Flores stays hot, but Giants drop another bullpen game

SAN FRANCISCO -- Wilmer Flores has almost single-handedly tried to keep the Giants’ streaky offense afloat over the past few months, but he couldn’t get the job done all by himself on Saturday afternoon.

Flores matched his career high with his team-leading 19th home run of the year, but the Giants were outslugged by the powerhouse Braves, who rode a pair of blasts from Austin Riley and Orlando Arcia to a 7-3 win at Oracle Park.

San Francisco (66-63) fell to 5-14 over its last 19 games, a miserable stretch that has caused the club’s playoff odds to fall from 76.7 percent on Aug. 5 to 42.3 percent, according to FanGraphs. The Giants’ seventh straight series loss dropped them 1 1/2 games behind the D-backs for the third National League Wild Card spot. With head-to-head record determining tiebreakers in the standings, San Francisco has the edge on Arizona, 6-5, with two games remaining between the clubs from Sept. 19-20.

“A lot of it has to do with going up against some of the best offenses in baseball,” manager Gabe Kapler said. “Not some of the best offenses, but hot, good offenses. It’s tough to limit the run output. If you’re not going to limit the run output, you have to figure out a way to outscore, and we’re not doing that. It’s just not good enough against these really good teams. They’re just playing better baseball than us.”

Atlanta jumped out to a 2-0 lead behind a pair of RBI hits from Matt Olson before Flores tied the game with a two-run shot off left-hander Max Fried in the third. With 33 games left to play, the 32-year-old Flores is on track to set a personal best in homers and continue to build on what’s shaping up to be the best season of his 11-year career.

"Personally, I'm not looking for homers, I'm looking to hit the ball hard," Flores said. "If it goes out, it goes out. It’s good for us, but I'm not trying. It's not on my mind to hit 20 or 30 homers. It’s just hit the ball hard somewhere."

Despite entering the season as more of a role player, Flores has established himself as the Giants’ most consistent hitter in 2023, batting .299 with a .902 OPS over 97 games. He entered Saturday with a 1.039 OPS since June 1, the fourth-highest mark in the Majors behind the Angels’ Shohei Ohtani, the Rangers’ Corey Seager and the Dodgers’ Mookie Betts, and has supplied 11 of the Giants’ 34 home runs (32.4%) since July 17.

“It’s hard to argue that Wilmer isn’t one of the better hitters in all of baseball and one of the more clutch hitters in all of baseball,” Kapler said. “I’m not sure where we’d be without him kind of sitting in the middle of our lineup on the more recent side. He’s been as valuable as any player in the game over the last couple of months.”

Still, Flores’ 409-foot shot to straightaway center field proved to be the extent of the damage against Fried, who held the Giants to two runs on six hits and struck out eight over six innings.

San Francisco’s cadre of relievers, meanwhile, couldn’t keep the Braves’ relentless offense at bay. Riley crushed a go-ahead solo shot off left-hander Sean Manaea in the fifth, and Arcia went deep against right-hander Luke Jackson, his former Braves teammate, in the sixth.

Atlanta broke the game open with a three-run eighth that featured a rookie mistake from Heliot Ramos, who didn’t make a hard throw to the plate on Nicky Lopez’s fly ball to right field, allowing Eddie Rosario to race home from third and score on a sacrifice fly.

With the loss, the Giants are now 17-12 in bullpen games this year, and have dropped each of their last four games in which they’ve used right-hander Ryan Walker as an opener.

San Francisco will send rookie Tristan Beck to the mound as it looks to avoid being swept in Sunday’s series finale, giving him an opportunity to make more of a conventional start for the club. Top prospect Kyle Harrison is also penciled in to make his home debut against the Reds on Monday, though that doesn’t necessarily mean the Giants are ready to move on from the opener.

“I think the body of work over a long period of work suggests that it’s a strategy that can work for us,” Kapler said. “We’re not going to abandon any one process or strategy because over the course of the last three weeks or a month, it hasn’t gone well. Some of it continues to be out of necessity. We need to mix and match a little bit.”