SAN FRANCISCO — It wasn’t a fair fight.
The Dodgers brought their $300 million behemoth to Oracle Park and needed only the first two games to secure a series win.
Another strong contingent of fans in Dodger blue watched Tuesday for a second straight night as their team vanquished the home squad, whose good-luck threads still weren’t enough to overcome its undermanned and overmatched roster.
Technically it was the Giants who lost, 10-2, but it might as well have been the Triple-A River Cats.
It was just on May 1, after all, that Marco Luciano and Blake Sabol and Luis Matos and Casey Schmitt and Brett Wisely and Jakson Reetz made up two-thirds of Sacramento’s batting order. Two weeks later, they were all wearing the Giants’ bright orange-and-white City Connect uniforms.
“Last night it was basically the same roster and we were ahead a couple of times in that game,” manager Bob Melvin said, referring to Monday’s 6-5 loss. “So I don’t think we look at it that way. Obviously there’s a lot of turnover at this point in time and we don’t have our main guys out there, but we’ve just got to keep fighting and not let it crater. We’ve got to hang in there and win some games and start getting some guys back.”
The good mojo associated with the alternate uniforms apparently didn’t survive the production delays that prevented them from being worn for the first two Tuesday home games of the season. The Giants’ record in their City Connects dropped to 26-11, while they fell to 0-5 this season against their archrivals — 2-13 in their past 15 meetings in San Francisco.
The Giants’ fortunes, in fact, only went from bad to worse as the evening progressed.
Shortly before first pitch, Patrick Bailey was placed back into concussion protocol, ruling out their starting catcher for at least the next seven days, and before the game was over, the Giants’ starting pitcher, Keaton Winn, was being escorted off the mound by head trainer Dave Groeschner.
Since last Friday, the Giants have lost seven position players to the injured list, including Bailey twice. The only healthy position player on their 40-man roster who hasn’t already been called into duty is third baseman David Villar, left to anchor Sacramento’s lineup after Luciano was the latest to be promoted to fill Bailey’s roster spot.
“It sucks,” Winn said of the rash of injuries. “That’s about all I’ve got. It just sucks.”
Winn was tagged for five runs over four-plus innings before departing two batters into the fifth inning. Over his past three starts, Winn has allowed 17 earned runs in only 8⅓ innings, raising his ERA to 6.17 from a season-low 3.18 on April 28.
It was only fitting that the two pitchers to take down the remainder of the game, Randy Rodriguez and Nick Avila, also started the year about 90 minutes up I-80.
Winn left with tightness in his forearm, according to the club, and will undergo an MRI on Wednesday. “It feels like a cramp right now,” he said, adding that he was “not overly concerned.”
Winn’s fastball velocity had dropped to 92-94 mph from 95-96 mph the previous inning. After breezing through the first three innings on 35 pitches, Winn exhausted 39 to record all three outs of the fourth while the Dodgers brought eight men to the plate.
“It definitely fatigued me,” Winn said of his extended fourth inning. “That’s the main thing that happened. I was trying to still be at the higher-end velo that I usually am.”
As for fair fights, well, Winn didn’t have much of one against Shohei Ohtani with the first fastball he threw in the four-run fourth inning.
Thanks to the substantial chunk of Dodger supporters on hand, the free-agent superstar who spurned San Francisco hasn’t received too much wrath from the home fans. But anyone still wondering how the Japanese slugger’s swing would translate to the difficult hitting conditions of the Giants’ home ballpark had their questions quickly put to rest with a Bondsian blast on a middle-middle heater Winn served up on the first pitch of Ohtani’s second at-bat.
Reaching base in half of his 10 times to the plate the first two games of the series, Ohtani on Tuesday homered over the right field wall; he laced a single up the middle; and he drove a double the opposite way, down the left-field line. Together with Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Will Smith and Teoscar Hernandez, the top five batters of the Dodgers’ order combined for 11 hits, eight RBIs and nine runs scored in 23 at-bats.
“It’s going through that part (of the order) again,” Melvin said of where Winn’s outing turned for the worse. “We’ve seen that where he’s really good for a few innings and then you have to go through that part of the lineup again. It’s tough to do. Just couldn’t stop the bleeding at that point.”
All of the 33,575 on hand knew the homer was gone, including Ohtani, who stood and admired the moonshot from the left-handed batter’s box. It left Ohtani’s bat at 113.4 mph and traveled 446 feet, finding a landing spot on the concourse not far from the cable car in right-center field.
The monster home run was only the Dodgers’ opening salvo in a loss that looked even worse than the final score.
Before the game, Melvin lamented “all these little things that don’t look great that keep piling up on us and contribute to where we are right now and our win-loss record,” and by the end of the third inning, his team had already been charged with two more errors.
Neither misplay ultimately hurt the Giants, but they might keep the manager up at night.
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Winn was forced to face one extra batter in the first inning when Matos, playing center field, got crossed up with left fielder Heliot Ramos on a fly ball from Freeman that should have been the third out of the inning. The ball fell to the warning track between the two outfielders and Freeman chugged into third base.
Two innings later, it required a creative double play started by Matt Chapman to negate the impact of a poor throw from Sabol that allowed James Outman to advance an extra base on his stolen base attempt, reaching third with one out. Outman, of Redwood City, was caught in no-man’s land when Betts bounced a hard chopper to Chapman, who tagged Outman for the first out and fired to first base in time for an inning-ending double play.
Notable
IF Marco Luciano was recalled from Triple-A Sacramento and activated approximately 25 minutes before first pitch when the Giants placed catcher Patrick Bailey back into concussion protocol. Bailey, 24, played one game after a weeklong absence with a concussion but had been held out of the lineup the past three games with an illness that the club was working to determine whether it was related to his recent head injury.
“We just weren’t comfortable with how he was feeling consistently,” Melvin said of Bailey. “I don’t know that it’s a concussion. It feels like it. He came back and was good for a day. Caught, didn’t feel anything. The next day came back and it was a combination of a head cold and just not feeling great, and then it started lingering.
“We just have to be careful with him based on his history.”
Up next
RHP Logan Webb (3-4, 3.38) is expected to be opposed Wednesday in the series finale by a bullpen game from the Dodgers, who are listing their starter as TBD. First pitch is scheduled for 6:45 p.m.
