The Giants' pregame clubhouse was extremely loose for a team that had lost six in a row, a day after manager Bruce Bochy gathered the players and told them to relax.
Music from the disco and "Breakfast Club" eras was blaring - Billy Joel, Bob Seger, the Bee Gees and the like. Aubrey Huff's iPod was the source. When his tunes were not getting much love, Huff shouted, "Am I the only one who loves the '80s?"
The Giants as a team need to go retro, to a time when they actually knew how to win a game. Two home runs from Huff plus Tim Lincecum on the mound were not enough Friday night, and the Rockies beat them 6-3.
The losing streak reached seven games, their longest since 2007. With 14-1 Ubaldo Jimenez pitching tonight, odds are strong the streak will reach eight and the Giants will fall to .500 for the first time this season.
Huff might have been home-run drunk after he drove in all three Giants runs with two swings, but he welcomed Jimenez.
"We've got a tough pitcher tomorrow," he said. "Might as well let it all hang out. Screw it. Let's go out and have fun. Crazy things happen in this game when you're down and out. He could be the exact guy we need to get out of it."
If so, a bunch of Giants will have to get hot in a hurry. Leadoff hitter Andres Torres has eight hits in his last 50 at-bats. Juan Uribe is 6-for-47. Even with the home runs Huff is 7-for-39.
"We haven't been putting pressure on guys," Huff said, "getting on base, making guys work. There's been a lot of three-up, three-down, maybe a two-out hit. We're just not putting any heat on anybody. I don't care who the pitcher is, if you're not putting pressure on guys, they'll nibble around and make you swing at bad pitches."
The Giants cannot really count on anything now, not even their two-time Cy Young winner.
Stuff-wise, Lincecum looked as good as he has all season, hitting 95 mph on the Coors Field gun in the first inning and staying around 92 later on. But he hung a curveball to Clint Barmes in the second inning for a two-run tying homer and paid for allowing five of his six leadoff hitters to reach.
"He pitched well enough to win the game today," Bochy said, blaming the offense. "We've got to get over this one, two, three runs (a game), especially in this ballpark. It comes down to us breaking out of our struggles."
Lincecum allowed the go-ahead run in the sixth inning on an Ian Stewart double, two walks and a Jonathan Herrera sacrifice fly. For the second game in a row, the Rockies busted open a 4-3 game against the Giants' bullpen in the eighth inning.
This time they scored twice on Jeremy Affeldt. Dexter Fowler, who has six hits in the two games, doubled home a run. When Bochy called on Chris Ray for his Giants debut, Rockies manager Jim Tracy rubbed salt into the wound by calling for a suicide squeeze, which worked.
Afterward, the clubhouse was so silent you could hear the whirr of the exercise bike that Pablo Sandoval was riding.
"We've just got to cut the tension we've got in the locker room now and go out and play the game the way we should," Lincecum said.
Yeah, the clubhouse was loud before the game, "but it all goes to silence when we go out and we've got to produce and do what we're supposed to be doing, and we're just not doing it."
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