Giants’ manager Bruce Bochy lasted roughly a half hour before he was ejected from Monday evening’s ballgame at AT&T Park.
Unfortunately for the San Francisco skipper, that was more than enough time for the game to be decided.
Thanks to an Andrew McCutchen three-run home run, the Pirates took a commanding 6-0 lead in the second inning, which was all it would take to outlast a Giants’ offense that’s scored six runs just once since the All-Star break.
Even if the Giants did manage a comeback, San Francisco wasn’t going to score 11 runs, and that’s what it would have taken to win as the Giants fell 10-3 on Monday.
With San Francisco trailing 3-0 in the top half of the second, Giants’ right-hander Matt Cain threw McCutchen a 1-0 curveball that appeared to catch the top half of the strike zone toward the outside corner of the plate.
Cain appeared to take issue with Conroy calling the pitch a ball, and offered a long glare in toward Conroy before retreating to the mound. Later in the at-bat, Cain delivered a 3-1 curveball that McCutchen smoked out toward left center field, and immediately the Giants’ starter knew he was in a 6-0 hole.
When Cain went to ask Conroy for a new baseball to replace the one McCutchen deposited in the bleachers, Conroy took his time, and then exchanged heated words with Cain. At that point, Bochy hopped out of the dugout, approached the home plate area, and needed less than 30 seconds to speak his mind and earn a trip back to the Giants’ clubhouse.
“He’s (Bochy) trying to keep his players in the game, and I think that’s what a good manager does,” Cain said. “He does a good job of being able to protect us and try to get us out of situations that we’re heated, and in the middle of a situation like that where I was probably a little more emotionally connected than we needed to be.”
The ejection was the second of the season for Bochy, who was run out of a ballgame on June 16 in a 10-8 Giants’ loss in Colorado.
Cain didn’t last much longer.
Though the 13th-year veteran threw two scoreless innings in the third and fourth, with the bases loaded and Cain due up to bat in the bottom of the fourth inning, Giants’ bench coach and acting manager Ron Wotus sent Conor Gillaspie to the plate to pinch hit. Gillaspie bounced out to second base, and the Giants’ offense squandered its best chance to put a dent in Pittsburgh’s early advantage.
For Cain, the loss dropped his overall record to 3-9 on the season, and 11-27 over his last 61 starts dating back to the start of the 2014 season. Though wins and losses aren’t the best metric to measure a pitcher’s success –especially for a pitcher like Cain who fell on hard luck during tremendous seasons early in his career– his inability to put a tally in the win column remains a troublesome trend.
In reality, Cain and Bochy never should have been in a compromised position in the top of the second, because when McCutchen came to the plate, Cain was searching for his fourth out of the inning.
With a runner on second and two outs already on the board, Cain induced a groundball by Pirates’ leadoff man Starling Marte, but Giants’ third baseman Eduardo Nunez couldn’t get a handle on the ball and Marte reached first base safely. After a Josh Harrison RBI single extended the inning, McCutchen came to the plate, and chaos ensued.
Bochy wasn’t the only member of the Giants’ staff tossed from Monday’s ballgame, as pitching coach Dave Righetti was bounced for arguing balls and strikes with Conroy in the ninth inning. After reliever Kyle Crick threw a 3-2 pitch that looked like it nabbed the corner and Conroy ruled the pitch a ball, Righetti came out for a visit to speak with Crick, and then was tossed by Conroy for arguing pitches on the way back to the dugout. The ejection was hardly noticeable, but nonetheless noteworthy, as the it was Righetti’s first ejection in more than a decade.
“Haven’t talked to Dave about it, but I’m sure, yeah, that’s what he was talking about,” Bochy said. “You know, it’s a big pitch there. 3-2 pitch right there on the corner and we didn’t get it.”
After falling behind 6-0 and losing their manager for the evening, San Francisco did rally, in large part thanks to catcher Buster Posey who knocked in Denard Span with a single in fifth inning and then plated Span again with a single in the seventh to cut Pittsburgh’s lead to 6-3.
The Giants were also able to keep Pittsburgh at bay in the middle innings thanks to excellent relief work from Albert Suarez, who threw two scoreless frames behind Cain after throwing a pair of hitless innings on Saturday. Suarez has missed the majority of the season with an injury, but his presence is a welcome one to a bullpen that may lose an arm or two at the trade deadline.
In the eighth inning, though, Pittsburgh snapped a stretch of five straight zeroes on a Jordy Mercer three-run home run off of lefty Josh Osich to push the Pirates’ lead to 9-3. Mercer’s blast gave the Pirates their second three-run home run of the game, which is as many as the Giants have hit all season.
“We had the bases loaded one inning there, we hit the groundball to second and the next inning, we were getting back in it and the double play ball kind of hurt us a bit,” Bochy said. “Buster had a big hit to get us a little bit closer so I thought we had some pretty good at-bats, guys were fighting to get back in it and the second three-run homer killed us.”
Mercer’s home run also took place when Giants fans had succeeded at circling the stadium with an atmosphere-puncturing rendition of “the wave.” The wave is the ultimate sign of surrender, and against a team called the Pirates, perhaps it was the only appropriate way for Giants fans to usher the game toward the finish line.
Ironically, as the Pirates extended their lead, the Dodgers were well on their way to widening the already-existing 30.5 game gap in the National League West standings. Moments after Mercer’s blast, Los Angeles rookie Cody Bellinger launched a three-run home run to give the Dodgers an eighth inning lead over the Minnesota Twins. While the Dodgers were busy improving to 69-31, San Francisco dropped a season-high 25 games below .500.
After dropping Sunday’s contest against San Diego, San Francisco fell to 38-62, which is the worst mark a Giants’ ballclub has posted through 100 games since moving West from New York in 1958. Clearly, Monday’s loss didn’t do much to help their pace.