A week had passed since the Giants last serious beat-down by the Padres, so I guess they were due.
San Diego’s 4-run 3rd in their 8-1 win over San Francisco bore resemblances to their 7-run 2nd on August 13th. It echoed some unfortunate breaks from Landen Roupp’s last start against the Rays in which a reliever Matt Gage took over and took a come-backer off the hip to fuel one of Tampa’s unrelenting rallies. This time, Roupp wore the bruising liner, and the consequences were much more of a bummer.
San Diego had already notched two runs against Roupp over the first two innings. Similar to his performance against Tampa, in which he got welcomed back from the IL with 5 earned runs over 3 IP, he had a hard time putting hitters away and closing out innings.
In the 1st nearly worked around a lead-off double from Fernando Tatis with two quick outs, but Ryan O’Hearn scratched and clawed his way out of a 0-2 hole, forcing Roupp to throw 9 pitches before flipping the 10th into center for a 2-out RBI singles.
Padres hitters succeeded in making Roupp uncomfortable from the start. They extended at-bats, lefties spat on his offspeed, worked a lot of deep counts, while also varying their modes of attacks. In the 2nd, Gavin Sheets cruised an 0-1 hanging curve over the right field wall. Roupp had been getting some nice run on his sinker, using its backdoor movement against righties to exploit the outside corner, but command of his breaking ball since his return has been fickle. The typically stoic right-hander couldn’t hide his frustrations after serving up that ripe curve to Sheets.
Another 10-pitch at-bat against Luis Arraez to lead off the 3rd had Roupp’s workload around 50 pitches. Roupp won that battle, getting Arraez to lineout to left, but it was a pyrrhic victory. Fatigue possibly settling in, he immediately lost his bearings against Manny Machado. He fell behind in the count 3-0, and seeing a chance to destabilize a young and tiring pitcher, the veteran Machado green-lit a 3-0 swing on a sinker sliding right over the heart of the plate.
The game got out of hand quickly after that. O’Hearn walked on 5 pitches, then Ramon Laureano beelined the baseball into Roupp’s right thigh, and in a cruel twist, his left leg appeared to plant awkwardly on the incline of the mound. The knee seemed to pop before giving out from underneath him. Roupp went down hard, writhing on the ground in pain.
Roupp left the field in a cart and was initially diagnosed with a left-knee sprain. An MRI will come back with more conclusive results, but I think it’s a safe bet to say, given the recent slew of injuries and career-high workload already, we won’t see Roupp pitch again this season.
Joey Lucchesi rushed to warm-up in the wake of the injury. He took the hill and promptly gave up a 3-run bomb to Gavin Sheets, adding two more runs to Roupp’s unsightly pitching line (2.1 IP, 5 ER). And just to heap on more embarrassment, more insults to injury, Christian Koss booted the next ball in play and Lucchesi balked that runner to second before laboring through the next two outs.
While Fernando Tatis was stylishly pulling a home run back onto the field of play, everything the Giants did with a baseball looked strained. A balk. An error. Diving after routine flyouts. Dropping routine flyballs, then getting outs through convoluted fielder’s choices.
Compare Tatis’s non-plussed expression as he sat on the warning track post-transcendence, the should’ve-been gone baseball nestled in the pocket of his glove because where else would it be…
to the grimace on Heliot Ramos’s face as he looked into his mitt after tackling a somewhat manageable flyout with a half-controlled and completely accidental barrel roll…
Right now, these two teams are playing in different leagues. And with lefty J.P. Sears on the mound — same man, different jersey — facing the Giants for the third time in a season, you’d be excused if you felt like you were trapped in some kind of nightmare merry-go-round.
Yes, you’ve seen him a lot. No, this isn’t the Twilight Zone. Sears got shipped from the Athletics to San Diego along with Mason Miller at the trade deadline. The starter felt like a tag-a-long, an oh yeah…throw something else just to not make this look soooo lopsided kind of thing. His results hadn’t been very impressive as an Athletic, and in his one start as a Padre, he surrendered 5 earned on 10 hits against the Diamondbacks and was optioned down to Triple-A.
Based on the 5+ ERA he lugged into Wednesday’s start, the rest of the league doesn’t seem too concerned when he’s on the mound. Hitters might even get excited…a fact that shovels even more shame on San Francisco’s hitters in light of their struggles against him.
The scouting report: Sears gives up a heap of flyballs, and a heap of those flyballs become home runs, and he dominates the Giants.
San Francisco got Sears for 4 runs over 4 innings in the Wilmer Flores game back in May. That “outburst”, like most things in April and May of this year, proved to be an anomaly. Sears threw 6 scoreless innings against them in July, his best start of the year based on game score, and looking to audition for a back-end rotation role in the Padres postseason push, he gave up just one-run on a Casey Schmitt solo homer over 6 more breezy innings on Wednesday.
Over the last two years, the Giants have squared up against Sears five times. He’s allowed 6 earned runs over 30.2 innings pitched and spun 4 quality starts. We could probably find a more effusive adjective than “quality” to describe those outings as well considering he held the Giants’ to just one run or fewer in all of them.
Does Sears boast some secret sauce, or is it simply the fact that he’s a southpaw, just another predatory lefty feeding off San Francisco’s line-up?
Who knows, and at this point, who cares? In five of the last six games against San Diego pitching, the Giants have scored just one run. Something tells me that these issues extend beyond Sears — but it’d still be cool if their paths didn’t cross again. Based on the cruel tides of this season, despite the fact that the Giants only have one more regular season game against San Diego, it feels like even that is too much of an ask.
Sears and San Francisco will get pulled into each other’s currents again somehow. The Padres will release him after more miserable starts, and the Dodgers, in desperate need of late-season innings-eaters, will pick him up off waivers right before they roll into Oracle in mid-September. Three weeks from now, Sears—same man, different jersey—will take the mound against the Giants. This nightmare will continue.
