SF Giants’ waste stable begin from Webb, Luciano’s first hit in loss to Pink Sox | Baseball
SAN FRANCISCO — The San Francisco Giants’ offense appeared to wake up Wednesday, and the club should have been well-rested Friday after a long-awaited day off.
They must have hit the snooze button.
Rookie shortstop Marco Luciano recorded his first hit and scored his first run of his career, and Joc Pederson smashed a late solo shot, but the Giants didn’t manage much else Friday night to back up a bounce-back start from Logan Webb in a 3-2 loss to the Boston Red Sox, who ran their winning streak to five games.
Pederson’s home run in the eighth, his 11th of the season, should have tied the score at 2. But the Red Sox widened their lead to 3-1 in the top half of the inning, after manager Gabe Kapler pulled an ultraefficient Webb with one out in the eighth, and Taylor Rogers surrendered an RBI single to the next batter.
Rebounding from the worst start of his career, Webb mostly silenced a lineup that has been the hottest in the majors since the end of June. He was shown shaking his head on the bench after the run scored, more likely lamenting the base runner he left for Rogers than Kapler’s decision to pull him.
Webb didn’t run a three-ball count until the fifth inning and was at only 88 pitches when Kapler came to get him, with Boston’s lineup turning over for a fourth time and a runner at second after a leadoff single and a sacrifice bunt. Pinch-hitter Rob Refsnyder lined the first pitch from Rogers into left-field, driving home Connor Wong for what proved to be a crucial insurance run.
Limiting a dangerous Boston lineup to three runs on six hits, Webb lowered his ERA to 3.49, including a 2.20 mark in 10 starts at Oracle Park. He struck out four and walked none. It should have been enough to earn the win, but the Giants’ lineup returned to its slumber against Red Sox starter Kutter Crawford.
The Giants managed just one other hit off Crawford besides Luciano’s and the RBI single from Michael Conforto that drove him in. Looking to extend their sixth-inning rally after Crawford was lifted for left-handed reliever Brennan Bernardino, Kapler called on Austin Slater to pinch-hit, and he struck out.
In his second major-league game, Luciano recorded his first career hit with a line drive that glanced off the glove of third baseman Rafael Devers to lead off the sixth. The ball left his bat at 107.1 mph. He took second on a wild pitch, putting him in position to score on a single from Conforto.
The Giants were primed to strike again in the seventh, with leadoff singles from J.D. Davis and Patrick Bailey. But, with the help of a sensational diving stop and flip from second baseman Justin Turner, they came up empty. Turner’s diving stop robbed Blake Sabol of an RBI single, and Luciano was called out on strikes to end the inning, stranding Davis at third as the would-be tying run.
The Red Sox, who improved to an MLB-best 16-5 since June 30, possess six of the top nine batters in the AL in that time span. Consider them the polar opposites of the Giants’ ice-cold group, which has produced three or fewer runs in eight of their past nine games and is batting .204 this month (Boston: .299).
Triston Casas accounted for Boston’s first two runs off Webb with two of their six hits, including his MLB-leading seventh home run since the All-Star break.
Casas traded places with Adam Duvall in the second inning with back-to-back ground rule doubles that put Boston up 1-0. Duvall’s was a line drive down the third-base line that just evaded the glove of Davis but eventually found the one of the ball guy, automatically awarding Duvall second.
Manager Alex Cora and a Red Sox trainer came out of the dugout to check on Casas in the fifth after he fouled a two-strike changeup off his shin and fell to the ground. It didn’t take long for Casas to prove he was all right, unloading on Webb’s next pitch for a 435-foot home run that landed halfway up the left-field bleachers.
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