Triston Casas, not Shohei Ohtani or Freddie Freeman or even the red-hot Wilmer Flores, has been the world’s best hitter since the All-Star break.
That didn’t change when the Red Sox came to Oracle Park for the first time since June of 2016.
Casas, the hulking 23-year-old slugger, drove in two of the Red Sox’s three runs with a double and home run off Logan Webb. With an extra late run, it was enough to hold off the Giants.
Webb tossed 7.1 strong innings, but Casas winning their matchup was enough to put the Red Sox on top in a 3-2 Giants defeat.
The Giants (56-48) most recently put up eight runs against the lowly Oakland Athletics, but have otherwise been mired in an offensive slump. They’ve now scored three or fewer runs in eight of their last nine games.
“Some good at bats and some empty at-bats,” Giants manager Gabe Kapler said postgame. “I think we know that in order to beat the best teams in baseball, we’re going to have to string together more walks, hits, and obviously score more runs.”
Casas, who woke up Friday morning leading MLB in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging, OPS, wRC+ and tied for the most home runs since the All-Star break, fittingly opened up the scoring in the second inning with a ground-rule double into the 415 club above Triples Alley.
Casas, the rookie, drove home Adam Duvall, who was on second because the Giants’ ball dude interfered with his base hit down the left-field line.
That RBI double had an exit velocity of 107.8 mph. Then in the fifth inning, the 6-foot-5, 244-pound Casas put another charge into a Webb fastball that leaked over the plate.
With a 109.5 exit velocity, Casas crushed a home run to left-center field, giving Boston a 2-0 lead. His solo shot boomed 435 feet as a display of opposite field power Oracle Park rarely sees from left-handed hitters.
The home run brought Casas to a .500 batting average since the All-Star break. And Webb isn’t the only ace who has struggled pitching to him — the first baseman has homers off Spencer Strider and Max Scherzer, too.
“A bunch of guys on this team hit the ball hard,” Webb said of Casas. “He’s definitely one of them.”
Webb, coming off the worst start of his career, had hardly any issues with batters not named Casas. He worked into the eighth by inducing 14 groundouts, mostly exchanging his slider for his changeup. He even got Casas to ground out in a 1-2-3 seventh inning.
But the Giants’ offense struggled behind Webb, which has been common this year. Marco Luciano’s leadoff single lined off Rafael Devers’ glove — his first MLB hit — to lead off the sixth inning was San Francisco’s first base hit since the first frame.
Luciano then scored his first career run by taking second on a wild pitch and wheeling around on a Michael Conforto single up the middle. The shortstop reached 28 feet per second on his race home, which is about a 70th percentile sprint speed, per Baseball Savant.
Earlier in the game, Luciano applied a perfect tag onto the face of speedster Jarren Duran, who became catcher Patrick Bailey’s 17th caught stealing victim.
Joc Pederson matched Casas’ fifth-inning bomb with a 109.5-mph exit velocity of his own in the eighth, but that only cut Boston’s lead to 3-2 because of a key insurance run from pinch-hitter Rob Refsnyder.
Casas came up again in the top of the ninth, but Taylor Rogers got him to fly out to deep right field. Still, on a night with so many impressive rookies, Casas was the one that swung the game.
