Padres 7, Giants 0: Two Hits. Two. That Is the Whole Night.
I spent about a day and a half thinking this team had turned some kind of corner, and then they went out in San Diego and put together the most embarrassing offensive night of the season. Two hits. Nine innings. Against a staff that used three different arms to do it. I am tired.
Twenty-four hours of good feeling, gone
Thursday night the Giants beat the Padres 4-1 in their building. It was their fourth win in six games. It came right after they punched the best team in baseball in the mouth twice in three days at Oracle Park, including a sixteen-run afternoon that made me remember what it feels like to enjoy watching this team. I actually wrote a column saying they were playing their best baseball of the year, and I meant it, and I do not take it back, because it was true when I wrote it.
Then Friday happened. Seven to nothing. Two hits. And not two hits in some 1-0 pitchers' duel where you tip your cap and go home — two hits in a game where San Diego had a four-run inning and then just cruised, because there was never any indication the Giants were going to threaten to score a run. Three Padres pitchers combined on a two-hitter. Three. They did not even need a starter to go deep. They just handed the ball around the bullpen and the Giants politely handed the bats back.
Carson Whisenhunt could not find the strike zone, and then he found too much of it
Whisenhunt got 3.1 innings, gave up seven hits and six runs, and walked four. That is the whole story of his night in one line. When he missed, he missed by a lot, and when he came back over the plate to stop walking people, San Diego hit it. He is a young left-hander in a lost season and there is a version of this where you shrug and say let the kid learn. But I have watched a lot of Giants starts this year end in the fourth inning, and it is exhausting, and it puts a bullpen that is already the most fragile thing on this roster into a game with five innings to cover in the first week of August.
The scoring went like this, and it is somehow both quick and painful. Manny Machado got the first run home with a sacrifice fly in the first. Luis Campusano singled one in to make it 2-0. Then the fourth inning arrived and it went sideways in a hurry: Jase Bowen hit the first home run of his major league career, a 384-foot drive to left that made it 4-0, and Ty France followed with a two-run single. France added a sacrifice fly in the sixth to finish with three RBIs on the night. That is your ballgame. A guy hitting his first career homer against us, and Ty France having a nice evening.
Nine spots in the order, two hits between them
Look at the names that were in there. Luis Arraez leading off. Heliot Ramos second. Bryce Eldridge third at DH. Rafael Devers hitting cleanup at first base. Jung Hoo Lee fifth. Willy Adames sixth. Grant McCray, Drew Cavanaugh, Christian Koss behind them. That is not the 1927 Yankees, but that is also not a lineup that should be held to two hits by a bullpen game. Arraez is an All-Star. Devers is one of the best left-handed bats in the sport when he is right. Eldridge has been the best story on this team all year. Adames got paid a fortune to be a middle-of-the-order presence.
And they got two hits. In San Diego. In front of a Padres crowd that spends all summer telling anybody who will listen that the rivalry is over and they own us now. I hate that they get to say it. I hate more that on Friday night they were right.
The part that actually bothers me
It is not the loss. It is August of a 47-63 season and I made peace with the loss column a long time ago. What bothers me is that this team has now spent four months proving it can look like a real major league offense for three days at a time and then vanish completely, and nobody in that clubhouse or that dugout seems able to explain why. You beat the Brewers 16-3 on a Wednesday and you get two-hit on a Friday. That is not a slump. A slump has a shape. This is randomness, and randomness is what you get when there is no plan, when the lineup card is a different arrangement of the same tired names every single day, and when nobody in the batting order has any idea from one afternoon to the next where they are hitting or whether they are playing at all.
The trade deadline lands Monday. Buster Posey has some very obvious decisions to make and about seventy-two hours to make them. A performance like Friday's should make those decisions easier, not harder. Sell. Get younger. Give the at-bats to the kids who might actually be here the next time this team is good, because whatever this is has run its course and everybody watching can see it.
Two hits. I am going to be thinking about that number all weekend. Go Giants, I guess.
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