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Giants beat Marlins, clinch a road series. Now, can they start a winning streak?

Evan Webeck, Bay Area News Group on

Published in Baseball

The next batter was De La Cruz, and after him, Winn threw five straight pitches outside the strike zone — one was erroneously called a strike — to put on Jazz Chisolm Jr., only to be erased by Patrick Bailey to end the inning.

Despite a strong pitching line and a low pitch count — 81 after six — Melvin turned to his bullpen to finish the final three frames. Camilo Doval — after a full complement of warm-up pitches — pitched a 1-2-3 ninth inning to record his third save of the season, his second of the road trip.

“He took that ball off the foot (and) it bothered him enough to come out of the game,” Melvin said. “His warm-up pitches were a little high and he ended up giving up a run, but we needed some innings today — we were down several guys (in the bullpen) — and he gave us six innings. Really efficient in how he did it, too.”

Winn held two of his first three opponents to three runs or fewer, but the Giants had lost all of his first three starts. They had scored two total runs while he was on the mound, the least run support for any starter in the National League (min. 16 IP), a title Logan Webb held last season.

The two runs they gave him Wednesday — plus an insurance run on a two-out double from Matt Chapman in the eighth — was all Winn needed.

Estrada doubled home Jorge Soler to open a 1-0 lead in the second inning and scored the go-ahead run in the seventh after beating out an infield single to lead off the inning. It was his third multi-hit effort of the six-game road trip, raising his batting average to .239 and OPS to .680.

 

Estrada heating up is good news for a lineup that is still struggling to produce consistent results.

“There’s, what, 142? 143 games left?” Estrada said in Spanish. “We can’t think about getting streaks going. We’ve just got to continue playing and competing. That’s baseball. We won today; it’s over. We wake up tomorrow, play again and try to win. If we lose, then we wake up the next day and play again.”

The Giants managed only three runs in the win and scored more than four only once in six games on this road trip. They seemed to snap out of their offensive funk in the final game of the previous home stand, a 7-1 win, but mustered just one run in their first game in Tampa. Five homers and 11 runs the next game were followed by 14 total runs over the final four games of the trip, including 35 strikeouts over the three-game series in Miami.

In one game, Blake Snell got shelled. In another, their bullpen coughed up four runs in a tied game. At other times, such as Wednesday, both components of the pitching staff have looked as dominant as ever. Called on to relieve Winn in the seventh inning, rookie Erik Miller filled up the strike zone with 98-99-mph fastballs from his left arm and retired the side in order, the first of three scoreless innings from Giants relievers.

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