Pillar makes unreal catch while hanging on wall

CINCINNATI -- Giants center fielder Kevin Pillar arrived from Toronto with a highlight reel of impressive catches, and he made another spectacular play in the third inning of Saturday night's 9-2 loss to the Reds at Great American Ball Park.

With the Reds leading 5-1, Nick Senzel sent a drive towards the 404-foot marker in deep center field, but Pillar climbed the eight-foot wall and readjusted his glove midair before making an improbable grab to rob the Reds' top prospect of his first Major League home run.

“It was a pretty cool catch, wasn’t it?” manager Bruce Bochy said. “He showed a lot of athleticism. He’s done that a lot. He’s made so many great catches out there, and that’s got to be right up there with one of the best. He went up that wall with ease and made it look easy.”

• Box score

For perspective, balls hit with Senzel's metrics -- a 106-mph exit velocity and a 32-degree launch angle -- went out for home runs 91 percent of the time since Statcast began tracking in 2015. It marked Pillar’s third career home run robbery, according to Sports Info Solutions. He also denied then-Ray Tim Beckham on April 15, 2015, and the Tigers’ Nicholas Castellanos on July 1, 2018.

“I think in moments like that, you’ve got to rely on your instincts,” Pillar said. “You have to rely on what you hear, what you see. Things happen quickly out there. I knew my best chance of catching the ball if it was over the wall was to get up on that thing and try to get as much reach over the wall as I can.”

Pillar’s catch was all the more impressive considering he was playing only his second career game at Great American Ball Park after spending most of his career in the American League with the Blue Jays. Pillar said he made a point to shag fly balls during batting practice on Friday to get a sense of the wall height and how the ball carries at the stadium.

“I like to go out and shag BP the first day pretty intently to try to get as many game looks as I can,” Pillar said. “If I’m not moving around out there, I’m tracking balls with my eyes, but just always kind of sizing up the wall. I think it’s something that you kind of live for as an outfielder, to go out there and make a play like that. It just comes with a lot of pre-pitch stuff, constantly looking to see where the wall is. You kind of have to have a sixth sense to doing stuff like that, and just understanding what your surroundings are and kind of seeing it before it happens.”

D-Rod struggles

Right-hander Dereck Rodríguez could only shake his head and smile in disbelief after witnessing Pillar’s thievery, but it proved to be only a brief reprieve from the Reds’ offensive onslaught. Rodriguez was tagged for a career-high eight runs, including four homers, over five innings in his first career start against Cincinnati, causing his ERA to spike to 5.75 on the season.

Rodriguez and Tyler Beede became the first Giants starters to yield eight runs in back-to-back games since Jeff Samardzija and Matt Moore on June 15-16, 2017, at Colorado.

“They swung it well again tonight, but it’s mislocation,” Bochy said. “He’s missing his good command. The fastball, he’s up with it around belt high, and if you don’t have good command of that, hopefully you have your offspeed going. He didn’t have that going, either.”

This was Rodriguez’s second consecutive rough outing, as he also gave up six runs (four earned) against the Yankees on Sunday. The Giants aren’t used to seeing this type of rough stretch from Rodriguez, who emerged as one of the best rookie pitchers in the National League after posting a 2.81 ERA over 21 appearances last season, but Bochy said he’s confident the 26-year-old will find a way to work through it.

“This is uncharted territory, so I’m just going to go out there like every other day and just battle,” Rodriguez said. “You just forget about it and move on. You think about bad outings too much, it’ll eat you up. In this game, you’ve got to have a short memory.”