Staring down NL’s toughest schedule, SF Giants can’t complete sweep of MLB’s worst team

SAN FRANCISCO — Logan Webb has been sick for a week now, but that hasn’t stopped him from dominating every time he’s taken the mound for the past month.

The Giants’ ace went eight innings Wednesday afternoon in front of 28,375 at Oracle Park, allowing two runs, but they weren’t able to complete a three-game sweep of the majors’ worst team.

Reeling off three wins in a row entering Wednesday, the Giants had a chance to match high-water marks by moving three games over .500 with a fourth straight win. But like every past opportunity this team has had to build on that momentum, they squandered it as soon as Webb departed the game.

Entering a tied ballgame in the top of the ninth inning, Erik Miller and Spencer Bivens combined to allow four runs to send the Giants to a 6-2 loss.

“We’re at a point in the season where we can’t let games slip away,” Webb said. “It was a much-needed win today to get the sweep and we came out flat. Plain and simple.”

It only gets harder from here.

Beginning Friday in Seattle, the Giants will play 27 of their final 33 games against teams with winning records. It was 30 of 33 before the flailing St. Louis Cardinals dropped eight of their past 10 to fall under .500. Their only respite from teams in the playoff chase is the Miami Marlins’ visit to begin the next home stand.

So far this season, the Giants are 27-38 against teams above .500, a .415 winning percentage.

“It’s not really going to matter as you go forward,” manager Bob Melvin said before Wednesday’s game. “But having said that with the teams that we’re playing, it has to get better.”

When the Giants began the second half, they were three games below .500 (47-50), three games out of playoff position and had the second-easiest remaining schedule. Now, they are one game under water and four back of the final wild-card spot while staring down the toughest remaining schedule of any team in the National League, with a combined winning percentage of .529.

Going 18-14 during that stretch, Giants pitchers have limited opponents to the sixth-lowest ERA in the majors over that span (3.40). But their offense has produced the 10th fewest runs per game (4.1), mostly a product of their .195 batting average with runners in scoring position, the second-worst mark in the majors.

“There are certain games where we have really good at-bats and we play good defense and we score opportunistically and we have good pitching and it looks really good,” Melvin said. “Some other games it doesn’t. … The one thing we have to be is more consistent in those opportunistic at-bats and the last few days we haven’t been.”

The Giants secured their 20th series win by taking two of three from the White Sox, but they have completed only two sweeps — both against the Rockies, who have a better record than only the Marlins and White Sox. They’ve had 10 chances to break out the brooms and gone 2-8 in those games.

“Those come back to haunt you,” Webb said. “… There’s games you should win, and today was one of them. The other teams are winning; they’re not losing. So we’ve got to keep winning to stay in it.”

They faced a stiff test in hard-throwing lefty Garrett Crochet, who like Webb was was a first-time All-Star this year, but had to feel good about their chances when he handed off a tied ballgame to the majors’ second-worst bullpen after four innings, four hits, a walk and four strikeouts.

Thairo Estrada singled home Heliot Ramos from third base for their second run of the fourth inning, tying the score at 2. Ramos stood and admired the deep fly ball he hit to center field but had to hustle to make it to second base when it came inches short of clearing the wall. Following a leadoff ground-rule double from Mark Canha, Ramos’ double gave the Giants runners at second and third with nobody out and they plated both of them.

From the fifth inning on, though, the Giants mustered two hits in their final 17 at-bats.

“We actually even scored two runs off of (Crochet), so we feel like we’re in a pretty good spot once he comes out of the game with Webby doing his thing,” Melvin said. “Just offensively we didn’t do anything after that.”

Opening an early 2-0 lead, the White Sox touched Webb for as many runs as his past four opponents combined, but the right-hander from Rocklin was no less effective than he has been dating back to July 31. The two runs amounted to the only damage Webb allowed on five hits while striking out six with no walks over eight innings — and still increased his ERA over his past five starts, to 0.96 (4 ER, 37 1/3 IP).

Webb allowed a triple to Nicky Lopez that sailed past the glove of a leaping Grant McCray in center field to lead off the game and a double to Luis Robert Jr. that snuck into the right field to begin the fourth. Lopez scored on Andrew Benintendi’s groundout, and Robert came home on a pair of sacrifice flies, but the White Sox weren’t able to muster much else besides bloops and bleeders against Webb, who used 93 pitches to complete eight innings for the third time this season.

With Webb under the weather, Melvin said his starter talked his way back into going out for the eighth but another inning was out of the question. Ryan Walker and Tyler Rogers have shouldered the league’s largest workload and were needed to close out Tuesday’s win, so both were unavailable, and Melvin said he was saving Jordan Hicks for potential extra innings.

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Relieving Webb, Miller loaded the bases with one out in the ninth inning, but the Giants were one strike away from getting out of the inning after he struck out Gavin Sheets on the fifth of five straight sliders and handed the ball to Bivens to face Korey Lee, the right-handed-hitting catcher from Cal.

Bivens got ahead 0-2 but fired two sweepers outside the strike zone, and when he tried a sinker, Lee laced it up the middle for a two-run single. The next batter, Lenyn Sosa, shot another sinker past a diving Matt Chapman and into left field that drove home another two runs, extending their lead to 6-2.

“This was an opportunity for us to get three above (.500) and it’s a big swing from potentially three to back to one again,” Melvin said. “And now we’re going on the road, so we really thought we’d end this home stand more than one game above .500.”

Up next

The Giants have not announced their pitching plans for their series in Seattle, but they could use the offdays sandwiching the three-game set to skip the next turns through the rotation for rookies Hayden Birdsong and Kyle Harrison, whose workloads are already at or near career-highs.