San Francisco Giants Can’t Complete Comeback; Suffer First Loss of Spring

The 3-game winning streak for the San Francisco Giants to begin spring training came to an end against the cross town rival Oakland Athletics 5-4 on Monday.

Another epic comeback fell just short as the Giants scored three runs in the seventh to tie the game, but the A’s took the lead back in the eighth and held the Giants scoreless in the last two frames.

The offense was unable to get anything clicking against the A’s pitching staff early despite having a lot of regulars in the San Francisco Giants lineup.

Oakland jumped out to a 4-run lead after scoring two in the first and two in the second off Jeff Samardzija and Kraig Sitton respectively. The bullpen was great after that until the eighth inning when Andrew Suarez gave up a run on 2 hits and 3 walks. He was fortunate it wasn’t more.

Let’s take a look at some positives and negatives from game four of spring training.

Positives

Christian Arroyo might not make this team out of spring training, but he’s certainly making a case to be called up soon. After going 2-3 with 2 RBIs in today’s game, he’s now 3-4 this spring. He played shortstop today, but I’m guessing he’ll see some action at third pretty soon.

After writing an article this morning on how bad Mike Morse has played early, he responded by going 2-2 with a run and an RBI.

And Cory Gearrin had a solid performance out of the bullpen striking out two batters and giving up just a hit. He’s now struck out three in 2 innings this spring.

Negatives

You can’t take away much from starting pitchers this early in spring, especially veterans who don’t have a job to lose, but it certainly wasn’t a great start for Jeff Samardzija giving up 2 runs on 3 hits and a walk with 1 strikeout. I’m sure the Shark will be fine in his next start.

The regulars in the lineup were just 2-12 at the plate with a couple of walks. Again, it’s way too early to panic over veteran players, but when you have that many regulars in the lineup against a team’s scrub pitchers, you hope for a better offensive output.

Next: San Francisco Giants: MLB Pipeline Releases Their Top 30 Prospects

Hopefully they’ll start another winning streak on Tuesday as Madison Bumgarner takes the hill for the second time this spring and faces the San Diego Padres.