SAN DIEGO - Giants manager Bruce Bochy was looking for a spark Sunday morning, so he wrote Chris Dominguez into the lineup for the series finale at Petco Park. In his first career start, the September call-up blasted a two-run shot, picking up his first big league hit and homer with one massive swing.
The rest of the lineup, however, continued to rub two sticks together and come up short. The Giants lost 8-2 to the San Diego Padres, completing a sweep that all but ended the Giants’ hopes of taking the division title.
With seven games remaining, the Giants fell 41/2 games back of the first-place Los Angeles Dodgers, their largest deficit since Aug. 27. The Dodgers will clinch the National League West if they take two of three from the Giants during a series that starts today at Dodger Stadium. Of greater concern is the fact that the Giants and Pittsburgh Pirates are now tied atop the wild-card standings at 84-71. Because the Pirates took the season series, they would host the wild-card game if the two finish tied.
The Giants certainly don’t want to go to raucous PNC Park to play nine innings of winner-moves-on baseball. But they had other issues to worry about after getting just 15 hits in a three-game series and giving up 16 runs to a light-hitting Padres lineup.
“Right now, the focus should be on winning,” right-hander Ryan Vogelsong said. “Obviously you would love if we were to get in and you’d have the game at home, but after the series we just had, the most important thing is to play the next game and to try to win it, and then win the game after that.”
Even that seems a tough task at the moment.
The Giants are springing new leaks every day, the most alarming being a complete lack of punch at the plate. They’ve totaled 14 runs over their past eight games, losing six.
“We’re kind of stuck at two runs” per game, Bochy said. “We ran into three really good pitchers at the top of their game, but you’ve got to find a way.”
For four innings, the Giants actually held a slight edge. The only hit to that point on either side was Buster Posey’s infield single.
Vogelsong gave up a leadoff double to Seth Smith in the fifth and fell behind on Alexi Amarista’s sacrifice fly. The right-hander wouldn’t make it out of the sixth. Back-to-back singles got the rally going, and Pablo Sandoval’s throwing error loaded the bases. That would be it for Vogelsong, who was charged with four runs - two of them earned - in five innings. Javier Lopez entered and gave up a sacrifice fly to Yasmani Grandal. George Kontos replaced Lopez and allowed a backbreaking two-run single to Cameron Maybin with two outs.
The Padres rolled from there. Ian Kennedy was cruising along until Dominguez blasted a fastball off the Western Metal Supply warehouse with two out and one on in the seventh. The fire lit under the Giants would soon burn out, but Dominguez was still having a hard time containing his smile a couple of hours later.
The ball was caught by a young girl named Estella who was celebrating her eighth birthday. Before a Padres official could approach the family and offer a trade for the keepsake, the girl wrote her name and “Happy Birthday!!!” on a baseball that Dominguez got back and will cherish forever.
“That’s all right,” Dominguez said, laughing. “It’s a good memory.”
He was about the only one who had reason to smile as the Giants boarded a bus for the ride up to Los Angeles.
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