SF Giants blow 4-run lead to Pirates, snap win streak at 4 games

PITTSBURGH — Everything, it seemed, had been going the Giants’ way this week. They shook the monkey of being the majors’ last team to win three games in a row off their back, reeled off a fourth and were in position to extend their win streak to five Tuesday evening when the ninth inning began.

Holding a 6-2 lead, the Giants didn’t send Camilo Doval out to start the inning on the mound. But he ended it by walking back to the visitor’s dugout after blowing a save situation that didn’t exist when Luke Jackson took over at the beginning of the frame.

After allowing the Pirates to tie the score in the ninth, it took only one pitch into the bottom of the 10th for the Giants’ four-game win streak to come to an end, 7-6.

“We had a game tonight that we should’ve won,” said the Giants’ starter, Logan Webb, whose six two-run innings went to waste. “It doesn’t make it feel any better just because we won four in row before that. It should’ve been five in a row.”

Nick Gonzales laced Erik Miller’s first pitch into center field, driving home the Pirates’ automatic runner. The Giants weren’t able to score theirs in the top half of the inning after Jackson, Doval and some shoddy defense teamed up to blow a four-run lead.

Manager Bob Melvin gave Jackson three batters in the ninth — two of whom reached base — before calling on his closer.

“They get two guys on, we bring Doval in for the save and it’s 6-2 with two guys on,” Melvin said, “you feel pretty good about winning the game.”

The usually dominant Doval struggled to find the strike zone, Marco Luciano — the Giants’ rookie shortstop — bobbled a potential game-ending double play grounder, and a Pirates rookie making his major-league debut snuck a single past second baseman Thairo Estrada to extend the inning.

Doval was charged with his first blown save of the season, though the first two runs were charged to Jackson and the final two were unearned because of Luciano’s error.

“He did his job,” Luciano said of Doval through Spanish-language interpreter Erwin Higueros. “I felt bad for him. I felt bad for me. I want to help, at least, to get a force out. But those are things that happen. … I did not put my glove in the right way. I was undecided how I wanted to field the ball.”

The game came down to power against power: the hard-throwing Doval vs. Oneil Cruz, who earlier lined the hardest-hit ball in the majors this season — an exit velocity of 120.4 mph — off Webb, who was in line for the win until the 6-foot-7 shortstop’s third hit of the night.

Wasting no time, Cruz attacked the second pitch of the at-bat — a 100.3 mph cutter — and dethroned himself from the top of the leaderboard. He sent a double screaming into the right-field corner at 121.5 mph, allowing the tying run to mosey home from third base. That it was hit so hard might have been the only reason the would-be winning run, the speedy Bryan Reynolds, received the stop sign when he reached third.

Just as they became the last team in the majors to win three games in a row, the Giants became the last to lose when scoring at least five runs. The previous 15 times they had reached that figure it had been enough to win.

While they built a 6-2 lead behind a pair of home runs from Thairo Estrada and Matt Chapman and six strong innings from Webb, early miscues and missed opportunities came back to haunt them. They went 1-for-12 with runners in scoring position — including all three at-bats with their automatic runner on second base in the 10th — and stranded 10 men on base.

“We had plenty of opportunities to widen the lead earlier in the game,” Melvin said. “But a lot of times it ends up being in close games like that late, you’ve got to play good defense.”

Working around base runners in five of his six innings, Webb limited the Pirates to two runs on six hits and struck out six — all on his changeup — but the one walk he issued, to the last man in the Pirates’ lineup, came back to bite him.

After putting Ji Hwan Bae on base, Webb allowed the Pirates’ rookie center fielder to steal second, then advance to third when he failed to cover first base, allowing Andrew McCutchen to leg out an infield single. The next batter, Reynolds, bounced a ground ball that allowed Bae to score.

“I’ve got to get over there,” Webb said. “The way he hit it, I was kind of watching the ball. But you’ve just got to go right over there. The way he hit it, was spinning a little weird. I just didn’t think about it. I’ve gotta get over to save the run for us. Today, maybe that’s the difference in the game.”

The Giants have lost four of Webb’s past five starts, though he has limited opponents to four runs over his past three starts.

With three RBIs, Estrada increased his team-leading total to 29. Two came on his fifth-inning blast that made the score 4-1, and he added another in the eighth.

Chapman negated the run the Pirates scored after Estrada’s homer with a line drive that carried over the center field wall to make it 5-2. Adding a sharp double in his previous at-bat, Chapman is batting .378 (14-for-37) with six two-base hits and a pair of homers since the start of the past home stand, raising his OPS to .718 from .601.

Wilmer Flores was not credited with a base hit or any RBIs on the ball off his bat that opened the scoring but provided a pair of singles for his fourth multi-hit game of the season, the second of which came after the Pirates swapped in a right-handed reliever for the left-handed Pérez.

It was an easy scoring decision in the first inning to charge an error to Cruz, who called off his left fielder while backpedaling onto the outfield grass, where the late-afternoon sun was blaring. It should have been a routine play and the third out of the inning but instead turned into two runs.

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