Taijuan Walker’s scoreless streak ends in Phillies’ 10-4 series-opening loss to the Giants

When Taijuan Walker took the mound in the second inning on Monday, he carried with him an unblemished ERA and a scoreless streak that had stretched over his last 11⅔ innings.

Two homers and 33 pitches later, San Francisco had emphatically ended that with a six-run outburst. Walker bounced back to hold the Giants off until he was lifted after the fifth inning, but they had taken a lead they would not surrender en route to a 10-4, series-opening win over the Phillies.

“Just one inning that got away from me, and those six runs hurt us,” Walker said. “I was able to settle down the next three innings, but that one inning just sped up on me.”

Only four of those six runs in the second were earned, due to Walker’s own error. In the first inning, Walker had erased a baserunner by picking off Willy Adames at first, but he wasn’t able to help himself out in the second.

» READ MORE: Phillies sit struggling Brandon Marsh vs. Giants: ‘It’s time just to relax for a minute’

With two runners on, Walker fielded a grounder and tried to get the force out at second, but a wide throw ended up in center field. What might have been an inning-ending double play turned into a run, and in the next at-bat, Tyler Fitzgerald sent Walker’s cutter to the left-field seats for a three-run homer. Fitzgerald, the Giants’ nine-hole hitter, finished a single shy of the cycle.

“I think that changes the entire inning,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said.

Walker said that after his error, he was trying too hard to get the next out, which led to him leaving pitches out over the middle of the plate. Adames hit a solo home run before Walker finally escaped the inning with a groundout.

“I felt like my stuff was pretty good still, attacking the zone,” Walker said. “I would hit 0-1 or 0-2 pretty quick, and couldn’t put them away. So quite a few 3-2 counts, and just the pitch count got too high.

“But for the most part, though, my stuff was pretty good. It was just really that one inning.”

The Giants’ outburst stifled any momentum the Phillies had built in the first, where they scored three early runs on three hits and two walks. From there, they were held off the scoreboard until a solo home run from Nick Castellanos in the fifth inning.

The Phillies had their opportunities to add on. They finished 1-for-11 with runners in scoring position and left eight runners on base. J.T. Realmuto came a few feet from a three-run homer that would have cut the Giants lead to one in the seventh, but it hooked foul. Realmuto was then called out on strikes on a slider well outside the zone to end the rally before it began.

» READ MORE: Phillies’ Alec Bohm addresses early-season slump: ‘The game’s trying to teach me a lesson’

“We haven’t played our best baseball, that’s for sure,” Thomson said. “And we need to get better, and we will. I mean, we’ve got a good club, so I’m not sure exactly why, but we haven’t hit as much as we normally do, but that will change.”

The Giants ran up the score on the Phillies’ bullpen. After a scoreless sixth from Joe Ross, lefty Tanner Banks allowed a triple and the Giants’ third homer of the game by Mike Yastrzemski to sink the Phillies into a 8-4 deficit. They hit two doubles off José Ruiz in the ninth and plated two more, finishing with seven extra-base hits.

One positive from the game was Alec Bohm’s double in the fourth. While he didn’t exactly break out afterward — Bohm finished 1-for-4 — the laser off the left-center wall marked his first extra-base hit since opening day. Max Kepler ended an 0-for-8 streak with a single in the fourth inning, and later doubled in the sixth. Castellanos and Kepler were the only Phillies with multi-hit games.

“[Bohm] wanted hits so bad that he put a bit too much pressure on himself,” Thomson said. “But that was good to see tonight, and hopefully he can build on that.”