Madison Bumgarner has won at least 13 games for the San Francisco Giants in each of the last six seasons.
It’s July 20, and Bumgarner is still searching for his first ‘W’ in 2017.
Though a decision is hardly a great indication of a pitcher’s performance, Bumgarner’s inability to break into the win column in the Giants’ 5-2 loss to the Padres on Thursday tells the tale of San Francisco’s season.
After missing nearly three months with a sprained shoulder sustained in a mid-April dirt-biking incident, Bumgarner returned to the Giants’ rotation on Saturday against the Padres at Petco Park and in that outing, Bumgarner lasted seven innings and surrendered just four hits, but he gave up a pair of home runs which allowed the Padres to cruise to a 5-3 victory.
On Thursday night, Bumgarner again looked sharp, but again, a pair of long balls cost the Giants’ ace the ballgame as San Diego took the first matchup of a four-game series.
“I got to stop giving up home runs,” Bumgarner said. “It’s not going to work.”
In his first home start April 13, Bumgarner met the Padres for the third time in six starts this season, and at this point, the Giants’ ace will be happy to see a different lineup, even if it is the first-place Dodgers, next week.
Much like he has in most of his starts, Bumgarner pitched with a deficit, as San Diego pushed two early runs across to stake out a lead. After a Jabari Blash double to deep right center field in the top of the second that nearly left the yard, right fielder Hunter Renfroe smacked his 17th home run of the season to give the Padres a 2-0 advantage.
In three of Bumgarner’s outings this year, the Giants mustered just one run or fewer, and the one game San Francisco’s offense did “break out” for him came on Opening Day, when Bumgarner launched a pair of home runs against the Diamondbacks to help his own cause. On Thursday, it again took the Giants’ offense awhile to wake up, but they did give him an opportunity to at least regain equal footing.
“It was a very similar game to the last game,” Giants’ manager Bruce Bochy said. “You look at the numbers, they weren’t great but he threw the ball well. A couple mistakes in each game that left the ballpark. Good stuff, good command, but I’m sure he’d like to have a couple pitches back. They’re solid outings, we’ve just got to find a way to score more runs.”
In the bottom of the sixth, left fielder Gorkys Hernandez led off with a double against Jhoulys Chacin, and then came around to score on a Denard Span single. In the next at-bat, Eduardo Nunez poked a one-out double into left field that dropped to the grass just in time to allow Span to score from second and tie the game 2-2.
With a new lease on life, Bumgarner returned to the hill in the top of the seventh, and ran into trouble when Padres’ shortstop Erick Aybar laced a one-out single into right field.
With his pitch count climbing toward the century mark, Bumgarner threw a middle-in fastball to San Diego third baseman Cory Spangenberg, who drilled the pitch deep into the night.
At 6-feet and 195 pounds, Spangenberg is hardly an imposing hitter, but his 428-foot moonshot landed in Barry Bonds territory and gave the Padres a 4-2 lead. It also ended Bumgarner’s night, in a much different way than he anticipated.
“He was getting up there with the pitch count,” Bochy said. “Seventh inning, wanted to cover him in case things did start going awry there a little bit. He had a couple long at-bats. So I’m looking, that’s his last hitter there and the ball left the ballpark.”
For the second time in a week, Spangenberg clobbered a pitch over 400 feet against a Giants’ pitcher, as his three-run homer at Petco Park against Jeff Samardzija on Sunday defied expectations for an infielder known for a contact approach.
Trailing 5-2 in the bottom of the eighth, San Francisco did have a chance to author a memorable comeback for the third straight day, and had Wednesday’s hero, Buster Posey at the plate. After the Giants loaded the bases against Padres’ super set-up man Brad Hand, though, Posey flew out to right field to end the inning and crush the come-from-behind effort.
The Padres’ win marked San Diego’s 15th victory over San Francisco since the 2016 All-Star break, and continued a bizarre trend that helps explain the Giants’ incredibly underwhelming season. Even though manager Andy Green’s club is in the midst of a multi-year rebuild, the Padres have now won seven of their first 10 against the Giants in 2017 and now sit five games ahead of last-place San Francisco in the National League West.
“I don’t know what the numbers are,” Bumgarner said, when asked about San Francisco’s struggles against San Diego. “We’re just not winning ballgames right now. There’s no magic solution to it. We just got to start playing better.”