SAN FRANCISCO - The Giants have plenty of fight. What they keep missing is the finish.
That was on display again Wednesday afternoon, when Christian Koss turned in one of those all-hands, dirt-on-the-uniform performances that usually gets rewarded. He singled twice, stole second, made two sharp plays at third base to help start and finish double plays, and nearly delivered the kind of late jolt that changes a game.
In the ninth inning, with the Giants trailing by a run, Koss got a pitch from Astros closer Josh Hader and sent it to left field. Taylor Trammell tracked it down on the warning track, and that was that.
The Giants fell 2-1 to Houston, another one-run loss in a season that has been full of them. It also meant another series in which they dropped two of three instead of sweeping.
At this point, the losses are no longer shocking. They are familiar.
San Francisco is 10-21 in one-run games this season, and the pattern has become impossible to ignore. These aren’t just the kind of losses that come from bad luck bouncing the wrong way.
More often, the Giants have been beaten by cleaner execution, sharper pitching or mistakes at the wrong moment. Wednesday fit that mold.
Adrian Houser gave them six solid innings, but the game slipped in the seventh. Willy Adames fielded a ground ball and threw a soft toss to second that kept Osleivis Basabe from turning a double play.
Then Victor Bericoto let a fly ball clank off his glove that should have ended the inning. Sam Hentges limited the damage to a sacrifice fly, but the Astros had already found the opening they needed.
In the eighth, Hentges left a pitch over the plate, and Trammell ripped it for a leadoff triple. Nick Allen’s sacrifice fly put Houston ahead. In the ninth, Koss almost bailed the Giants out anyway, but the ball hung just long enough for Trammell to make the catch.
Koss wasn’t talking like a player on a team that has quit on the season. He said the group is still working.
“We’ve talked about it before - not getting comfortable with losing,” Koss said. “To repeat that feeling isn’t great, but the guys here are doing everything they can to win every day.
“With all the close games we haven’t been winning, I think there was a point where it was, ‘Aw man, here we go again,'” Koss added. “The last couple weeks or so, it hasn’t felt like that.
“I mean, the tide still hasn’t turned in our favor, right? But the preparation hasn’t wavered.”
There’s no shortage of effort around this club, and that’s part of the issue. Tony Vitello has not had to drag his players into the park. The harder job has been knowing when to pull them back, especially the veterans who keep pushing to stay in the lineup.
Adames is the clearest example. He made that shaky throw in the seventh because his lower back tightened up again, and Anthony Reyes checked on him during a pitching change. Adames stayed in, led off the bottom of the inning with a pop-up, and was replaced by Buddy Kennedy at the start of the eighth.
The Giants probably should have put him on the injured list at the end of June, when he missed three games against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Instead, he came back for the series against the Colorado Rockies and has started 35 straight games since, all while dealing with the back issue. The results have been rough: it has been the worst offensive season of his career, and he also ranks as the second-worst shortstop in the league in outs above average.
Vitello said he had to push hard to get Adames out of the game.
“Had to fight him tooth and nail to come out of the game,” Vitello said. “Anyone who saw him moving around obviously knew he wasn’t … at full speed.
The biggest thing (in taking him out) was … to prevent anything from getting any worse than it is. I think his frustration is there’s symptoms there lingering for, to be honest, I don’t know how long.
… So again, you got kind of some internal stuff - whatever fancy word they used in there. It’s not a fracture or anything like that, and then you got his willingness and want-to to play.
“But the bottom line is: We’re at a pretty distinct point here where he needs to get back to get some treatment on that thing.”
The bigger picture is ugly. The Giants are on pace for 95 losses, and they need to win 13 of their final 41 games just to avoid matching the 1985 club’s 62-100 mark for the worst record in the San Francisco era. With the roster thinned out in multiple spots and the lineup short on dangerous bats, the path out of this slide is narrow.
Still, Koss pointed to the group’s continued effort as a reason not to fold.
“As bad as it looks on paper, we know we’re not that bad,” Koss said. “You can definitely see a turn in the past month or so, and then it’ll get sloppy at times. But it’s an opportunity to play, and you have to be excited about that.”
For the Giants, though, effort is not the question anymore. Direction is.
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