Sloppy Giants continue to look overmatched by Padres after ‘frustrating' series originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
SAN DIEGO — The San Diego Padres already had the best ballpark food in the National League, but this spring, they decided to kick things up a notch. A mini donut stand showed up down the first base line, and several concession stands now sell replica Western Metal Supply Co. buildings filled with banana pudding and nilla wafers.
The dessert is the greatest addition to Major League Baseball since the pitch clock, and judging by how many Padres and Giants fans were carrying it around over the last four days, it might singlehandedly cover the next $300 million contract that Padres executive A.J. Preller decides to hand out.
In just about every way — ballpark atmosphere, food, scoreboard graphics — the Padres are ahead of the curve. Giants employees can feel it when they visit a ballpark that used to be jokingly known as AT&T Park South, and that extends to the field, too.
Thursday’s 8-4 loss was the sixth in seven games between the NL West rivals over the past two weeks. The Padres outscored the Giants 44-13 over those seven games, and the difference between the two teams — once competing for the same Wild Card spot — is now 11 games.
Overall, the Giants went 3-10 against the Padres this year and got outscored by 36 runs. It’s one thing to finish well behind your division leader, but the Giants now trail the Los Angeles Dodgers and Padres by double-digit games. Given their trajectory — they have the worst record in baseball over the past five weeks — there’s a chance they finish 20 back of two teams in their own division.
From the top step of the dugout, it has certainly felt like the Giants have been working uphill in just about all of these matchups.
“If you get behind them, their bullpen is pretty tough to score on. We’ve done that often against them and we haven’t done enough offensively to put any pressure on and keep some of their plus guys out of the game,” manager Bob Melvin said. “They have a good lineup. They played well against us. Earlier in the year, I felt like we matched up a little bit better against them, but certainly it’s frustrating.
“It’s a team in your division that you feel like you should play better baseball against. To go 3-10 is bad.”
The Padres are addicted to star power, but that’s not necessarily the reason the Giants have been overwhelmed. Manny Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr. have had good years, but not MVP ones. Jackson Merrill’s sophomore campaign has been ruined by injuries. Their bullpen is the best in the league and is even stronger with the addition of Mason Miller, but their rotation has been patched together.
They do, however, do several key things that the Giants do not. They’re last in the National League in strikeouts, more than 200 behind the Giants, and that’s what stood out to Justin Verlander when asked about the matchup.
“They put the ball in play a lot,” he said, pausing for several seconds. “They put the ball in play a lot.”
That was on full display in the fifth inning, which ruined Verlander’s day and left him with a 1-10 record. The Padres put down three consecutive bunts, one of which was thrown into right field by Casey Schmitt. When the rolling ball was dropped by Luis Matos, it became a two-error play that led to two runs.
The Giants caught a couple of breaks early, too, which led to two runs. But they have been unable to fully make an opponent pay in recent weeks. The Padres did, with Machado lining a two-run double off Verlander after the errors, making it a 6-2 game.
“It’s just their ability to capitalize on mistakes,” Schmitt said. “They capitalized on my mistakes.”
Schmitt made four errors in the series, which generally was filled with sloppy baseball by the Giants. That’s particularly frustrating for the staff, given that Buster Posey’s main directive after executing a trade deadline sale was to play cleaner baseball.
“It looks terrible,” Melvin said. “When you’re not hitting and you play bad defense, it just looks awful. Two errors on one play — you look at Justin’s line, and he certainly did not pitch to that line. His stuff the first couple innings was just as good as we’ve seen it and we scratch a couple (runs) and then obviously the fourth and the fifth just got away from us.
“We continue to work on it. We do have some guys playing some different positions at this point in time and some new guys here, but that’s no excuse. We have to play cleaner defense.”
Verlander has pitched well in recent weeks, but he was charged with seven earned runs. He has had unfathomably bad defensive luck, run support and help from the bullpen this season, and on Thursday, the frustration showed. The future Hall-of-Famer chose some words carefully, knowing that not much needed to be said about how shaky the defense was behind him.
But he also called it “one of the more frustrating games of my career.”
“Especially with the season I’ve had, you’re kind of scratching and clawing to find your way out of it and you feel like you’ve finally found something to grasp onto, and then you have a game and inning like that,” he added. “I’m being tested, for sure.”
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