LOS ANGELES — Tuesday night’s game was the 100th since the 2016 All-Star break, when everything seemed to change for this organization. The Giants are 40-60 during that span, the worst record in baseball, so the night’s result certainly felt familiar.
Matt Moore’s night felt familiar, too.
The left-hander had another maddeningly inconsistent outing and there was no recovering. The Giants lost 13-5 and nine of the runs went on Moore’s line, tying a career-high. In his last start, Moore held the same Dodgers to one run over seven innings, and this all fits a pattern. Two of his starts have been brilliant, but in the other four he’s been charged with 23 runs in 17 1/3 innings.
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SIGN UP HERE “It does get under my skin after a while,” he said. “In six starts, it’s been Jekyll and Hyde.”
Moore’s night matched his season in a way. He needed just six pitches to get through the first, but the second was a 39-pitch disaster. The Giants led 4-0 at the time, but Moore was taken deep on an 0-2 pitch to Franklin Gutierrez. Chris Taylor walked on four pitches. Yasiel Puig singled. Austin Barnes walked on four pitches to load the bases.
“Matty is so good, but occasionally he does have these moments,” manager Bruce Bochy said of his left-hander’s propensity for four-pitch passes.
The moment would only get worse. Moore was on his way to another free pass to Cody Bellinger, but the young rookie had other ideas. With the pitcher due up next, Bellinger loaded up on a 2-0 fastball and pulled it so far foul that it landed in the upper deck. He straightened it out on the next pitch, driving a bases-clearing triple into left. Alex Wood, the opposing left-hander, singled Bellinger home. A double and sacrifice fly made it 6-4 as the bullpen got hot.
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“Not going right after Taylor there, that was probably the mistake that wound up compounding it with the big inning,” Moore said. “Today it was about attacking, but before I knew it there were runners on first and second with no outs. Regardless of the Gutierrez at-bat, you’ve got to be able to make pitches. My off-speed stuff was up in the zone. Barnes hit a changeup hard. The breaking stuff was in and out of the zone. It was an immediate feeling right after the game of feeling I had so much more than that.”
Bochy wrung another four outs out of Moore before turning it over to a bullpen without a long man. The Dodgers kept pulling away, giving the Giants plenty of time to contemplate the night and the missed opportunity. Wood was not particularly good on the other side, but it didn’t matter. A night after beating Clayton Kershaw, any hopes of momentum died a quick death.
The Giants have played 28 games and won 10 of them. Only once have they taken back-to-back games, and the numbers say it’s not really a fluke. They have been outscored by 40 runs, the worst differential in the Majors.
