OAKLAND, Calif. — Over their past two games entering Sunday, the Giants scored two runs on five hits.
In their first three innings against the Athletics, they scored four runs on five hits.
It didn’t take much for the Giants’ lineup to be better. The offense still wasn’t good, though, as a lack of power prevented them from gaining any serious advantage over the gutted Athletics.
During Sunday’s back-and-forth, high-scoring affair, the Giants fell short of their standards in all three phases of the game. They committed two errors and lost another ball in the sun. Their pitching staff, led by starter Alex Cobb, surrendered a myriad of hard contact to the least menacing lineup in baseball. And their batting order hardly quelled concerns over their six-week slump.
In the 40 games leading up to Sunday, a stretch that goes back to June 19, the Giants have averaged 3.4 runs per game. That number would rank last in MLB and rests well below the league average of 4.59.
The box score looked better, but promising signs of a bounce-back were a facade. Against the 32-80 A’s, all nine of the Giants’ base hits were singles. They stranded 11 runners. All eight of their last hitters that came up to the plate went down.
On an afternoon that the Giants (61-51) had every chance to snap out of their funk, they faltered. The compact Nick Allen socked two home runs and the Giants never found a game-breaking inning in a 8-6 defeat.
“Not a good baseball game,” Giants manager Gabe Kapler said postgame. “Not a clean baseball game. We’re better than that as a group.”
The Giants and Athletics exchanged first-inning runs with a pair of hits. Then the Giants rallied again in the second inning to earn a 2-1 lead.
In a stretch in which runs have been so hard to come by for the Giants, two early runs created a favorable environment for Cobb. But the veteran struggled nonetheless.
Cobb walked Shea Langeliers, a .201 hitter, with two outs in the bottom of the second. The next hitter, Nick Allen (.186) took Cobb deep for a go-ahead homer. It was Allen’s second home run in 60 games this season.
The Giants responded, keeping the box score spattered with figures. They scored two more runs on two walks and an error to take a 4-3 lead. Rookie Patrick Bailey delivered a big hit and Brandon Crawford beat out a routine double play to extend the rally.
Cobb, who has struggled in day games all season, put up the first scoreless frame of the afternoon by inducing a double play in the third. He said that inning, he made a slight adjustment to his delivery.
The Giants kept piling up runs for Cobb, pushing their lead to 6-3 in the fifth with small ball. Yet the story of their offense was one of relative progress, but ultimate frustration.
Nearly every inning, San Francisco threatened to break the game open. They never came up with the big hit to create true separation, though, despite having 16 chances with runners in scoring position.
SF still hasn’t put up more than three runs in a regulation inning since June 23.
Cobb served up a second homer to Allen — the infielder tripled his season total with his first career multi-homer game — in the fifth. He departed after 5.1 innings, having surrendered two homers, a triple, two doubles and two singles.
“I just couldn’t believe that I had that opportunity in front of me today,” Cobb said postgame of SF’s early lead. “The team seemingly gave me everything I needed early…thought I made the right adjustments, but couldn’t string it together. I felt in that moment that I let the team down. Had a really good opportunity to flush what happened early. They gave me a new chance. I wasn’t able to capitalize.”
Cobb finished with five earned runs on seven hits in 5.1 innings. The two biggest plays came off Allen’s bat.
“I just think I didn’t have it,” Cobb said. “Not much life on the fastball, or really any of the pitches. Just kind of in battle mode all day. (Allen) got me twice.”
At the time Luke Jackson replaced Cobb, the six hardest-hit balls of the game belonged to Athletics.
Then Jackson sprayed the ball over the place. The right-handed reliever couldn’t find the zone, walking in a run and giving up a go-ahead single to Langeliers. The Giants never went to righty Ryan Walker or lefty Scott Alexander — both of whom were warming up — even after Jackson faced the minimum three batters.
“Quite simply, Luke is an excellent, excellent Major League reliever,” Kapler said when asked why he left Jackson in for so long. “Has been for a really long time. Has had a great year for us so far. Had no reason to do anything but trust Luke Jackson there, and I’ll keep doing it going forward.”
Alexander, after what seemed like 45 minutes of warming up, finally entered for the seventh. Facing a one-run deficit, Michael Conforto lost a routine pop fly in the sun, leading to another Athletics run. Then Wilmer Flores, Austin Slater, and J.D. Davis, three of SF’s best hitters, struck out in a row. The Giants didn’t earn a base runner in the eighth or ninth inning.
The Giants have scored more than four runs twice since July 18. Both came in games against the Athletics.
San Francisco’s pitching and defense have buoyed them afloat in those three weeks. To make the postseason run they want to, the Giants will need to rediscover how to score runs against teams other than their cross-bridge rivals.
The Giants didn’t field or pitch well on Sunday, either. But their offense remains the biggest problem. That is, unless their struggles against poor teams come back to haunt them.
“To get where you want to be, you have to beat the teams you’re supposed to beat,” Cobb said. “Letting two games go like that — hopefully it’s not going to cost us at the end of the year, but it definitely has the potential to.”