PHOENIX -- For the second time in four days, the Giants grabbed a lead with a four-run first inning, only to fall in a heartbreaker to a division foe.
With a 6-5 walk-off loss to the D-backs on Tuesday night at Chase Field, the Giants have dropped four straight and are three games back in the National League Wild Card race with 11 games to go.
“It’s frustrating. All these games we lose like that are frustrating,” manager Bob Melvin said. “Especially against the lefty [Eduardo Rodriguez] we’ve had trouble against and had a tough time with last time, to be able to score four in the first and another in the third. After that, it didn’t feel like we had a baserunner.”
That made this one sting a little more. The win was there for the taking despite it feeling like the deck was stacked against the Giants coming into the game.
The Giants entered the day dead last in MLB in a number of offensive metrics against left-handed pitchers, and the D-backs were starting veteran southpaw Rodriguez, who had shut down the Giants on two hits over 6 1/3 innings in San Francisco six days prior.
But Heliot Ramos and Rafael Devers opened the game with a double and a single, respectively. Matt Chapman plated the first run with a sac fly one out later, and Wilmer Flores and Jerar Encarnacion had run-scoring hits with two outs as the Giants posted a much-needed four-spot.
The early cushion not only set aside the Giants’ lefty issues, it was even more welcome considering San Francisco had a planned bullpen game, right on the heels of the ‘pen allowing 18 earned runs over 14 innings in the last three days.
De facto starter Tristan Beck turned in a scoreless first inning, but the D-backs closed the gap with three runs in the second.
“That inning got away from me a little bit,” said Beck. “And it’s because I fell behind in the count and had to go into the heart of some of those hitters and just didn’t make the pitches.”
The D-backs registered hard hits (95 mph or faster exit velocities) on eight of the 11 balls put in play against Beck, but he did manage to return for a scoreless third after Flores’ solo homer in the top of the inning had the Giants up 5-3.
Unfortunately for the Giants, Flores’ homer was their last hit, as the D-backs’ bullpen combined for four perfect innings.
Rookie Trevor McDonald, the Giants’ No. 18 prospect, was called up earlier in the day to give the bullpen a much-needed fresh arm. He took over for Beck to start the fourth inning and turned in a scoreless eight-pitch frame to open his 2025 debut. But Arizona tied the game at 5 with a walk and three hits against the 24-year-old in the fifth.
Joey Lucchesi, José Buttó and Ryan Walker had to deal with a lot of traffic, but they managed to keep the D-backs off the board through the eighth. When Walker returned for the bottom of the ninth, however, the bullpen’s luck ran out.
After Corbin Carroll led off with a single and Gabriel Moreno drew a walk to put runners on second and third with nobody out, Blaze Alexander laid down a sacrifice bunt to the first-base side. Walker fielded the ball and fired to first, where second baseman Casey Schmitt was covering. The throw was good, but Schmitt -- adjusting to the everyday second base role despite being a natural third baseman -- missed the bag for an error.
The bases were loaded with no outs and the game ended one batter later on Jordan Lawlar’s soft ground ball to first base.
“To lose like that, where a ball after Carroll’s doesn’t even leave the infield, is really frustrating,” Melvin said. “There’s a lot of new things for Casey at second base, and one of them is he’s got to get on the bag there. Obviously, he didn’t and that was a huge part of that inning.”