Melvin calls out team for ‘awful’ play in 6th straight loss

PHOENIX — Bad. Terrible. Awful.

Manager Bob Melvin shared some choice words Tuesday evening after the Giants lost, 8-5, to the Diamondbacks, extending their season-long skid to six games.

“That was a terrible game by us today, especially the early portion. When you’re going through losing streaks, at least you fight. For the most part we have. That was an awful game,” Melvin said. “We made it interesting at the end but didn’t play well. Made Harry get multiple outs. We had a starter on the ropes every inning and couldn’t cash in. It’s a bad game in a bad stretch by us.”

The clubhouse remained closed to reporters for 15 minutes, and hushed tones dominated the room once the doors opened.

For the second time in little more than two months of baseball, Melvin felt the need to address his club. There was also a team meeting after they were swept in Philadelphia, and the message this time was to bounce back the next day and to not let it happen again.

“Tomorrow,” Melvin said. “We’d better.”

Chase Field must begin to be feeling like a house of horrors for the Giants, who watched their season collapse while being swept here last September, had one teammate kick a bat into another out of frustration in the dugout the year before and have not won a game in this building since September 2022.

Less than a week after hitting their high-water mark of two games over .500, the Giants sunk back to 29-33 and into fourth place in the National League West, a half-game behind Arizona.

“It’s just not good. It was a terrible game,” starting pitcher Kyle Harrison said of the message to the team. “We’ve got to figure out a way to win those and stay in it.”

Coming only a day after Melvin described his team’s series-opening loss as a “game of inches” and noted that they were playing better than their losing streak would indicate, it came as a quick reversal of tone from the manager.

But, then again, he watched his club leave the bases loaded once, ground into double plays twice; strike out three times with runners on third base; and generally bumble their way through the first half of the game defensively, including four batted balls that all glanced off the gloves of Giants defenders while Arizona opened a 3-0 lead in the third inning.

“We just looked like we were running around in quicksand for a while,” Melvin said. “It is what it is. But it doesn’t feel very good when you play like that.”

Casey Schmitt was pelted with three hard-hit balls to shortstop and wasn’t able to corral any of them, and Arizona scored its first two runs when Kevin Newman lined another pitch off the tip of Matt Chapman’s outstretched glove and into the left field corner.

Schmitt wasn’t charged with an error, however, until the next inning, when he was eaten up by a hopper off the bat of Randal Grichuk. The first two plays were a degree more difficult, forcing him to range to both sides, but he could have come away with two errors on his record after letting a more routine hopper up the middle from Ketel Marte get away into center field, allowing the fourth run of the inning to cross the plate.

“I should have definitely gotten both,” Schmitt said of the balls hit by Marte and Grichuk. “It’s just unacceptable on my part. … I maybe just took my eye off of it a little bit. There were two (other) balls just a little bit out of my reach, just off the tip of my glove, but I’ll look back at it and just go from there and get better.”

Since tossing seven shutout innings at Coors Field a month ago, Harrison has allowed at least three earned runs in each of his past five starts, raising his ERA to 4.18 from 3.20 after his May 7 start against Colorado. He punched out only five batters but traded his strikeout stuff for better efficiency, pitching beyond the fifth inning for the first time since his gem six starts ago.

Harrison called the start “a good step forward for me.”

“I’ve been working on a lot of stuff with my mechanics and just trying to get back to seeing the version of myself that I’m used to seeing,” he said. “Velo was there. Felt good. Changeup was there. Slider was there. So, a good one to build on, for sure.”

That start in Colorado was also the last time any Giants pitcher not named Logan Webb completed six innings, and the nine outs taken down by Jackson and Taylor Rogers increased the bullpen’s major-league leading workload to 144⅔ innings since the start of May.

“We needed six innings today because we were a little bit limited in the bullpen,” Melvin said. “He had to get some extra outs. He didn’t pitch bad. He didn’t walk anybody. He gave up some hits. Harry pitched OK.”

As to the impact the poor defense behind him had, Harrison said, “it takes a toll.

“But you’ve got to pick up your defense behind you, and that’s all I was thinking at the time.”

Jackson surrendered a leadoff single to Blaze Alexander, and Newman’s sacrifice bunt to advance him to second ended up being one of only two he recorded while allowing six of the eight batters he faced to reach base and four to score.

“It just wasn’t a good day for him,” Melvin said of Jackson, who had limited opponents to a .200 batting average since returning from the injured list April 22. “He’s been finding his way. It feels like he’s found his way a little bit with some good games and today was not a good one. Couple walks and it got out of hand in the seventh.”

Back in the leadoff spot, Heliot Ramos reached base all of his first three times to the plate, and Chapman supplied a pair of hits — extending his on-base streak to 22 games — but the Giants regretted their missed opportunities, stranding nine men on base and went 2-for-10 with runners in scoring position.

“The at-bat qualities were good up until we really needed a good at-bat,” Melvin said. “We made them work and we got into situations where we were in the driver’s seat and we let them off the hook.”

Coming up with runners on the corners in his final two trips to the plate, Chapman wasn’t able to come through in the most critical situations, grounding out to end the fifth inning and watching a 101 mph fastball from 22-year-old rookie Justin Martinez for strike three for the final out of the seventh.