Baseball is a game of numbers and trends, and for Giants’ left fielders this season, the numbers have been bad and the trends have been worse.
A day after rookie Austin Slater became the 10th different San Francisco player to start a game in left field this season, manager Bruce Bochy turned back to recent call-up Orlando Calixte, who suffered through his worst performance in a Giants’ uniform in Wednesday’s 6-3 loss.
Calixte entered the evening 4-for-21 since his May 31 promotion from AAA, and struggled with both the bat and the glove as the Giants ensured they will return to San Francisco with a losing record on their seven-game road trip.
Aside from an 0-for-3 effort at the plate punctuated by a strikeout and a key double play ground out during a potential sixth-inning rally, a pair of miscues in the field cost the Giants and left-handed starter Ty Blach.
After tossing his first-career shutout on Friday evening against the Phillies, Blach surrendered a home run to the third hitter he faced Wednesday evening as Brewers’ right fielder Domingo Santana deposited a ball just beyond the short right field porch at Miller Park.
The Phillies sent 32 hitters to the plate against Blach without scratching a run across on Friday, but Santana’s solo blast in the bottom of the first set the tone for the night for a Milwaukee offense that capitalized against Blach in four separate frames.
The Giants did manage to rebound from the early deficit, as Brandon Belt knocked in Eduardo Nunez on a third inning single that gave Belt his team-high 27th RBI of the year. Two pitches later, Buster Posey unloaded on a towering home run to straight away center field that snapped a personal streak of eight consecutive solo home runs.
The two-run shot gave the Giants a 3-1 lead, and marked the first time in 2017 that Posey homered with a runner on base.
But much like it has been throughout the 2017 season, the success the Giants found in the third inning was short-lived.
Brewers’ first baseman Jesus Aguilar kicked off the bottom half of the fourth inning with a routine single into the left center field gap, but Calixte let the ball to slide under his glove which allowed Aguilar to advance to second. Two days after unleashing one of the worst throws of the season that resulted in an error and contributed to an early Giants’ deficit, the converted infielder’s miscue put Blach in an immediate bind.
Calixte’s woes in the outfield continued later in the inning when he misjudged a line drive off the bat of Hernan Perez. Whether Calixte could have made a play on Perez’s double is uncertain, but his jab step in following the crack of the bat helped him break a cardinal rule of outfield defense.
Calixte’s inability to track down Perez’s double led to a sacrifice fly for Milwaukee catcher Manny Pina, allowing the Brewers to tie the game 3-3 after four innings.
For the second straight day, the Giants were the victims of a timely, well-placed hit that gave Milwaukee some separation on the scoreboard. A day after Eric Sogard blooped a single past the outstretched glove of a diving Brandon Crawford to plate two runs, Aguilar poked an outside fastball just inside the first base line past the reach of Belt for an RBI double in the bottom of the fifth.
Aguilar’s hit brought home Santana, who broke down Blach with a single on a critical nine-pitch sequence earlier in the frame.
The Giants had no shortage of opportunities to take command of the game early, but failed to take advantage of Brewers’ starter Jimmy Nelson when he was most vulnerable.
In the first and second innings, San Francisco had runners in scoring position with less than two outs, and Belt, Posey, Calixte and Blach were unable to push a run across.
The Giants’ next best chance came in the sixth, when Joe Panik and Hunter Pence reached base on one-out singles. Trailing 5-3, San Francisco had the makings of a rally.
But with the table set, the Giants had a left fielder at the plate, and all season long, that’s destined San Francisco to the same fate. On Wednesday it was Calixte’s turn to play left and hit eighth, and the 25-year-old bounced into an inning-ending double play.
