SAN FRANCISCO -- The word "unlucky" has been tossed around quite a bit whenever Alex Cobb takes the mound for the Giants, and for good reason. 

Entering the day, the veteran righty had pitched to a middling 4.26 ERA -- but that doesn't tell the whole story. Cobb's expected ERA sat at 2.88, over a run lower, which is the largest differential between expected and actual ERAs among pitchers who have allowed a minimum of 200 balls in play.

Cobb pitched much more in line with his expected stats in Friday night's 4-2 loss to the Cubs at Oracle Park, tossing six-plus innings of one-run ball and punching out a season-high 11 batters. This time, though, Cobb and the Giants were unlucky on the other side of the ball.

• Box score

The Giants outperformed the Cubs in just about every way -- except when it came to bringing runs home. San Francisco batters tallied 13 hits and held Chicago to six, all while striking out just six times compared to Chicago's 14. But quality is better than quantity, and the timely hit the Giants were searching for eluded them all evening.

"We drove the baseball tonight," manager Gabe Kapler said. "We had high-quality at-bats … and we weren't able to get the big hit. We were unable to deliver that one blow that would have changed the game for us, and that's really the story of the game, in my opinion."

That story played out consistently all night long, starting in the first inning. All five batters the Giants sent to the plate reached base, but they walked away with nothing to show for it.

Tommy La Stella led things off with a line-drive single off Cubs starter Marcus Stroman, but he was quickly out at second base after Luis González grounded into a fielder's choice in the next at-bat. Then history swiftly repeated itself, as the Cubs were able to again erase the lead runner on a fielder's choice, this one coming on a Wilmer Flores grounder.

Perhaps the most pivotal play of the game came two at-bats later, when Mike Yastrzemski headed to the plate with runners on first and second. He turned on a slider from Stroman and belted it to left field for a base hit.

Off the bat, it looked good enough to get the Giants on the board early. But Cubs left fielder Ian Happ fielded the ball cleanly and fired a dart to catcher Willson Contreras, who easily applied the tag to Flores, who was trying to score from second, for the third out.

"You go back, and you're like, 'Hey, did he get him? Did he make a good turn around third base? Did he get a good jump? Was he aware and alert?' He was," Kapler said. "Happ just made a good throw, and Contreras a good tag. All this is to say that if we score there, maybe we get a little head of steam, and we weren't able to do that."

Said Flores: "He couldn't have made a better throw."

Once the first inning set the tone, the narrative continued all evening. The Giants consistently made contact and drove the ball well, but they fell short in the execution, finishing the night having gone 3-for-11 with runners in scoring position. San Francisco was on the brink of being shut out until the bottom of the ninth inning, when Flores hit his 15th home run of the season.

"You keep stringing together that many hits, the runs will start crossing," Cobb said. "That just didn't happen tonight. It was weird."

Cobb is all too familiar with the frustration that the Giants lineup felt on Friday. It's a hard pill to swallow when they seemingly did a lot of good things, but the results didn't follow. Cobb has leaned on the idea of trusting the process: It worked for him tonight, and it can help the Giants move on from a tough evening.

"There's a handful of things that we can control and work on," Cobb said. "If you continue to do that, the odds are going to be that you're going to have some success. If you try to do too much or try to be somebody different than you're supposed to be, bad things end up happening.

"At the end, through 162 games, it'll eventually even out for you."