SF Giants haunted by Dodgers’ Nick Ahmed as playoff chances dim

LOS ANGELES — The Giants cut ties with Nick Ahmed earlier this month, and on Thursday the veteran shortstop might have sealed their fate this season.

Only playing his second game for the Dodgers, Ahmed launched a two-strike sinker from Tyler Rogers into the left-field bleachers that gave the lead right back to the home team in the bottom of the eighth after the Giants rallied for two runs to tie the score in the top half.

Shohei Ohtani followed with a moonshot to right field, and the Giants lost to the Dodgers for the third time in four games, 6-4.

“Pretty deflating game, as far as it went,” manager Bob Melvin said.

If they weren’t already, Farhan Zaidi and the Giants’ front office must be seriously considering whether they have the pieces to make a playoff push with 58 games to go and five days until Tuesday’s trade deadline. Even in the crowded National League wild card race, the Giants stand near the back of the pack, falling 5½ games out and behind five other teams, tied with the Cubs, who have already committed to selling.

Inside a quiet postgame clubhouse, outfielder Michael Conforto said, “You guys can feel it.

“Nobody likes losing in here. We feel we’re better than the way we’ve played, not just since the break, but overall. It’s disappointing, but we’ve got to find a way to show up, bring the energy and play good baseball.”

A veteran on an expiring contract, Conforto would be one potential piece the Giants could move — and open the path to playing time for younger players such as Luis Matos — but he said, “We’re all aware (the trade deadline), but it doesn’t play a part in the way that we play the game. … We all want to stay together. We really enjoy playing with each other. It’s a very tight group. For now, it’s out of my control. All I can control is on the field.”

Conforto did his part in the eighth inning, doubling in David Villar to cut the deficit to 4-3 and getting on his horse to score from second on a single that Jorge Soler dropped into left field to tie the score at 4, but it was almost immediately negated by an uncharacteristic outing from their submarining set-up man, who had never surrendered multiple home runs in 314 previous career appearances.

“It felt like once we got to the eighth inning there, pitching-wise, we were probably in a pretty good spot,” Melvin said. “Came back, got a lead, lost it again. And then in the eighth, made a nice push to get ourselves in position to get one of our key guys in the game in Tyler. … Yeah, frustrating.”

With a chance to build on the momentum from Robbie Ray’s electric club debut the night before and return home in better fashion than they began the second half, the Giants sent their ace to the mound on a sweltering Thursday afternoon against a somewhat neutered version of their longtime arch nemesis.

Not even those favorable circumstances could overcome the chasm between them and the Dodgers, who got only four innings from Clayton Kershaw in the 36-year-old’s first start since offseason shoulder surgery but knocked around Logan Webb enough to take three of four games in their final meeting until next June.

Opening the second half by dropping two of three to the last-place Rockies, the Giants lost three of four to the Dodgers to go 2-5 on their first road trip after the All-Star break. In the 13-game season series, the Giants dropped nine of their meetings against the Dodgers, including all but one of their seven games in Los Angeles.

“The talent’s always been there. We just haven’t been playing well, including myself,” said Webb, who lasted only one inning longer than Kershaw, surrendering four runs on nine hits and three walks while expending 89 pitches to complete five innings.

The National League leader in innings pitched, Webb is also encroaching on less favorable spots on the league leaderboards. Having allowed seven or more hits in each of his past four starts, Webb now has surrendered the most in the majors this season — 143, 10 more than second-place Patrick Corbin — while putting an average of 1.32 runners on base per inning, the highest rate since he was a part-time rotation member in 2020 and among the 11 highest qualified starters in the majors.

“He feels good. There isn’t anything physically wrong. He just struggled with his command,” Melvin said. “He was missing and he doesn’t usually miss by wide margins.”

The Dodgers put traffic on the bases in all but one of Webb’s five innings and plated runs in three of them. The last time Webb pitched past the sixth inning or allowed fewer than four runs was at the start of this month, when he beat the Braves 4-2 in Atlanta on Independence Day.

A leadoff walk to Gavin Lux came around to score to open a 1-0 Dodgers advantage in the second inning, and Lux kickstarted their two-run rally in the fourth with a leadoff double. Webb allowed the leadoff man to reach again in the fifth, and after Lux’s third hit of the afternoon, Andy Pages was able to score from third on a double play.

“I’m disappointed I’ve pitched pretty (poorly) the past three times I took the mound,” Webb said. “There’s no excuse for that. It’s just not great. … “They were going middle-away and it went places where nobody was playing. The three walks probably makes me the most mad. Just finding holes, that’s about it. It just wasn’t good.”

In Webb’s 16 career starts against the Dodgers, the Giants fell to 8-8 while his ERA rose to 4.11.

Pitching in his 60th career game against the Giants, Kershaw’s ERA remained the second-lowest of any pitcher to face San Francisco at least 20 times, even after surrendering a pair of runs in the third inning that gave the Giants a brief 2-1 lead and increased his career mark to 2.04.

Soler led off the inning with a single, and Fitzgerald tripled him home from first base when Teoscar Hernández misplayed his line drive into the left-field corner. The next batter, Heliot Ramos, singled home Fitzgerald and the Giants appeared to have something brewing with nobody out. But Kershaw struck out the next three batters, getting empty swings from Patrick Bailey and Thairo Estrada on backfoot sliders and freezing Villar with a 72-mph curveball, to end the inning.

The Giants struck out 16 times — six at the hands of Kershaw — their most in one game this season.

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