Giants allow three homers, drop series finale to Rays

For the tenth time this season, the Giants turned to Ryan Walker to serve as the club’s opener. It’s a role the right-hander has adapted to nicely and with the addition of another crisp outing on Wednesday, Walker has now allowed just four earned runs in 16 innings with 25 strikeouts across his ten starts.

Walker kept Tampa Bay hitters off guard at the plate with eight swings and misses –– six of them on his slider. Prior to the game, Rays catcher Christian Bethancourt told MLB.com’s Sonja Chen that “it seems like he’s going to hit you every time, so it’s not a very fun at-bat at all.”

The Rays didn’t end up getting drilled, but they managed to push a run across in the first when second baseman Brandon Lowe drew a one-out walk and later came around to score on an RBI single from Isaac Parades. The run wasn’t attached to Walker’s name because the Giants would have escaped the inning on an inning-ending double play ball to third, but an error by third baseman J.D. Davis resulted in zero outs generated.

The Giants are now 8-3 in games that Walker opens.

From there, San Francisco turned to Ross Stripling, their honorary “featured pitcher” for the afternoon. Since returning from a low back injury on June 25, the veteran righty has started seven of his last nine games and has been relatively effective to the point where he’s flirted with the possibility of being the highly-coveted third full-time rotation member.

However, the success didn’t necessarily translate to Wednesday afternoon’s outing, as Stripling was rocked by a resourceful Rays offense. In his six innings of work, Stripling allowed five earned runs on 11 hits while striking out three. The story was that of a narrative that has followed him around for the majority of the season: allowing homers.

Entering into the game, Stripling’s 2.12 HR/9 was the fourth-worst in MLB for pitchers with a minimum of 70 innings pitched. To lead off the fourth inning, Josh Lowe trampled a solo-shot over the right-center field fence. The following inning, Stripling fired a hanging changeup to Brandon Lowe that landed 421-feet away beyond the center field fence for a two-run dinger.

While it wasn’t traditional in any sense of the imagination, the Rays tacked on another roundtripper off Stripling in the sixth. The genre in which it came was unexpected and unprecedented. Luke Raley emerged off the bench for the Rays and blasted an elevated slider to the right-center gap, historically known as “Triple’s Alley” among Giants fans. A sure homer in any other ballpark, this ball had different ideas that didn’t remotely match up with reality. In a bizarre twist, it clanked off the bricked wall and pinballed back toward center field –– essentially redirecting center fielder Wade Meckler as it ferociously rolled across the warning track.

Raley came all the way around to score for his 17th homer of the season, but first career longball in the inside-the-park variety.

Meckler’s action in the outfielder was frequent as the rookie showed off his speed to rob Tampa Bay hitters twice on identical sliding catchers on fast-sinking fly balls –– once in the second and again in the seventh. Heliot Ramos also had a moment in left field in the fourth, throwing out a greedy Jose Siri attempting to stretch a single into a double.

The Giants offense was mainly quiet against Rays newly acquired right-hander Aaron Civale, who held them scoreless across six innings while allowing five hits and a walk. He struck out five.

It took Civale exiting the game for them to finally break through. Reliever Hector Perez entered in the seventh, automatically yielding a single to J.D. Davis, Thairo Estrada, and Johan Camargo. With the bases loaded, LaMonte Wade Jr. drew a walk to add a run on the board and make it 6-1. With a chance for more, Austin Slater grounded into an inning-ending double play to eliminate any chance of a big inning.

Overall on the day, the Giants bounced into four double plays.

After an off-day, the Giants will square off against the Atlanta Braves at Truist Park for a three-game series. They haven’t announced their pitching plans for the road trip.