Bucs Sweep GIANTS...G-Men coming home

Light offense swept away
Giants score little, complete 1-5 trip

Henry Schulman - San Francisco Chronicle

First, there was a 1-6 start. Then came a burst of plucky play, some wins and optimism. Now, the Giants are in a third stage, in danger of falling into the kind of malaise expected of a team with too many too-young players and not enough pop.

They flew home Thursday night after a 5-4 loss that completed a Pirates sweep and a trip through Pennsylvania that yielded one win in six games. Matt Cain blew a 4-2 lead in the seventh inning aided by Jack Taschner's first slip-up of 2008.

When contending teams slog through trips like this, it is easier to wave them off as aberrations. For a team such as the 14-21 Giants, the immediate future is tougher to predict.

Who knows what is the aberration and what is the norm? Will their pitching carry them through a 10-game homestand that begins against Philadelphia tonight? Or will they be buried by their inability to hit in the clutch or go deep? Thursday's lineup collectively owned nine home runs, and one of those was Cain's.

In either case, the thinking inside the clubhouse after a terrible trip must be the same whether the 25 men inside are expected to vie for a division title or just trying to find their way.

"You've got to clear it out. It's got to be over with," Barry Zito said. "Once you walk out of the clubhouse today, you get that stuff out of your head and play a good ballgame tomorrow. You either perpetuate or create. You either perpetuate the past or create a new mode right now."

The optimist can point to how well the Giants competed in Philadelphia, or that four of six games on the trip were decided by one run, but as manager Bruce Bochy said, "The bottom line is we went 1-5. It wasn't a good trip. These guys know it."

Bochy's bad trip ended with a terrible fall. In the third inning, Cain shot a line drive toward the manager, who was standing along the dugout rail. Bochy escaped the ball, but when he instinctively moved back he slipped on the rain-slicked floor and struck the back of his head. It took him awhile to get up, and he still seemed dazed as he sat on the bench, head trainer Dave Groeschner by his side.

Bochy was OK. Had the Giants won, there might have been jokes about Cain's poor aim or the earth shaking when that noggin hit the ground, but the clubhouse was noticeably yuk-free.

Instead, there was frustration over yet another critical umpire's call that went against the Giants. In the seventh, Jose Castillo's throw on a Nyjer Morgan bunt appeared to beat the runner. But Morgan was called safe, and the Pirates' decisive three-run rally against Cain was born.

They tied it 4-4 when Freddy Sanchez doubled, Nate McLouth hit a sacrifice fly and Jason Bay doubled on a hanging curveball, Cain's final pitch. He was relieved by Taschner, who got the second out then walked Xavier Nady intentionally to face Adam LaRoche, who was batting .143 against left-handed pitchers.

The move backfired when Taschner fell behind 3-1 and LaRoche lined a fastball into right for a single and a 5-4 Pittsburgh lead. Bay became the first of 19 runners that Taschner has inherited this season to score.

More than an hour later, Taschner still was grinding his teeth as he said, "Bad pitch. Horrible pitches. ... I throw a first-pitch strike on the guy and end up getting down 3-1. Then I throw him a (hit-me fastball). Brutal. Poorly executed. That's all it was. Terrible."

Cain was down on himself for the two runs he allowed in the third because the rally began when he walked pitcher Paul Maholm. The Giants responded with a four-run burst of superb two-out hitting in the fourth. Emmanuel Burriss drove in a run with an infield hit, Steve Holm blasted a two-run double to center and Cain singled home a run.

But the Giants' scoring ended there. Several wet innings later, so did their trip, "a tough road trip," Cain said. "Obviously we lost a couple by one or two runs. It was a difficult situation. We didn't get stuff done right."

The Giants have 127 more chances to get it right, starting tonight, if they can revert to Chapter 2 of this season and win some games with their two best options, pitching and pluck. Pitching and power might be better, but a team deals with what it has.