Amid unacceptable stretch, Giants left searching for answers after Padres sweep originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
SAN FRANCISCO — Willy Adames was playing about as far up the middle as is allowed under the new rules regarding shifts. The Giants shortstop was positioned perfectly.
When the ball left Jake Cronenworth’s bat at 61 mph, Adames took a couple of steps toward the bag. In his mind, he scrolled through all the different ways he might be able to turn an inning-ending double play. There was an obvious first choice: Scoop the ball on one hop, race to tag second, and then make a strong throw to first.
“Hell yeah,” Adames said later. “It was a double-play ball. It was a jam shot. You could have turned a double play in any direction.”
Adames never got the chance.
Cronenworth’s soft liner hit second base and ricocheted into the outfield, scoring two runs. By the end of the inning, the Giants trailed 7-0. The game effectively was over.
The Giants ended up falling 11-1, losing for the 13th time in 14 games at Oracle Park. Over their last five, all losses, they have scored five total runs.
It’s a stretch that defies belief, and the Giants have been left searching for answers. This won’t pacify anyone watching, but they truly, honestly, do not know what has happened. They are healthy, and when they hit the road, they occasionally still look dangerous. They took four of six on their last trip and the lineup looked like, well, a normal lineup.
But at home, the losses have been automatic. The frustration continues to build.
“It feels like for the last two months, it’s the same story,” Adames said. “It feels like for some reason nothing positive is coming. It’s either a jam shot hitting the base with the bases loaded [that was] a double-play ball. Something negative is in the air. We haven’t been able to figure out how to beat it and how to be better out there. It seems that it’s been the same story.
“It sucks. It’s bad, because we have a really good team in here but it hasn’t gone our way lately.”
Adames stood in front of a large pack of reporters for seven minutes on Wednesday afternoon and spoke openly about the skid that has all but mathematically ended the season. The Giants are three games under .500 for the first time and trail the first-place San Diego Padres by 10 games. They have been caught by an Arizona Diamondbacks team that has had unbelievably bad injury luck and went into full sell mode at the 2025 MLB trade deadline.
It has been an unacceptable stretch of baseball, one that leads to obvious questions about the future.
It wasn’t long ago that president of baseball operations Buster Posey picked up Bob Melvin’s option for 2026, but this is a brand of ball that does not reflect well on a manager or his coaching staff. This will not be a comfortable six weeks no matter what the contracts say.
Melvin on Wednesday began his postgame session by defending Heliot Ramos for spiking a throw into the grass during the seven-run second inning.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Melvin said. “It was more of how we were positioned for the cut-off.”
It was a fair explanation, but it brings to mind other questions. Why after 120 games are the Giants still so sloppy on defense? Why are people forgetting things like the infield fly rule? Why is the lineup, as Melvin talked about at length before the game, so poorly prepared to hit fastballs?
The mistakes are piling up, and that has to be particularly annoying to Posey. After he traded two of his best relievers and his starting right fielder at the deadline two weeks ago, Posey said he had talked to Melvin about the need to play a cleaner brand of baseball over the final two months.
“We talk about being a pitching and defense team. We’ve pitched well but our defense has not been good — really, all year,” Melvin said. “That’s the main part that we need to clean up. That’s the part that really looks bad, when you play games like this.”
Melvin has six weeks to get the ship in order, and Posey has that much time to evaluate. At the moment, it feels like he needs to take a closer look at just about every part of the organization, which is a baffling place to be for a clubhouse that was full of energy for the first three months of the season. They have no idea how it all went so wrong so fast.
“It’s just, like, every day, something happens,” Adames said. “Everybody feels the same way, or at least some of the guys feel the same way. It feels like in the dugout we kind of, like, lose the energy right away and from [there] it’s hard to come back when you don’t have it. It’s just tough. We have to be better. That’s the bottom line. We have to play better baseball, that’s how it is.”
Adames said this is the hardest stretch he has experienced as a big leaguer. He struggled at the plate early this season, but he was able to keep a smile on his face every day because the team was winning. Right now, just about the entire team is struggling, and it’s hard to find a light at the end of the tunnel.
At some point during his seven minutes, Adames repeated something that Giants ace Logan Webb said earlier this week, and that other veterans have mentioned. “I don’t even know how to describe it,” he said.
The Giants are at a loss. They show up every day thinking things will get better, because things have to get better. Nine innings later, they sit in a silent clubhouse, trying to make sense of another loss.
“It’s a tough spot to be in,” Adames said. “We’ve got to do something different. We’ve got to figure it out.”
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Eric Samulski
