The San Francisco Giants played their 100th game of the season on Sunday afternoon, and not surprisingly, the team hit yet another milestone.
By dropping a 5-2 contest to the San Diego Padres, the Giants fell to 38-62 on the year, their worst record through 100 games since the franchise moved West to the Bay Area in 1958.
The Sunday loss cost the Giants a shot at a split against a San Diego team that has now won four consecutive series against San Francisco and has developed a stranglehold on fourth place in the National League West.
With the end of July nearing, Giants’ struggles that appeared unusual in April, unshakable in May and unfathomable in June are now just…reality.
At this point, nothing should come as a surprise, and that’s why another non-competitive loss against a dismal Padres team was just another day at China Basin. A San Diego squad that is far and away the worst offensive team in baseball has had no troubles against the Giants’ pitching staff, as the Padres averaged more than six runs per game in the four contests the teams played this weekend.
“I wish I could but for some reason our starters just have not had very many good starts against these guys,” Giants’ manager Bruce Bochy said when asked if he could pinpoint his team’s struggles against San Diego on a particular issue. “They have a little power and they’ve hit their share of home runs.”
The Giants’ failures against the Padres are a microcosm of the 2017 season. No one expected the season to unfold the way it has, and no one seems to be able to explain exactly why this has transpired. Bochy and his pitching staff didn’t expect the Padres’ offense to turn into world-beaters when they faced them, and there’s no explanation for why Wil Myers and Hector Sanchez look like future Hall of Famers when they’re at the plate against the orange and black.
On Sunday, Myers homered in his third consecutive ballgame, walloping a first inning changeup from left-hander Ty Blach into the left field seats for a 453-foot blast that served as a crushing opening salvo to the contest. Andrew Baggarly of The San Jose Mercury News noted that Myers’ five home runs at AT&T Park this season are more than Buster Posey, Brandon Crawford, Hunter Pence and Joe Panik have hit combined.
“He’s (Myers) had some pretty good pitches to hit. I think that’s fair to say,” Bochy said. “He’s a good player. Good players take advantage of pitches. In this ballpark, he seems to hit well here. I think he’s got five home runs here. So that’s our fault. I guess the mistakes we’ve made with him.”
Sanchez’s success against his former club also defies logic. On Sunday, he finished 2-for-4 with an RBI and bumped his average up to .254 on the season, while improving his lifetime mark against San Francisco to .464 (13-for-28). Sanchez hit three extra base hits against San Francisco this weekend, including an RBI double off of Blach in a four-run fourth inning Sunday.
There are certain players the Giants can’t seem to figure out. The Rockies’ Nolan Arenado? His dominance against San Francisco is practically unparalleled. Wil Myers? A team can put up with a power-hitter exerting his will and can still find a way to win. Hector Sanchez? That’s downright insane.
How do you make sense of the Giants’ dismal season? Look at the way Myers and Sanchez have clobbered San Francisco’s pitching staff, and then examine how the heart of the Giants’ order has performed against the Padres. On Sunday –against Dinelson Lamet, who entered the game with a 6.40 ERA– it wasn’t pretty.
“Sanchez has killed us with the mistakes that we’ve made,” Bochy said. “This guy coming in (Linet) has good stuff, he had a six ERA and the heart of our order went 1-for-16. That’s not going to work.”
The Giants’ stunning crash is hard to put into perspective, because in reality, it’s incomparable to anything the franchise has ever experienced. San Francisco entered the season with the seventh highest payroll in baseball, and through 100 games, the Giants are now on pace to finish with exactly 100 losses.
No team that’s started a season with a payroll higher than $150 million has ever lost more than 93 games in a season, and now, the 2012 Red Sox — the team that lost 93 games– are eagerly awaiting company.
The Giants have been bad before. For longtime Bay Area baseball fans, this isn’t new. From 1972 through the end of the 1986 season, San Francisco never finished higher than third place in the National League West, and though divisions looked different during that era, the team’s best winning percentage during that 15-year stretch came in 1978 when the team went 89-73. In 11 of those seasons, the Giants finished under .500.
For an extended period, the Giants’ appeal in the Bay Area couldn’t rival that of the Oakland Athletics, and in 1993, the franchise nearly up and moved to Tampa Bay. Days have been dark for the franchise as a whole. These days, AT&T Park is no longer a guarantee to sellout, but the outlook of an organization that’s won three World Series titles this decade is still remarkably positive. The Giants draw 40,000 fans regularly, and there’s sincere hope among players, coaches, front office staff and fans that sooner or later, the Giants will turn things around because they believe this team is playing worse than it’s capable of.
But through 100 games, the reality is, the San Francisco Giants have never been worse. And that’s embarrassing.
