PITTSBURGH — Everything, it seemed, had been going the Giants’ way this week. They shook the monkey of being the majors’ last team to win three games in a row off their back, reeled in a fourth in a row and were in position to extend their win streak to five entering the ninth inning Tuesday evening.
Holding a 6-2 lead when the ninth began, the Giants didn’t send Camilo Doval out to start the inning on the mound. But he ended it by walking back to the visitor’s dugout after blowing a save situation that didn’t exist when Luke Jackson took over at the beginning of the frame.
After allowing the Pirates to tie the score in the ninth, it took only one pitch into the bottom of the 10th for the Giants’ four-game win streak to come to an end, 7-6.
Nick Gonzales laced Erik Miller’s first pitch into center field, driving home the Pirates’ automatic runner. The Giants weren’t able to score theirs in the top half of the inning after Jackson and Doval teamed up to blow a four-run lead.
Manager Bob Melvin gave Jackson three batters in the ninth — two of whom reached base — before calling on his closer.
But the usually dominant Doval struggled to find the strike zone, Marco Luciano — the Giants’ rookie shortstop — bobbled a potential game-ending double play grounder, and a Pirates rookie making his major-league debut snuck a single past second baseman Thairo Estrada to extend the inning.
The game came down to power against power: the hard-throwing Doval vs. Pirates 6-foot-7 shortstop Oneil Cruz, who earlier lined the hardest-hit ball in the majors this season — an exit velocity of 120.4 mph — off starter Logan Webb, who gave them six strong innings and was in line for the win.
Wasting no time, Cruz attacked the second pitch of the at-bat — a 100.3 mph cutter — and dethroned himself from the top of the leaderboard. He sent a double screaming into the right-field corner at 121.5 mph, allowing the tying run to mosey home from third base. That it was hit so hard might have been the only reason the would-be winning run, the speedy Bryan Reynolds, received the stop sign when he reached third.
After a rough month and a half, things seemed to be swinging back in the Giants’ direction before the ninth began.
That kismet, after all, was the only possible explanation for how the surefire third out of the first inning turned into the Giants’ first two runs on a hot and muggy Tuesday evening at PNC Park in the opening game of their two-city road trip.
When Wilmer Flores shot the full-count fastball from Pirates starter Martín Pérez straight up, the runners who began the play at the corners treated it like any other routine pop fly with two outs, slowly jogging around the base paths. But the ball glanced off the glove of Cruz at shortstop and fell to the grass in shallow left field, so Luis Matos picked up his pace to score from first, just behind Estrada, while Flores scooted into second base.
A two-run home run from Estrada in the fifth and a solo shot from Matt Chapman in the seventh extended the Giants’ lead to 6-2, which they held until the ninth.
Working around base runners in five of his six innings, Webb limited the Pirates to two runs on six hits. He struck out six — all on his changeup — but the one walk he issued, to the last man in the Pirates’ lineup, came back to bite him when Ji Hwan Bae stole second and scored in the fifth to make it 4-2.
The Giants have lost four of Webb’s past five starts, though he has limited opponents to four runs over his past three starts.
With three RBI, Estrada increased his team-leading total to 29. Two came on his fifth-inning blast that made the score 4-1, and he added another in the eighth.
Chapman negated the run the Pirates scored after Estrada’s homer with a line drive that carried over the center field wall to make it 5-2. Adding a sharp double in his previous at-bat, Chapman is batting .378 (14-for-37) with six two-base hits and a pair of homers since the start of the past home stand, raising his OPS to .718 from .601.
Flores was not credited with a base hit or any RBIs on the ball off his bat that opened the scoring but provided a pair of singles for his fourth multi-hit game of the season, the second of which came after the Pirates swapped in a right-handed reliever for the left-handed Pérez.
It was an easy scoring decision in the first inning to charge an error to Cruz, who called off his left fielder while backpedaling onto the outfield grass, where the late-afternoon sun was blaring. It should have been a routine play and the third out of the inning but instead turned into two runs.
Notable
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In his first two at-bats against Webb, Cruz recorded two of the 16 hardest-hit batted balls in the majors this season. His line drive in the first inning reached the right-field wall so quickly it limited him to a single. The ball left his bat at 120.4 mph, dethroning Giancarlo Stanton for the highest single exit velocity recorded in MLB this season and one of 19 balls put in play at 120-plus mph since Statcast began tracking the data in 2015.
Cruz’s double in his second at-bat was clocked at a mere 116.3 mph, a figure topped by Giants hitters only twice since 2015 (Joc Pederson, 116.6 mph, in 2023; and Mac Williamson, 116.8 mph, in 2016).
Up next
LHP Blake Snell (0-3, 11.73) is expected to be activated from the injured list to oppose RHP Jared Jones (3-4, 2.89) in the second game of the series, with first pitch scheduled for 3:40 p.m. PT Wednesday.
