inning-ending outfield assist from Tatis was overturned, it turned into a four-run inning.
Trying to score from second on a single to right field from Joc Pederson, Blake Sabol was given an aggressive, two-out green light from third-base coach Mark Hallberg. Tatis has one of the best outfield arms in the game — he owns the hardest-thrown assist on record this season — and showed it off, firing a laser beam to catcher Gary Sanchez that easily beat Sabol to the plate. It was, at least initially, an easy call to make for home plate umpire Quinn Wolcott.
But Giants manager Gabe Kapler conferred with Wolcott and challenged the play. Sanchez was ruled to have blocked Sabol’s path to the plate — similar to the play that got an irate Bruce Bochy ejected earlier this week — awarding the Giants their second run and extending the inning. Once play resumed following the approximately five-minute delay, Mike Yastrzemski and J.D. Davis each immediately ripped RBI singles that made it 4-0.
After the game, Melvin said it was “one of the worst calls I’ve seen this year,” while Kapler unsurprisingly took the other side.
“It seems like they got the call right,” he said. “That’s just our interpretation. …
“The rule as we understand it is if the catcher’s left foot is on the outside of the (foul) line without the baseball, he’s not providing a clear lane to the plate for the base runner. That’s what we saw on video. That’s what it looked like in real time.”
Speaking to a pool reporter, Wolcott cited the explanation given by the replay center in New York: “The catcher’s initial positioning was illegal and his subsequent actions while not in possession of the ball hindered and impeded the runner’s path to home plate.”
The successful challenge was Kapler’s 17th in 23 tries this season — the second-best success rate in the majors — and Sabol said the bench was already on top of it by the time he returned to the dugout.
“I was just being the base runner. I was running as hard as I could and trying to avoid a collision there,” he said. “Once I was wasn’t able to reach home plate after he tagged me out, I was like OK, I feel like I didn’t even have a chance to touch it. … That’s what big about this coaching staff: They’re always overprepared, if anything. They’re always looking for stuff like that. Kudos to them, that was a big challenge for us.”
For the third night in a row, the Giants got excellent work from a rookie right-hander to bridge the gap to the later innings. This time, it was Sean Hjelle, who entered in the second after a scoreless first inning from opener Ryan Walker and blanked the Padres for four innings, before handing the lead off to San Francisco’s high-leverage arms, Taylor Rogers, Luke Jackson, Tyler Rogers and Camilo Doval, who earned his 20th save, tied with Cincinnati’s Alexis Diaz for most in the NL.
The Giants improved to 8-3 in 11 games using an opener this season, while their bullpen ERA (1.79) since Mother’s Day is the best in the majors by nearly a full run.
“I made a joke in the bullpen the first day I got here,” said Hjelle, who was called up Monday. “Obviously you hit the ground running, but it’s kind of like merging onto a freeway. Like, I hope I can merge at the same speed you guys are going because things are clicking on all cylinders here.”
By all accounts, Hjelle did just that, lowering his major-league ERA this season from 10.13 to 7.79 with his work Wednesday night.
Hjelle pumped his fist as he walked off the mound at the end of the fifth inning. He worked himself into trouble, walking the leadoff man and throwing a wild pitch that took away a double play and put two runners in scoring position, but got himself out of it with a strikeout of Tatis. They battled for seven pitches before Hjelle got Tatis to swing through a knuckle curve that needed to be smothered by Sabol, ending the inning and prompting an animated reaction from the 6-foot-11 right-hander.
“It was a big moment in the game,” Hjelle said. “If they scratch a run there in the fifth, it could tip the game one way or another.”
The Giants also benefitted from an outfield assist of their own, which went down as one of four double plays turned on the evening. After Manny Machado doubled to lead off the fourth inning, he made the third out of the inning at third base attempting to tag up on a shallow pop fly into foul territory. Michael Conforto made the routine play and made a casual toss to cutoff man Brandon Crawford, who still had plenty of time to turn and get the ball to J.D. Davis, who laid the tag on Machado.
Walker and Hjelle each generated double-play ground balls off the bat of Juan Soto in his first two trips to the plate, the first time in his career the Padres slugger had grounded into multiple double plays in a single game. The biggest clutch work came from Jackson, who got Jake Cronenworth to ground into an inning-ending double play in the sixth after allowing the first two batters to reach base.
The Giants have historically crushed Darvish. The 6.26 ERA against them he took into Wednesday night was the highest of any starter since 2012 with at least 10 starts against San Francisco. Seven players in the Giants’ starting lineup had previous faced him, combining for a .333 batting average and seven home runs in 69 at-bats.
But it took until the fifth to break through, with the rally started by the two players who had never faced Darvish: Matos, who beat out his second infield single of the game, stole second and scored on Crawford’s sac fly, and Sabol, who recorded a pair of hits against him, a single that set up the pivotal play at the plate and a double the following inning. The run scored by Matos was his 10th of the season, the most ever by a Giants rookie in his first seven games.
The Giants, still, have not scored in the first three innings of any game this series, and have only run run in the first four innings. But, like all their past 10 games, they won nevertheless.