The Giants’ run of strong starting pitching came to an end Wednesday night and so did their season-best winning streak.
Mason Black was in and out of the strike zone and out of the game by the end of the third inning, while the Diamondbacks’ ace, Zac Gallen, deflated the Giants’ recently hot bats and handed them their first loss in six days, 8-2. Still, they’ll return home for the final season’s final weekend with a chance to finish at .500 or better, thanks to their 7-2 road trip, which went down as one of the four best nine-game road trips in the franchise’s history.
Here are three takeaways from the final road affair of the year:
A rare hole
The Giants had played so well on this trip that they entered the series finale having flipped their season run differential into the green for the first time since March 30. They had scored first in all but one of their previous six games and trailed at the end of only nine innings.
It had to feel a little bit foreign, then, when the Diamondbacks pounced on Black in the second inning and took a 2-1 lead on which they would only build.
Charged with four runs on five hits — and five walks — in 2⅔ innings, Black became the Giants’ first starting pitcher to surrender more than three runs in 17 games, dating back to his own start in San Diego on September 6. In between, he turned in his two best outings as a big leaguer, but instead of building on that success in his final start of the season, he reverted to old tendencies, struggling to find the strike zone with just about anything.
Black walked multiple batters in three of his five outings in his first stint in the majors, but hadn’t issued more than one free pass in any of his four games since returning from Triple-A Sacramento. Manager Bob Melvin determined he had seen enough when Black’s 70th pitch (31st ball) landed wide of the strike zone and forced in Arizona’s second run of the third inning, extending its lead to 4-1.
Dating back to last Sunday, the entire Giants rotation had only surrendered eight runs in 49⅓ innings entering the game, a 1.46 ERA.
Great Gallen
Blake Snell has showed a couple of the Giants’ recent opponents what it’s like to face an ace at the peak of his powers, but they got a taste of the same medicine against Gallen. The crafty right-hander mixed his five pitches to ring up 11 Giants hitters and keep them off the scoreboard after the second inning.
Tyler Fitzgerald made Gallen pay for walking the leadoff batter in the second, shooting a double that allowed Michael Conforto to score from first, opening a 1-0 lead, and it looked like they were off to the races after their 11-run outburst the previous night.
However, they went 1-for-their-next-15 before Gallen departed the game after six innings, holding a 5-1 lead. They struck out 17 times in total, matching their second-most of the season. It was only the third time on the nine-game trip that the Giants were held to three or fewer runs and only the second time they managed six or fewer hits.
Road to improvement
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Despite dropping their final road game of the year, the Giants have to feel good about the way they finished the season away from Oracle Park.
When they set out on this trip, they hadn’t swept a series on the road all year but had a chance to do it for the fourth time when they took the field Wednesday. At the outset, they owned the National League’s fourth-worst road record, 10 games below .500, but will finish the year 39-42, currently tied for sixth-best in the NL.
Even if it’s bittersweet, the majority of it coming after being eliminated from playoff contention, the road trip will go down as the best any Giants team has put together in the past 50 years. Only three other teams in franchise history racked up as many wins on one nine-game road trip:
New York Giants 4/17/1923 4/24/1923 8-1 (.889)
San Francisco Giants 4/23/1971 5/2/1971 7-2 (.778)
New York Giants 6/9/1885 6/19/1885 7-2 (.778)
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