SAN DIEGO — The Giants flew into San Diego with the second-best record in baseball. They return to San Francisco with the third-best record in the division, suffering a two-game sweep at the hands of the Padres after losing, 5-3, on Wednesday at Petco Park.
So goes life in baseball’s toughest division.
“We’ll go home, put these two games away, and hopefully do some damage over the next four,” said manager Bob Melvin.
San Francisco’s (19-12) next four games will be against another NL West foe, albeit one that has a chance of becoming the worst team in league history.
The Colorado Rockies stumble into Oracle Park for a four-game set against the Giants with an abysmal 5-25 record. They’re on pace to lose 135 games, which would clear the current record of 121 losses that the Chicago White Sox accumulated last year.
The Padres (19-11) and Los Angeles Dodgers (21-10) have both already swept the Rockies at home this season, and the Giants will have an opportunity to do the same. Melvin said there isn’t additional pressure to sweep the series after San Diego and Los Angeles did so in April, emphasizing the reality that any given team can win on any given day.
“Every major-league team can beat any other team. We don’t take anybody lightly,” Melvin said pregame. “The Angels beat us two out of three, and that was the only team on that road trip that we had a losing record against. I don’t think there’s more pressure on it. I think you individualize each game and have an expectation to win. That’s the best way to look at it.”
Added Heliot Ramos, who hit his fourth homer of the year: “At the end of the day, we have to go out there and compete. It doesn’t matter who it is. It doesn’t matter if they’re good, it doesn’t matter if they’re a great team. We have to go out there and compete and give everything that we got.”
San Francisco, to its credit, did indeed compete in its two losses to San Diego, a pair of defeats that mirrored one another.
Similar to Tuesday, the Giants fell behind early but refused to go quietly. They fell behind, 5-1, after Landen Roupp allowed four runs over 4 1/3 innings, but hung around as Spencer Bivens, Camilo Doval and Tyler Rogers allowed one run over 3 2/3 innings. Ramos hit a solo homer in the seventh, Mike Yastrzemski did the same in the eighth and a four-run deficit shrunk to two. Against baseball’s best bullpen, that was too much to overcome.
“We’ve played well on the road. These are just two frustrating games because we have a chance — one swing and it’s a completely different game,” Melvin said. “It’s not like we laid down and didn’t fight. We did fight until the end. It was just a little bit of the same theme early on.”
Ramos began his season by hitting three homers over his first five games but then went 25 straight games without a homer, his walk-off Little League home run on Sunday not counting as a true long ball. The 25-year-old described the homer-less stretch as more mental than physical, sharing that he was getting in his head about his setup, his hand placement and what pitches. With a home run and a walk on Wednesday, Ramos has now reached base in eight consecutive games — and made some loud contact in the process.
Over these two games in San Diego, Ramos put five batted balls in play. Four of them generated exit velocities of 104.3 mph, 106.7 mph (today’s home run), 107.6 mph and a season-high 111.4 mph.
“I was thinking about everything instead of focusing on one thing,” Ramos said. “I feel like that’s the biggest thing for me: being in a good setup, being in a good position and trying to stay focused on what I want to do.”