PHILADELPHIA — Everything about Mason Black’s major-league debut was, as the 24-year-old right-hander put it a day earlier, “storybook.”
Everything, that is, except for the final score.
Phillies 6, Giants 1. Sweep, complete.
Overshadowing Black’s sentimental first start in the ballpark where he grew up attending games, with scores of friends and family from his nearby hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, in attendance, was the ever-heavier lead balloon of a road trip that dropped the Giants to 15-21, further below .500 than they have been all season.
Off to Colorado for three more, the Giants have lost six of the first seven games of the portion of the trip in the Eastern Time Zone.
“We left home and, what, we were one game under .500?” a visibly frustrated Bob Melvin said. “We weren’t playing very well, and I thought that might be a pretty good place for us, being that we hadn’t played well. And now we’re playing terribly. So, we have to clean it up.”
The tailspin lead the manager to address his team after Monday’s loss, according to multiple players.
“I think everybody has to take a look at themselves and just figure out, How can I find a way to contribute, how can I help this team?” said third baseman Matt Chapman, who struck out three times while going 0-for-4. “Obviously I need to play better. I think a lot of guys probably feel like that. … At the end of the day, it doesn’t have to be pretty; we just have to find ways to win.”
Chapman said he was “embarrassed” by the Giants’ play against the Phillies, who own both the National League’s best record and best ERA. But he disputed the characterization from LaMonte Wade Jr. that the team lacked a sense of urgency.
“It’s still early, but it’s time to start moving with more urgency,” Wade said. “Everybody’s working hard. I don’t think anybody’s not competing. We just need to translate it to the game. It’s a hard thing to do. It’s a hard game. And it’s a long season. It’s just one of those things. We’re in a little rut right now, but it can turn around just like that.”
The season-long struggles can hardly be placed on the shoulders of a rookie making his first career start, though the five runs allowed by Black put them in too deep of a hole. He mowed through the powerful Phillies twice and had three strikeouts by the end of the second inning, making victims of Bryce Harper and J.T. Realmuto.
Sent out to face the order a third time, that is where Black’s storybook debut took a twist. He faced six batters in the fifth inning and retired only one of them. Having seen Black’s full complement of pitches his first two trips to the plate, Harper had all the intel he needed by the time he stepped in with two on and nobody out.
Ambushing the first pitch of the at-bat, Harper sent a belt-high sinker into the left field seats, providing Black one moment from a memorable day that he’d like to forget.
“I can’t leave a fastball middle-middle to a good hitter,” Black said. “A lot of these guys, once they see you once or twice, they’ll figure out what you’re trying to do. It’s just a learning process.”
Until the fifth, Black had been doing his best impression of Roy Halladay, the Phillies pitcher he admired most growing up.
Through four innings, Black had limited the Phillies to one run, added a fourth strikeout victim to his ledger and had yet to allow a single piece of hard contact (defined as an exit velocity of 95-plus mph). He had thrown 68 pitches, three shy of the most he had thrown in six starts at Triple-A to begin the season.
With the top of the order due up to start the fifth, Melvin sent the rookie right-hander back out there, anyway.
“I would have liked him to go six, but it wasn’t in the cards,” Melvin said. “He pitched really good. The line doesn’t really suggest how he pitched. He hasn’t really pitched deep into games. We needed him to go out for the fifth today. That’s kind of where it all came loose.”
Harper’s home run was his second of the series, driving in six runs between them. In 14 trips to the plate this series, Harper reached base nine times and scored five runs. It should catch your eye, then, that Black caught him looking to end the first inning by painting the inside corner with a changeup. Catcher Jakson Reetz tossed the ball aside after the previous batter, Realmuto, who fouled back a four-seamer in Reetz’s glove for Black’s first career punchout.
“I tried not to look up too much,” Black said. “I just tried to keep the focus on the plate. … It means a lot being close to home. It was incredible.”
The debut of one Giants pitching prospect coincided with a former member of San Francisco’s farm system firing on all cylinders.
Already scuffling, the Giants’ reeling offense faced one of its toughest tests to date in Zack Wheeler and produced the expected results.
Traded away for Carlos Beltrán when he was 21 years old, the perennial Cy Young contender flummoxed his former organization for seven innings. The only run the Giants were able to manufacture came when shortstop Bryson Stott airmailed a throw that allowed Thairo Estrada to reach and later score on a sacrifice fly.
Wheeler rung up five Giants looking, powered his four-seamer past another four empty swings and coaxed a couple chases on breaking balls for 11 strikeouts. Tacking on two more against the Phillies bullpen, the Giants struck out at least 10 times in three of their four games in Philadelphia.
Over the four-game series, the Phillies scored 29 runs, or two more than the Giants have scored since April 23 — 12 games ago.
“I think we believe we’re a good team,” Chapman said, comparing their standing to their past two opponents. “I’m not taking anything away from the Red Sox and I’m not taking anything away from the Phillies. But I think we’re a great team too and we can put up better fights.”
Up next
The Giants face a long flight and a quick turnaround before beginning a three-game series at Coors Field at 5:40 p.m. PT.
LHP Kyle Harrison (2-1, 3.79) flew ahead of the team and will get the ball in the first game Tuesday against RHP Dakota Hudson (0-5, 5.93).
