Fitzgerald hits 5th straight home run but San Francisco Giants lose to Dodgers, 5-2

LOS ANGELES — Can Tyler Fitzgerald get help?

The rookie shortstop is about the only piece of the Giants’ struggling lineup that works, and once again Tuesday night he was responsible for most of their offense against the Dodgers. Once again, the superhuman efforts of one man were not enough to raise the bar of eight other slackers.

By launching a clean shot to left field that gave the Giants a leadoff in the second inning, Fitzgerald homered for his fifth straight game — the first Giants rookie to do so — but his teammates weren’t able to do much else in a 5-2 loss to the Dodgers.

“We still lost the game,” said Fitzgerald, who finished 3-for-3 with a walk, accounting for all but two of the Giants’ hits and two RBIs. “That’s cool and all, but it would be even cooler if we had one. At the end of the day, we come here to win, so everything I do is cool and all — at the end of the year, I’ll look back and smile — but we lost the game. So not much good came out of it.”

The loss is the Giants’ fourth in five games since the All-Star break, and they haven’t scored four runs once. In 17 games this month, they’re averaging a paltry 3.47 runs per game, and it’s been five weeks — dating back to June 17 — since they’ve scored five runs, the number it would have taken to overcome Jordan Hicks’ second-shortest start of the season.

“It’s frustrating,” Melvin said. “We talked about it today. We’ve got to do a little more damage early, create traffic, take shots, get guys on base, and hopefully do some damage early.”

With six games left before the July 30 trade deadline, the Giants fell to six games below .500 and five games out of the National League’s final wild card, the furthest they’ve been from playoff position all season, having to jump six teams.

They’ll add Robbie Ray to their rotation on Wednesday, but even Melvin is starting to worry that their reinforcements aren’t coming too late.

“You can’t help but know where we are (in the standings),” Melvin said. “There are other teams that are separating themselves a little bit. We’re falling back even more. We talked about bringing the cavalry, but we have to do it now. We’re going to have to carry this one today and go out and win a game tomorrow because the deeper we dig ourselves into a hole, the harder it’s going to be for us.”

Fitzgerald’s home run was his fourth in four games since the All-Star break, and his five-game home run streak dates back to July 9. In doing so, he joined exclusive company, becoming just the fifth player in the San Francisco era to hit a home run in five straight games and the first since Barry Bonds homered in seven straight games in 2004.

No rookie in major league history has hit six home runs in a row.

“I try not to think about it, to be honest with you,” Fitzgerald said. “I just look at it and hit good pitches and do some damage when I hit the pitch I want to. That’s cool and all, but I just try to keep my head down and keep working and not get too caught up in everything that’s going on.”

When he started his first game of the second half of the season Saturday in Colorado, Fitzgerald said it had been 11 days since he had faced live pitching. Melvin hasn’t been able to get him out of the lineup since, moving him to the seventh hole Tuesday night.

“Life comes at you fast,” Fitzgerald said.

In four at-bats, he reached base four times. After hitting a home run in his first at-bat, he drew a four-pitch walk in his second at-bat and hit a single the other way that could have started a seventh-inning rally. However, the next batter, Mike Yastrzemski, grounded into an inning-ending double play.

After Alex Vesia walked the first two batters of the ninth inning, Fitzgerald added another hit and an RBI to his line, driving home Matt Chapman from second base to cut the Dodgers’ lead to 5-2. That brought the potential tying run to the plate with no outs, but Wilmer Flores grounded out, Brett Wisely grounded out and LaMonte Wade Jr. grounded out to end the game.

With the exception of Fitzgerald, the rest of the Giants lineup went 2-for-29, with their other two hits coming from Heliot Ramos.

Since the start of the second half of the season, Fitzgerald has accounted for six of the Giants’ 11 RBIs, going 7-for-13 with four home runs and a double. The rest of the team has combined for a .149 batting average (22-for-148) with 42 strikeouts and seven extra-base hits, just two more than Fitzgerald alone.

“We had our best at-bats against Vesia late in the game,” Melvin said. “We’ve had really good at-bats against relievers all year, but we need to be able to get better at-bats early in the game.”

Fitzgerald’s second-inning home run could only bring the Giants within one run after Hicks had the Dodgers scored two runs in their first plate appearance, hitting Freddie Freeman, walking Teoscar Hernández and allowing Gavin Lux to double home both, opening a 2-0 lead.

Hicks, making one of his final starts before moving to the bullpen, looked like a pitcher running on empty. Although he was making just his third start since July 3, the converted reliever has already surpassed his career high in innings pitched and “probably has one more start to make,” Melvin said before the first pitch, “and then we’ll have a decision to make.”