Colin Rea, Brewers fall to Giants in tough loss

SAN FRANCISCO — The best thing the Brewers could say about Wednesday’s blowout loss to the Giants at Oracle Park is that they haven’t endured many nights like this.

Usually reliable right-hander Colin Rea saw his ERA jump from 3.72 to 4.21 after he set dubious career highs, allowing 10 earned runs and 11 hits over four innings of a 13-2 defeat. It wasn’t Milwaukee’s most lopsided loss this season — that was a 12-run loss to the Yankees on April 27 — but it came close. In the bottom of the eighth, first baseman Jake Bauers, armed with a fastball that mostly sat below 70 mph, took the mound.

Bauers allowed two runs but also recorded three outs, one on his first career strikeout. He tossed the baseball to the Brewers dugout so it could be authenticated by MLB and preserved for posterity, which was good for a smile at the end of a tough night.

“We’ve got a special team here, so we don’t play many games like this,” Bauers said. “That’s a trait, I think, of really good teams.”

Manager Pat Murphy often notes his team’s knack for staying in ballgames, and the numbers back him up. The Brewers have only suffered 16 losses by more than three runs, the fewest in the Majors, and are the only team under 20 such defeats. In 60 percent of their losses — 37 of 62 — the Brewers have been within two runs. More than a third — 23 of 62 — have been one-run losses.

None of that was any consolation for Rea, who found himself in an 8-0 hole before recording his fourth out after the Giants put four runs on the board in the first inning and four more in the second on the way to a 10-1 lead by the end of the fourth.

It made Rea the sixth pitcher to be saddled with 10 earned runs this season. Nobody has allowed more than that this year. The last Brewers pitcher to get knocked around for double-digit earned runs was Alec Bettinger, who yielded 11 runs to the Dodgers in his only Major League start in May 2021 — the only other time this decade that a Brewers pitcher has allowed double-digit earned runs.

The unfortunate club record belongs to left-hander Bill Travers, who was saddled with 14 earned runs on 18 hits while covering 7 2/3 innings in Game 2 of a doubleheader against Cleveland in August 1977.

“It kind of felt like, timing-wise, they were on everything,” Rea said.

With 154 innings in the books, the 34-year-old is well beyond last year’s total (124 2/3 in the regular season) and beyond his previous career high (144 for Triple-A Iowa in the Cubs system in 2019), but Rea doesn’t believe fatigue is a factor.

So, he will rewatch Wednesday’s outing, looking for clues beyond missed locations as to why Giants hitters were able to pound him for 11 hits, including four doubles and three home runs.

“It just seemed to me like they were on time for a lot of stuff,” Rea said. “But for the most part, ‘flush it’ and move on is the best way to approach it. I’ve had outings like this before and you have to move past it.”

The outing went sideways from the start, with Tyler Fitzgerald’s double hanging up in the air forever but managing to find green grass between left fielder Jackson Chourio and center fielder Blake Perkins. Still, Rea was within one strike of escaping a scoreless inning when, with catcher William Contreras watching a runner break for second with a stolen base in mind, Rea misplaced a four-seam fastball to the point that it eluded Contreras’ glove for a run-scoring passed ball.

On the next pitch, LaMonte Wade hit a run-scoring single. The next batter was Jerar Encarnacion, who hit a two-run homer.

Rea’s last three starts have each ended after four innings. He has a couple of weeks to get back on track before he’s presumably lined up to start Game 2 or perhaps Game 3 of a postseason series.

“Colin hung in there and gave us four innings so we didn’t have to go into our ‘pen any deeper,” Murphy said. “He didn’t have his great stuff, but he’s done so much for us that I’m confident. He’s probably a little worn out, like a lot of the guys are, but there’s no time for that. He’ll bounce back.”