Win streak snapped, Giants set sights on 1st-place D-backs

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Giants could seemingly do no wrong while reeling off their first 10-game winning streak since 2004, but things quickly went sideways as that impressive stretch came to a deflating end.

Left-hander Alex Wood couldn’t get out of the fourth inning after surrendering a pair of three-run home runs to Gary Sánchez and Manny Machado, saddling the Giants with a 10-0 loss to the Padres in Thursday afternoon’s series finale at Oracle Park.

Despite the drubbing, the Giants (42-33) still took three of four games from the Padres and will aim to quickly turn the page and prepare for their upcoming weekend series against the first-place D-backs. San Francisco, which leads the Majors with a 25-10 record since May 15, currently trails Arizona by 3 1/2 games in the National League West.

“I’m certainly not going to dwell too long on today,” Wood said. “The vibes are high in here. We’re playing really great baseball. I just want to get to a point where I’m consistently going out there every fifth day and pumping strikes start to finish and contributing so we can continue playing the great baseball that we’ve been playing.”

Wood was charged with six runs on four hits over 3 1/3 innings, but he was most frustrated by his four walks, which set the table for Sánchez and Machado’s blasts and helped the Padres jump out to a 6-0 lead by the third inning.

“I don’t know if it’s mechanical or what it is, but I’ve got to figure out a way to throw strikes more consistently,” said Wood, who was making his second start since returning from the injured list. “A team like that, you can’t give free passes to those guys. If they hit a homer, it really hurts. Four walks just can’t happen. We’ll sit down tomorrow and kind of go through it and see where we go from there.”

The Giants mounted several dramatic rallies during their 10-game winning streak, but no comeback was in the cards against San Diego left-hander Blake Snell, who struck out 11 and allowed only three hits over six scoreless innings.

The matchup was so lopsided that the Giants sent David Villar to the mound in the ninth, marking the 26-year-old infielder’s first career pitching appearance. Villar issued a leadoff walk to Matt Carpenter, but he coaxed a flyout from Sánchez and then induced an inning-ending double play from Jake Cronenworth to complete his efficient eight-pitch outing.

Villar, who topped out at 70.4 mph, hadn’t pitched since the eighth grade, but he said he was willing to go out there and cover an inning to ensure that the Giants have a relatively fresh bullpen heading into the D-backs series.

“It’s important that we save the bullpen,” Villar said. “We’ve got another three important games coming up this weekend. If I can go out there and save one of our guys that we may need tomorrow or Saturday or Sunday, I’ll go out there. We throw for a living, so I could just lob it in there at 60 [mph] right over the plate and sometimes hitters get themselves out. I got lucky with those guys.”

“While this was a bad day -- this is not a day that we’re going to want to remember -- there was some really good teammate behavior that you only see on good teams,” manager Gabe Kapler said.

The Giants lost three of four games against the D-backs in their first matchup at Chase Field last month, but they’ll be hoping for a better result as the series shifts to San Francisco. The Giants drew 38,638 fans to Oracle Park on Thursday afternoon, the third-largest crowd of the season, a sign that the team is beginning to capture the attention and support of fans across the Bay Area.

“Given the way that the team has been playing and the way we’ve been riding this wave, I think we’ll be ready to bounce back tomorrow,” Villar said. “We know who we have coming into town, so it’s no time to let off the gas right now. We need to get ready for this weekend and continue to play the Giants baseball that we’ve been playing.”