Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
LOS ANGELES — When, in the span of two games, you have surrendered 17 runs and scored two, there is plenty of blame to go around.
The Giants’ hitting? After Jaylin Davis’ home run was their only promising moment, sure.
Their pitching? Absolutely. Tyler Anderson and Kevin Gausman were not stellar in their Orange and Black debuts, and Sam Coonrod faltered, too.
The defense? It perhaps stands out as, if not the worst misstep of the first few games, the most surprising one.
The Giants’ camps have emphasized defense and baseball IQ, endless creative and competitive drills aimed to bring the best out of players, who Gabe Kapler had said would be tested in every situation so nothing they saw in big-league play would be new.
After a four-error and many-mental-error 9-1 loss to the Dodgers on Friday, everything looks new.
“Kai [Correa] and I were talking about this on the bench tonight,” Kapler said over Zoom, referring to his bench coach. “We didn’t see some of the sloppiness that we saw tonight in our first spring training camp. We didn’t see it in our modified camp. And we certainly have seen it in these last couple of games. So those are things that we have to clean up. Got to tighten up our practices and continue to elevate our focus, and we’ll get right to work.”
They did not see Wilmer Flores, from third base, airmail a throw to Pablo Sandoval. They did not see Wandy Peralta throw wildly to first. Even Brandon Crawford got involved in the sloppiness late.
Are they ready after just three weeks of camp? Is a shorter ramp-up period exposing an inexperienced team more than an experienced one like the Dodgers?
“I think we’re ready,” said Flores, who has two errors in two games but is the lone Giant to hit well. “There’s no excuse of having a short camp. Every time you step on that field, you gotta feel ready to play. There’s no excuse for mental errors.”
Physical and mental errors were involved in perhaps the Giants’ most frustrating run allowed. Kike Hernandez went from first to third on a ground out because the Giants’ shifted infield left third base uncovered, and Hernandez noticed this before the Giants defenders.
Joc Pederson then got on first base and took off for second, the Dodgers pulling the Little League play and sending Hernandez once catcher Rob Brantly threw to second. The throw was low, though, and a charging Mauricio Dubon, who wanted to fire right back at Brantly, could not come up with it, the ball glancing into center field and Pederson heading to third. All this a day after Tyler Heineman got caught between third and home, the smarts disparity between the Dodgers and Giants looking as large as the talent gap.
Kapler said no one is panicking after two games — even if those two games would be equivalent to about six in a normal season. Yet, it is not the losing but how the Giants are losing that has come as the biggest surprise.
“I think the most frustrating thing is from an all-around perspective we didn’t execute,” Kapler said after he fell to 0-2 in his Giants tenure. “Didn’t throw enough strike, didn’t play enough D. Didn’t see enough pitches, and we didn’t execute from any angle.”