DENVER — As the saying goes, no lead is safe at Coors Field.
Even with offensive outbursts up and down their order, the Giants were left sweating in the late innings of an eventual 10-7 win over the Rockies, extending their winning streak against Colorado to 12 games dating back to last season.
The Giants had to call on closer Camilo Doval for the second straight night to record the save, getting the powerful C.J. Cron to fly out as the would-be tying run to bookend a game that began with a 464-foot home run by a player listed generously at 5-foot-11, 180 pounds.
There’s no softer landing for a hitter coming off the injured list than the mile-high setting in Colorado, and Tommy La Stella took full advantage. In his first full game back from offseason surgery, La Stella clobbered the second pitch of the game from Rockies starter Chad Kuhl a dozen rows into the second deck of the right field seats — a preview of the pinball game to follow.
The Giants scored runs in each of the first four innings, building a lead of 8-1. It grew to 10-2 after Brandon Crawford and Thairo Estrada delivered two more RBI hits in the top of the sixth. Only at Coors Field would those runs be classified as valuable insurance rather than piling on.
Giants starter Alex Cobb was cruising through five innings, as much as one can at Coors, where the Rockies haven’t scored fewer than two runs in more than a year, a span of 83 games. But that’s just where Cobb had them through five innings: trailing 10-2, with only five hits and two base runners erased by double plays. Then came the sixth, as the Rockies turned their lineup over for a third time and tagged Cobb for five runs, capped off by a three-run shot to left from center fielder Randal Grichuk that ended Cobb’s night.
In an encore to his mammoth blast, La Stella added two doubles in the fifth and the seventh that served as the Giants’ seventh and eighth extra-base hits of the game, a new season-high. La Stella’s eight total bases led the team.
The second of La Stella’s doubles looked like it was headed for the seats, but the moonshot — hit at a 40-degree launch angle — stayed in the park. In a twist of irony, the player with the two-homer game the night before, Curt Casali, was the only Giant not to reach base in Tuesday’s high-scoring affair.
La Stella, Crawford and Mike Yastrzemski all recorded three hits as the Giants came one shy of their season-high in that category. Yastrzemski scored a team-high three runs, and Darin Ruf drove in a team-high three runs while reaching base four times, including a two-RBI double in the fourth that scored Yastrzemski, narrowly beating the throw as he slid across home plate. Yastrzemski delivered his own two-RBI double the inning prior as part of a four-run fourth-inning rally.
None of the Giants’ 10 runs were as memorable as their first two.
La Stella’s 464-foot blast was the longest by a Giant this season — outdoing Joc Pederson’s 441-footer by an estimated 23 feet — and tied for the seventh-longest home run hit by a Giant in the Statcast era (since 2015).
Leading off the second inning with the first of his three hits, Crawford circled all four bases on a line drive to the right field corner, though he was credited with a triple, rather than an inside-the-parker. Crawford dove in to third base as the throw from the cutoff man sailed out of play, then retreated to a well-earned puff of canned oxygen in the dugout after trotting home on the errant throw.
The Giants’ 12-game win streak over Colorado marks the club’s longest against a single opponent since moving to San Francisco, last done by the New York Giants against the Philadelphia Phillies more than 75 years ago.
The Giants will try to make it 13 in a row as they goes for a sweep Wednesday afternoon with Logan Webb (5-1, 3.48 ERA) on the mound.
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