On the first day of Summer Camp, Jeff Samardzija spoke forcefully about what was ahead of the Giants. He talked about how there were no excuses once players got on the field, and that if someone didn't want to be there, he didn't need to be.
Samardzija is established enough that he very easily could have been one of the people who took the year off, but he wanted to be here, to be digging into the rubber on Tuesday night at Oracle Park for the home opener. He also wasn't going to make any excuses when it all spun away from him.
The Giants lost 5-3 to the Padres, who early on have been the most complete team in the NL West, and all five runs were charged to Samardzija. The big blow was a three-run shot from Fernando Tatis Jr. that cleared the wall in right and snuck into the arcade.
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The homer, which turned a one-run deficit into a two-run lead for the Padres, came on a slider that was down and even a little in. It was about as impressive an opposite-field homer as there's been in this park in years, and it made one wonder about the potential juiciness of the ball or coziness of a right field that has been closed off to some of the elements. Samardzija wasn't having it.
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"He's a heck of a player and you fall behind in the count like that, it was just the story of the night," he said. "Instead of putting guys away early in the count, there were a lot of 3-2 counts, a lot of three-ball counts, and when you've got to throw a guy like Tatis a strike and then hopefully a good pitch at the same time, you're asking for it."
Samardzija gave up another shot in the fourth, his final inning. Wil Myers took him 422 feet to center, smashing a homer into the new bullpen that was his ninth at Oracle Park since the start of 2017. The ball would have been a home run with the old dimensions. With the new ones, it easily cleared the wall.
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"I think Wil's would have been gone out in a hurricane," Samardzija said. "Let's give him credit."
The two blasts ruined a start that took longer to arrive than most fans expected. The Giants held Samardzija out of the Dodgers series, knowing it was a bad matchup for the veteran right-hander. Instead, he threw a five-inning sim game the day before the season started and prepared for a Padres lineup that leans right.
Samardzija only struck one of those Padres out, though. His fastball hovered 89-90 mph and topped out at 92. Manager Gabe Kapler said he thought Samardzija attacked the zone well early on, but he wasn't able to "maintain a rhythm throughout the game." If there was any concern about his raw stuff, Kapler didn't show it.
"I thought he actually had a pretty good fastball, especially relative to our modified camp," Kapler said. "Actually that wasn't a concern tonight. The velocity was better than it has been."
That fastball was down in a rushed camp, one of the reasons it was hardly a surprise when Samardzija didn't see the field in Los Angeles. He said he knew this would be the situation, and he felt it lined up as a good situation to succeed.
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"It's a different type of season," Samardzija said. "I think we were just trying to make sure everyone was ready. After my second-to-last start in this summer camp the time just didn't really line up to get out there and throw in L.A. We just made the best of it, we came out here against this lineup and just didn't have the results we were looking for.
"We'll get back to the drawing board. These things happen. It was a different type of day out there but you learn from it and move on."