SAN FRANCISCO — Hours after Farhan Zaidi declared that the Giants were putting their postseason hopes in the hands of a starting rotation he called the “best in baseball” and a young core that had “been the catalyst for some of our best play,” the lowly A’s knocked around their starting pitcher and held their lineup in check.
In a 5-2 loss Tuesday night to their last-place cross-bay rivals on the same day they largely stood pat at MLB’s trade deadline, Robbie Ray served up three home runs and put his team in four-run hole that they were unable to overcome against his counterpart, fellow lefty J.P. Sears, who blanked the Giants for seven innings.
The loss snapped the Giants’ season-long winning streak at four games and did them no good in the National League wild-card chase, where all six teams ahead of them won, including the Padres, who got two home runs in the ninth inning to force extra innings against the Dodgers in an eventual 6-5 victory.
“It’s probably going to fall on us to carry the load a little bit,” said Ray, who allowed three or more home runs for the 13th time in 223 career starts. “We definitely have the guys for it. We’ve just got to go out and do what we know how to do … I felt like it was just bad execution tonight. I just left some pitches over the plate that if I execute them it’s probably an out, and they made me pay for it.”
Making his second start in return from Tommy John surgery, Ray’s first time pitching at Oracle Park didn’t go as smoothly as his re-entry to the major leagues last week at Dodger Stadium, when he struck out eight over five hitless innings. Surrendering seven hits and issuing three walks, Ray battled traffic on the base paths every inning he toed the rubber but met the end of his evening with one out in the fifth, when Brent Rooker turned a 95 mph fastball into a two-run homer.
The pitch was Ray’s 93rd of the evening, and “95 is kind of what we were looking at today, tops, so he had to come out in the middle of the inning,” manager Bob Melvin said. “They just made him work some. Threw a lot of pitches. He made some mistakes, and they hit some homers, which they’ve done for a while now.”
The three home runs were the most allowed by a Giants pitcher in an outing this season, and J.J. Bleday tacked on a fourth against Taylor Rogers with a solo shot in the eighth that extended the lead to 5-0.
Ray’s rocky performance isn’t to be unexpected from a pitcher making his second start since major elbow surgery but also displays the risk of the Giants’ deadline strategy, betting on the 32-year-old’s ability to quickly return to form that earned him the 2021 American League Cy Young.
“He won’t make any excuses for that,” Melvin said, suggesting Ray may have been pitching with less adrenaline than in his first start in 16 months.
“I don’t think so,” Ray said when asked if a lack of adrenaline factored in. “I felt good coming into this game. My arm felt great. My body felt great. Just poor execution.”
By trading Jorge Soler to Atlanta, the Giants opened an opportunity for Marco Luciano to get regular at-bats at designated hitter after homering six times with as many walks as strikeouts over the past month for Triple-A Sacramento. The 22-year-old top prospect doubled and scored in the eighth inning once the Giants had forced Sears from the game but went down swinging in his first two trips to the plate and the Giants weren’t able to mount much else offensively.
Going 0-for-4, Tyler Fitzgerald’s hit streak was snapped at 12 games, and the Giants’ were held to five or fewer for the fourth time in 12 games since the All-Star break. Patrick Bailey singled home Matt Chapman to cut the deficit to 5-2 in the ninth, but they were still held to four or fewer runs for the seventh time since the break.
Heliot Ramos, whose All-Star first half was a big reason why the Giants weren’t bigger sellers Tuesday, was ejected in the seventh inning arguing balls and strikes with home plate umpire Chris Segal, who rung him up on the 10th pitch of his at-bat — at the top of the strike zone — and didn’t allow him to get many words in before tossing him from the game. It was Ramos’ first career ejection and the first time a Giants player has been tossed from a game this season.
While apologizing and saying he didn’t like the call and got caught up in the heat of the moment, all Ramos would reveal was that he “said something I shouldn’t have.”
“I thought it was a little quick,” said Melvin, who has been ejected four times this season.
The one external upgrade the team made to its group of position players, Mark Canha, likely wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Serving as his placeholder in the lineup at first base against a left-handed starter, David Villar started the sixth by lining a double into the right-field corner for the Giants’ first of two extra-base hits.
Pulling into second base with nobody out, that is where Villar would remain as the next three batters — Derek Hill, Tyler Fitzgerald and Casey Schmitt — struck out to end the inning. Bailey’s ninth-inning single represented their only hit in seven chances with runners in scoring position.
“We were behind his heater a little bit, and his slider’s an acquired taste if you haven’t faced him a whole lot,” Melvin said of Sears, who took a 4.81 ERA into the game. “There’s not a lot of depth to it. But he pitched up and down pretty well and was getting some calls on the outside corner to righties that helped him some. But he pitched well.”
Notable
The Giants held a moment of silence before the game to honor Reyes Moronta, who pitched for the team from 2017-21 and died Monday at age 31.
Up next
RHP Logan Webb (7-8, 3.72) faces off against RHP Ross Stripling (2-9, 6.02) for the final game of the Giants’ home stand and the last iteration of the Bay Bridge rivalry at Oracle Park. First pitch is scheduled for 6:45 p.m.
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