Singular games do not necessarily define a team’s status, as a handful of players correctly argued in the aftermath of Monday night’s contest, but it was difficult to discern between the two.
The Rangers lost their sixth consecutive game and registered arguably their sloppiest performance of the season in a 5-1 loss to the San Francisco Giants at Globe Life Field Monday night. It came on the heels of an ugly road trip and the club’s decision to stand pat the trade deadline. It was fueled by a season-high five errors and another offensive clunker. It does not inherently reflect one way or another on the team’s deadline inactivity, but as right fielder Brandon Nimmo acknowledged, it occurred at “a bad time,” as the Rangers viewed this homestand as an opportunity to turn the page.
“We played probably our worst game of the year tonight,” Rangers manager Skip Schumaker said, “quite honestly.”
It unraveled less than two innings into the game. Giants catcher Daniel Susac pulled a ground ball down the line to lead off the second inning, but third baseman Ezequiel Duran whiffed on the grab, and the runner reached second base while the ball rolled into the outfield. In the next at-bat, outfielder Drew Gilbert hit right-handed pitcher Cal Quantrill’s curveball into right field for a single, and the ball skated past Nimmo’s glove and to the wall.
Susac scored the game’s first run while Gilbert reached third base and scored on a sacrifice fly in the next at-bat.
“It’s really unacceptable from my standpoint,” Nimmo said. “It’s embarrassing and at a bad time, obviously, because we’re not playing our best right now. That just compounds things and makes things even tougher. I think our record when we score first is pretty dang good, and when we don’t, it’s kind of the other way around. It makes a big difference for us, and my error let the first runs get on the board, and that puts us behind against a good pitcher.”
Nimmo’s error was the second of five that the Rangers made. Catcher Austin Wynns made two and shortstop Corey Seager made another. It was only the sixth time this century the Rangers have made that many defensive miscues in a single game.
“I know it’s bad timing, but that’s kind of baseball,” Quantrill, who only allowed one earned run in six innings, said. “You play 162 games, it had nothing to do with our preparation today, the boys wanted to win and we had good energy. We just had a bad day, and that’s baseball, it’s part of it. It sucks, sometimes the timing leads to a story that I know you guys might want to write, but the energy was good. We came here to play, we put the road trip in the past and we were ready to win today.”
The Rangers, who are 5 for 41 with runners in scoring position since their last win, finished with seven hits and didn’t score until Duran hit a solo home run in the bottom of the ninth inning.
“We just didn’t play clean behind [Quantrill],” Schumaker said, “and in this league, when you don’t play clean baseball, any team will capitalize.”
The last-place, woebegone and firesale-friendly Giants did Monday night.
“To put us down 2-0, by really no fault of anybody but myself, it really just kind of ended up being the theme of the night,” Nimmo said. “It was really bad timing.”