SAN FRANCISCO — The San Francisco Giants offense is the Wilmer Flores Show until further notice.
On Saturday, Flores hit his 19th home run off Braves star Max Fried to tie a career-high set last season. He’s hit 11 of the Giants’ last 34 home runs and coupled his consistent power with an improved contact rate that’s made him the team’s best hitter. The clutch guy, the pillar.
Flores’ two-run home run tied the game 2-2 in the third inning and gave the Giants a glimmer of hope to salvage a series against Atlanta. With how things are going in San Francisco, there was no one else in the Giants lineup that could keep that mojo going as they fell 7-3 and lost the series at Oracle Park with a chance to prevent a sweep on nationally televised Sunday Night Baseball.
With that, they’ve lost seven straight series dating back to a two-game sweep against the bottom-feeding Oakland A’s in July. They’ve dropped 14 of their last 19 games and, as their closest competitors rise, are threatening to sink even deeper out of the Wild Card picture and closer to a .500 winning percentage with a 66-63 record. As of Saturday afternoon, the Giants were 1.5 games out of the third wild-card spot. The Cincinnati Reds, their next opponent following a series finale on Sunday, stand between them.
“We have to play better,” Flores said. “It’s right there for us.”
It’s fair to justify this skid as one of many pits in a long baseball season. It’s also fair to wonder if these previous seven series losses tell us more about whether this Giants team is truly a contender.
The Braves may be the best team in baseball, and the Giants have looked outmatched on nearly every front in the five games they’ve played over the last two weeks. They have two MVP contenders in Ronald Acuña Jr. and Matt Olson who have shined in the first two games at Oracle Park.
Olson made quick work of Giants’ go-to opener Ryan Walker, smacking a double that caromed off the brick wall in right field to score Austin Riley from first base with two outs.
The Giants have now lost each of their last three games in which Walker opened after going undefeated in the previous seven games he opened. When a somewhat experimental strategy goes awry at a critical point in the season, it’s fair to wonder if the strategy is worth sticking with. But the Giants see it important to stick with their macro strategy rather than react to the micro implosions.
“The body of work over a long period of time suggests that it’s a strategy that can work for us,” Kapler said. “We’re not going to abandon any one process or strategy because over the course of the last three weeks or month, it hasn’t gone well.”
Their pitching staff is built to have the depth to tackle any matchup, but that’s been an issue against Atlanta. The Braves came into the game with a .884 OPS against left-handed pitchers, which made the Giants’ decision to deploy Sean Manaea as their “featured pitcher” a bit of a head-scratcher. Manaea didn’t have his best command but held the Braves to a ton of weak contact — until Riley got hold of a first-pitch fastball and hit it 111.2 mph into deep left field to untie the 2-2 tie game in the fifth inning.
Manaea struck out five and gave up three hits and two runs in 3 1/3 innings. He got 13 swing-and-misses using his fastball and slider. But the Braves don’t need many gifts to make an impact.
The bench is built to have the depth to tackle any matchup, but other than Flores’ home run, the Giants had nothing to give against Fried or the Braves’ bullpen. Wade Meckler’s ninth-inning RBI single was the only hit with runners in scoring position out of six chances. A team built to exploit matchups and hit for power isn’t delivering — against good pitching and less-good pitching.
The Giants expected to have their offense fueled by home runs, but their 141 home runs rank 21st in MLB. Since Aug. 5, when this down period began, their 16 home runs rank second-worst behind Cleveland (13).
“It’s just not good enough against these really good teams, who are just playing better baseball than us,” Kapler said. “It’s a pitching, it’s a hitting, it’s a defense, it’s a base running. It’s an entire group effort. We lose as a team, and we’ve really lost these games as a team, there’s not one area in particular.”