The Arizona Diamondbacks streak of nine-straight wins over the San Francisco Giants came to an end Saturday night thanks in large part to the arm (and bat) of Matt Cain. The D-backs offensive struggles continued while Trevor Cahill was decent on a night when excellence was required.
The D-backs finished with 11 strikeouts, which is consistent with their ranking as one of the highest-strikeout total teams in the league. Of course, the Baltimore Orioles are right up there too and they have an AL East leading 22-12 record.
Overall, the team needs to play better.
"I think it's the way we played. We had a good win (Friday) night and we did not follow the effort up tonight. All around it was not a good game for us tonight," Kirk Gibson said.
The Giants took advantage of Cahill's early command issues to put one run on the board in the first inning. Leadoff hitter Gregor Blanco walked, advanced to second on a fielder's choice, and scored on a double by Angel Pagan. Pagan went 3-3 for the day with two walks (one intentional).
Cahill settled in after the first and had two quick innings before allowing a hit in the fourth, a run in the fifth and then the wheels came off in the sixth. He gave up a hit to Pagan, but a double play ball cleaned that up. Then the seventh and eighth hitters were plunked with two outs and opposing pitcher Matt Cain doubled down the first base line to score them both.
Trevor said that he had two strikes on both the batters he hit and was just trying to hard to put them away, "I guess I tried to throw an extra nasty pitch or whatever and it got away from me."
He hit Bruiss with a curveball and Crawford with a change-up.
Cahill was replaced by Craig Breslow having given up four earned runs off six hits. He walked two and hit two with three of those free runners scoring.
The D-backs offense had its own struggles with Cain. He gave up just three hits and two walks to the Saturday Snakes with the only run allowed in the third inning. Aaron Hill led-off with a triple and Willie Bloomquist sent him home with a sac fly to right field.
the D-backs added another run in the seventh thanks to a pair of Giants errors and the Giants answered by with a run in the ninth after Brandon Belt tripled and scored on a Melky Cabrera double. Cabrera also had three hits with two doubles and two RBI for the game.
Lefties Joe Saunders and Barry Zito will duke it out from opposing mounds on Sunday to close out the series.
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