SAN FRANCISCO -- It’s never a good sign when a team goes into a sudden freefall, but the Giants’ recent tumble has been particularly ill-timed.
With a lackluster 3-1 loss to the Pirates on Tuesday night, the Giants dropped their fifth in a row and their 11th in their last 13 games. At 54-54, they’re down to .500 for the first time since they were 1-1 on March 29. They’ve slipped five games behind the Padres for the third National League Wild Card, creating plenty of questions about which direction president of baseball operations Buster Posey will take ahead of Thursday’s 3 p.m. PT Trade Deadline.
“I feel like Buster has been giving us all the opportunity and all the chances to win,” left fielder Heliot Ramos said. “We just have to put it together. Whatever happens is up to them over there, and they’re working on it. But I just feel like we have to get better.”
The Giants -- who stood a season-high 12 games above .500 on June 11 -- hoped acquiring Rafael Devers from the Red Sox would supercharge their roster, but they’ve gone an MLB-worst 13-23 since the three-time All-Star debuted with San Francisco on June 17. Devers is batting .224 with a .702 OPS and four home runs through his first 36 games with the Giants, though he’s looked a bit more refreshed since coming back from the All-Star break, hitting .267 with a .794 OPS through the first 11 games of the second half.
Shortstop Willy Adames -- who launched his 16th home run of the season off Pirates left-hander Bailey Falter on Tuesday -- is also enjoying a surge at the plate, batting .341 with a 1.123 OPS, seven home runs and 21 RBIs through 23 games in July, but the Giants haven’t gotten enough from the rest of their lineup.
San Francisco collected only two hits on Tuesday and compounded its offensive woes by committing costly baserunning and defensive blunders. Ramos continued his string of recent mental mistakes by getting doubled off at second base after losing track of the infield fly rule in the bottom of the first, though he took full ownership after the game and said he felt he was simply overthinking and trying to do too much.
“I messed up,” Ramos said. “It’s been happening a lot. I’m just trying to get better. I’m trying to do better every day. I’m just trying to work on it, even on my defense. I know it hasn’t been the best, but I don’t want to mess it up. I don’t know what to do. All I’m doing is working every day, trying to fix everything.”
Ramos, of course, isn’t the only one who's searching for a way to turn it around.
“We’ve had meetings, we’ve had team meetings,” manager Bob Melvin said. “We've had all kinds of meetings. It's going out there and fighting a little harder to win a game and having a little bit more resolve, which we've shown this year. We just have not done it here recently.”
The Giants’ slide has caused their FanGraphs playoff odds to plummet from 65.8% to 16.4% over the last month, though it still seems unlikely that they’ll go into full sell mode. San Francisco has a few players who could likely fetch significant hauls if the club were open to moving them, including All-Star left-hander Robbie Ray, closer Camilo Doval and setup man Tyler Rogers, but it’s hard to envision the front office going down that path after committing big money to cornerstone players like Devers, Adames and third baseman Matt Chapman.
“I don’t think there’s uneasiness right now,” Melvin said. “The uneasiness is that we’re not playing good baseball right now. We’d like to be in a better position. Pretty quickly now, we’ve kind of fallen down a little bit. Now, it can still turn around that quickly, too, but we have to make it happen. At the end of the day, the Trade Deadline is only a couple days away, but there’s still two months of baseball left. A lot can happen in two months. I think we feel like we can get it figured out in that time.”
It’s unclear whether Posey will have the appetite to seek out significant roster upgrades this week, but the Giants’ most pressing needs remain more rotation depth and another bat, particularly a right-handed hitter who could help beef up the club’s lineup against left-handed pitching.
“Everybody here is pretty confident in us being able to play better baseball like we have earlier in the year,” Melvin said. “The timing of it has been terrible. We’ve lost [11] out of [13] in a time where you hope you play your best baseball and maybe get some help. But we also made a huge trade earlier than any other team did. We feel like that’s still going to make a big impact for us.”