SAN DIEGO -- The Giants have been a team that’s fought back late all year. It’s been enough for an MLB-leading five walk-off wins, helping make them one of the biggest surprises in the big leagues this season with a 19-10 record at the start of the week and tied for first place in the stacked NL West.
But it wasn’t enough to win their first division series of the season.
In both games against the Padres on Tuesday and Wednesday, much like several of their other games this season, the Giants fell behind early. And in both those games, much like the other times, they rallied. But they fell short each time, losing to the Padres 7-4 on Tuesday and 5-3 on Wednesday as they fell victim to a midweek sweep at Petco Park.
“Basically, this is the same game where we didn’t do enough early in the game and put some pressure on the starter, and they did,” manager Bob Melvin said after Wednesday’s loss. “Then we had to do our work against relievers, which we did. We had the tying run up a couple times late in the game. It’s tough to do it off those guys.
“But it’s early in the game that we didn’t put enough pressure, and we gave up too many runs in the first half of the game as well. In both of them.”
It’s always a tall order to rally late in a game. But against the Padres bullpen, the height of that order might as well be Victor Wembanyama. They entered the series with a 1.63 ERA and ended it with a 1.77 ERA, the lowest in the Majors.
Pitching is also the strength of the Giants; their bullpen has the second-best ERA in the Majors at 2.41. But it was their starters, Logan Webb and Landen Roupp, who got the worst of the Padres’ bats. Webb, San Francisco’s ace, had his worst outing of the season as he allowed five earned runs on nine hits over five innings pitched.
Roupp didn’t fare much better on Wednesday, giving up four earned runs on seven hits -- tying the most hits he’s allowed this season -- with three walks over 4 1/3 innings.
But a lot of the hits Webb gave up tended to be soft contact that managed to find grass. The average exit velocity for Padres hitters against Webb on Tuesday was 84.5 mph, down a bit from his 2025 average of 87.8 mph.
“It’s always frustrating when you have games like that,” Webb said. “But I’m not one to complain. I get a lot of hard hit balls right at people. It was just one of those nights that I thought the gameplan was good, just stuff was finding grass, finding holes. Did exactly what I wanted to do. Just one of those days.”
Roupp felt the same way about his start on Wednesday, adding that the Padres were able to get some weak hits while guys were on base, but that he felt good for the most part.
The Giants pitching has generally been able to compensate for some of the inconsistency at the plate through the hot start, but those cracks became a little more visible this series. Wilmer Flores entered Tuesday tied with Aaron Judge for the MLB lead in RBIs (28), but he went hitless against the Padres as he struck out five consecutive times between Tuesday and Wednesday, with six strikeouts overall.
And it wasn’t just him.
Between Matt Chapman and Flores, the Giants’ four and five-hole hitters respectively, they went a combined 0-for-16 with 12 strikeouts this series.
The team did find some production in other parts of the lineup, though. LaMonte Wade Jr. and Willy Adames both had big games on Tuesday, and Adames walked twice in Wednesday’s game. Mike Yastrzemski and Heliot Ramos each had big home runs late in the game to cut into the Padres’ lead. Jung Hoo Lee had an RBI single. They battled, as they have all year, it just wasn’t enough this time around.
“These are just two frustrating games because we have a chance. One swing, and it’s a completely different game,” Melvin said. “So it’s not like we just laid down and didn’t fight. We did fight to the end. It was just a little bit of the same theme early on.
“But we just go home and put these two games away, and hopefully do some damage the next four.”