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Mistake-prone Giants help Dodgers end 11-game losing streak

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SAN FRANCISCO–Johnny Cueto was bobbing and weaving, zigging and zagging, maneuvering and scheming. His foot was glued to the pedal.

Like a driver going too fast for his own good, Cueto wasn’t adhering to the signs on the road. He was navigating his own way through traffic. And for awhile, it worked.

Through three innings, Cueto’s furious lane changes –err, changes of pace– kept the Dodgers off balance to the tune of seven strikeouts. Then he hit gridlock, and his night was over.

Traffic arises for a variety of reasons, and on Tuesday night, it materialized thanks to the Dodgers’ bats and the Giants’ gloves. For Cueto, it was too much to overcome, and his engine stalled. So too did the Los Angeles losing streak, which came to an end at a franchise-record 11 games with a 5-3 win over the Giants.

During the first third of Tuesday’s contest, Cueto marched to the beat of his own drum. When he was on the mound, his band mates were out of tune, forcing Cueto to work for every out on his own.

“I felt really good, I mean those were two good innings,” Cueto said. “But you know, that’s what baseball is, a flyball there. A grounder. Things happen on the baseball field and that’s what baseball is all about.”

After striking out the side in the first inning, Cueto picked up two more punchouts in the second. He didn’t leave much to chance for his defense, and that proved to be a good strategy. With two outs in the third inning, a Yasiel Puig pop up that should have ended the frame dropped in between right fielder Hunter Pence and second baseman Joe Panik. Puig wound up on second base with the most inexplicable double of the season, and Cueto needed 10 more pitches to finish the inning.

It was a road bump, but Cueto was undeterred.

“It’s baseball, right,” Cueto said. “If my teammates make errors, it’s my job to make sure that they don’t score the run. I know for a fact that my teammates are not there trying to make errors behind me. It’s just part of the game.”

In the fourth inning, though, Cueto ran into the tire spikes you’d find in a parking lot, except he was on the open road.

Dodgers’ second baseman Chase Utley led off the inning with a towering splash hit to right field that tied the game at 1-1, and pitcher Clayton Kershaw followed with a line drive to left that should have resulted in out No. 1. Instead, the ball went sizzling past the glove of left fielder Austin Slater, who misjudged the trajectory off the bat.

Cueto, looking for a detour, offered his defense an opportunity to bail him out. Chris Taylor hit a bouncing ball to shortstop Kelby Tomlinson, and Kershaw attempted to take third base on the play. A good throw would have cut down the Dodgers’ starter on the base paths, but Tomlinson threw the ball wide of third baseman Orlando Calixte and Kershaw was safe. It was the third defensive miscue of the game for the Giants, and eventually, Cueto ran out of gas.

On his 101st pitch of the night, Cueto surrendered a three-run double to Puig, who admired his mammoth shot off the wall from the batter’s box before celebrating with some excited hand gestures and assorted antics at second base. When you hit a ball that far, you can do that.

“I thought Johnny was actually pretty good, I did,” Giants’ manager Bruce Bochy said. “The pitch count caught up with him but a lot of that was a lack of defense, some mistakes we made but you know, I thought he battled well. I thought he had good movement on the fastball, good changeup, slider, he just had to work extra hard and that’s a lot of pitches.”

The 4-1 lead the Dodgers held at the end of the fourth inning was enough for Kershaw, who began the evening with a 1.29 earned run average over 20 career starts at AT&T Park. Despite allowing four runs in 3.1 innings in his last outing against Colorado, the Dodgers’ ace regained his form in time to down San Francisco on Tuesday.

The lone Kershaw mistake San Francisco took advantage of came in the bottom of the third inning, when Tomlinson launched a 2-0 fastball into the left field bleachers to give the Giants a 1-0 edge. Tomlinson’s home run was his first of the season, and his first since an inside-the-park home run on October 3, 2015. The fact it came off Kershaw, a pitcher who Tomlinson was 0-for-14 against with six strikeouts entering the at-bat, made it even more unlikely.

“Tommy, it was a little bit of Tommy ball tonight we call it. He hit a home run, had another base hit, made a great play up the middle,” Bochy said.

Kershaw didn’t necessarily have his best “stuff,” on Tuesday, but he did battle his way through a 91-pitch, six-inning outing that kept the Giants a tick behind all night.

The Giants did show signs of life as the game wore on, though, picking up a run in Kershaw’s final frame thanks to a Calixte sacrifice fly and then a run in the seventh on a Pence groundout. Those tallies cut Los Angeles’ lead to 4-3, but Dave Roberts’ squad had enough of a cushion built up to fend off the Giants’ late charge.

The cliche goes, “All good things come to an end.” And for Giants fans who have enjoyed the last two weeks of Dodgers’ suffering, Tuesday night signaled the end the road.