After Melvin’s message, SF Giants ambush D’backs to snap skid

PHOENIX — Messaged received.

After manager Bob Melvin dressed down his players following a season-worst sixth loss in a row Tuesday night, they responded the next afternoon with an onslaught against the Diamondbacks’ starter, Jordan Montgomery, and stopped the bleeding at six games with a 9-3 win to avoid being swept for a second straight series.

“Yeah,” smiled Jorge Soler, who singled and scored on one of two Giants home runs in a six-run third inning, then contributed his own solo shot in the seventh. “He kind of squeezed a little bit (more out of us) and let us know how he was feeling. So today, yeah, we were motivated to win for him.”

“Oh,” Melvin blushed, “it had nothing to do with me. We just had good at-bats today. We’ve been really aggressive this entire series on their starting pitchers — they do like to throw strike one — but we got a good pitcher out of the game and made him work.”

Melvin and the Giants know a thing or two about disappointing starts from free-agent pitchers who signed late, and Montgomery trudged back to the third-base dugout to a chorus of boos from the 24,178 on hand with six runs in and no outs recorded in the third inning.

Bringing a dozen men to bat, all six of the Giants’ runs in the inning came on a pair of powerful swings from Heliot Ramos and Wilmer Flores.

Ramos launched a towering two-run shot on to the concourse in center field, an estimated 424 feet away, to open the scoring, and four batters later Flores turned the ambush into a full-blown assault, depositing a hanging curveball into the left-field seats for the Giants’ third grand slam of the year.

All but one member of the Giants’ lineup reached base in the six-run third inning, but Ramos was the only player to do so twice.

Drawing a career-high four walks to pair with his home run and a single, Ramos became the first Giants player besides LaMonte Wade Jr. (who has done it twice) to come to the plate at least six times and not make an out since Pablo Sandoval in 2013.

“I’ve never walked that many times, not even in the minor leagues,” Ramos said. “It’s been tough (to be patient) because I like swinging the bat. … I don’t want to be up there and just automatically take. I want to stay aggressive with my pitch, and when I stay aggressive with my pitch, I know they don’t want to leave something right down the middle.”

Since being moved to the top portion of the lineup four games ago, Ramos has come to bat 20 times and reached safely in 12 of them with three home runs, raising his batting average to .304 and OPS to .918, both of which would lead the team if he had enough plate appearances to qualify.

“He’s just so balanced, every take, every swing,” Melvin said. “He’s just completely locked in. Who walks four times? Especially when you’re hitting like he is, you want to swing. But they’re deep counts, it’s 3-2, he ends up taking a ball off the plate. It’s really cool to watch because he’s such a good kid and it’s been kind of hard road for him to get here.”

It was as much of a breakout game for Ramos, a rookie, as it was for a pair of struggling veterans in Soler and Flores, who combined to reach base five times, drove in six runs and scored three. Soler’s hard contact translated to results, and the mere presence of triple-digit exit velocity from Flores provided a positive sign.

The .211 average and .573 OPS that Flores took into Wednesday’s contest would have each been the worst marks of his career since he was a 21-year-old rookie, and the underlying data hasn’t been any better, with an average exit velocity in the bottom 1% of big-leaguers.

But with a line-drive single to go with his grand slam, Flores has reached base five times in the past two games, and his five RBIs were a season-high. He laced the single at 107 mph and launched the home run at 100 mph.

Both those guys are going to be key for us,” Melvin said. “In Wilmer’s case, it hasn’t looked great to this point. But if you’re looking at exit velocity, he had really good exit velocity on (two) different hits today, so a lot of times for a guy like him it only takes a game or two to get going.”

Soler tacked on another run with a 427-foot solo shot off lefty Brandon Hughes in the eighth, and the Giants added two more against him in their half of the ninth. The nine runs amounted to their best offensive output since a 9-5 win in Pittsburgh two weeks ago and only the sixth time they have reached that total in 63 games.

After all that, the first stat Melvin said he looked at in the box score was runners left on base.

Even while scoring nine runs, the Giants stranded 16 more runners, tying the Brewers for the most in one game this season. The Diamondbacks, meanwhile, stranded 12.

“It was a little frustrating,” Melvin said. “The entire game felt like it was frustrating for both sides, as many pitches that were thrown. It was kind of a white-knuckle thing for a while. But opened it up enough, did some good things offensively, made some good defensive plays, and the bullpen did a great job.”

Waiting until to sign until March 29, 10 days after Blake Snell, Montgomery’s ERA in nine starts rose to 6.80, a far cry from the pitcher who helped lead the Rangers to the World Series last fall but still nearly two runs lower than Snell’s 9.51 mark in the six starts he has been able to make.

Both starting pitchers had left the game by the time the Giants came to bat for a fifth time, as Arizona ran up Jordan Hicks’ pitch count and backed him into a bases-loaded jam in the fourth inning, prompting Melvin to call on Sean Hjelle, who coaxed a soft ground ball from Lourdes Gurriel Jr. to escape the inning.

Hicks required 92 pitches to record 11 outs, his shortest outing of the season, but limited the Diamondbacks to two runs while striking out seven. His velocity also ticked up, registering regular 98 mph readings on his fastball and averaging an extra mph across his arsenal.