SAN FRANCISCO — In so many ways this year, Madison Bumgarner has been a strength of the Giants. He leads baseball in innings pitched, allowed one earned run in his last 23 innings at AT&T Park and has been the unquestioned ace on one of baseball’s best teams.
But as the Giants’ second-half skid continued Wednesday afternoon, not even Bumgarner, was immune to the Giants’ plague. An illness personified by Jay Bruce over the last three days, and contracted by the Giants left-hander on his first pitch of the seventh inning.
“I just didn’t make a good pitch to him,” Bumgarner said. “I know that that’s a spot he can handle. Especially early in an inning with you loosen up again.
“…It just leaked back over the inside, and the way he’s going right now, he’s not going to miss those.”
The game-deciding swing was Bruce’s fourth home run of the series, and sixth in his last five games. In the grander, more staggering picture, it was the 24th home run allowed by the Giants in 11 games. The Reds set an AT&T Park record with eight home runs as the visiting team in a three-game series. The numbers built up to a series loss for the first-place Giants (59-42) against the last-place Reds (40-61), and a 2-1 loss on Wednesday.
The Giants bats sure did its part to spoil Bumgarner’s dominant eight innings. Aside from Conor Gillaspie’s solo home run, no Giant advanced past first base. With an offense sputtering like that, any and every mistake is magnified, and Bumgarner knows it.
The Giants scored him only one run Wednesday, just as they did when he began the team’s dreadful 11-game stretch by allowing two home runs to the Padres. Jake Peavy only allowed four hits, but three were two-run homers on Monday. Sergio Romo is lucky the Giants had a big cushion when he allowed back-to-back home runs in the eighth inning on Tuesday.
“You obviously don’t want to give up any (home runs),” Bumgarner said, “but you’ve just got to keep pitching. It’s warm, the ball’s traveling right now.
“We’re facing a hot team that hits a lot of home runs. That’s why you say you’ve just got to keep pitching, that’s it.”
AT&T Park is supposed to be a safe haven for Giants arms, that’s why it was semi-acceptable to see the Padres, who tied an NL record Wednesday homering in their 25th consecutive games, lift off against the Giants. That’s why it was semi-acceptable to see the Giants struggle at hitter-friendly parks like Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park. Because they were coming home.
But the home runs have persisted, and there’s no clear indication of what’s changed from the first half of the season when the Giants allowed the third-fewest long balls in baseball. Home runs numbers are up across all of baseball, and Bumgarner laughed when asked about the ball being juiced. Manager Bruce Bochy maintains that pitch location has been the primary issue. Buster Posey agreed with that assessment, and stretched to find a silver lining.
“It’s out of the norm,” Posey said of the home run numbers. “But those things are cyclical, and we could turn it around and start a stretch (tomorrow) of giving up very few.”
Posey could be right, as the Giants could look back on the last two weeks as a small divergence in their 162-game path to October. But the road doesn’t get easier from here. Seven of the Giants next eight series are against teams in playoff contention. Any wide-spread issues will be exposed.
Right now that’s the home run ball. If it got in the Giants’ way of beating one of baseball’s worst teams, it sure can get in the way of beating the best.
Said Bochy: “You’re in the second half. You’re in a pennant race. There’s more tension in (each series).”