CINCINNATI — Bob Melvin laid out two imperatives in recent days.
The Giants needed to start racking up series wins, and they would have to do so on the road, where they have played the fifth-worst baseball of any team this season.
Romping over the Reds, 8-2, they checked both boxes Sunday afternoon.
Robbie Ray struck out nine over five innings while limiting the Reds to a pair of back-to-back solo home runs, and the Giants got their own power display from Matt Chapman, LaMonte Wade Jr. and Tyler Fitzgerald, whose homers accounted for all the runs San Francisco would need to secure a win in the series’ rubber game.
“To win our first series of the second half on the road is a good thing,” Melvin said afterward. “Now we’ve got a four-game series (against the Nationals), which is a little tougher to win, but we’re off to a good start and we know we have to play much better on the road if we’re going to end up going where we want to go.”
The Giants improved to 10-1 when hitting at least three home runs after dropping their first such game the previous night.
Taking two of three, the Giants (56-57) earned their first series win away from Oracle Park since this time last month and created some separation at the bottom of the National League wild card race. They now lead the Reds (53-58) by two games but still trail four teams with four games separating them from playoff position.
“Every game is valuable. If we keep winning series, we’re going to be in a good spot at the end of the year,” said Chapman, who matched his home run total from last season in 30 fewer games with his team-leading 17th of the year. “Winning this series, going into tomorrow with some momentum now, and start that series off the right way. It’s going to be a dogfight until the very end for us.”
The score was tied at 2 when Wade stepped to the plate against Cincinnati starter Carson Spiers to lead off the sixth inning, and one pitch later the Giants held a one-run lead that they wouldn’t relinquish. Wade lined a knee-high sinker just high enough but plenty hard — 107.7 mph off the bat — to clear the wall in right field.
It was a close enough call that Melvin wasn’t sure if it was going out.
“I didn’t think so initially,” he said. “But it’s a good place to hit here.”
The home run was Wade’s fourth of the season and his first since July 2, a 19-game drought. It was one of 11 home runs around the majors this season with a launch angle of 17 degrees or less, and together with his towering 50-degree blast in May gives him the Giants’ highest home run of the Statcast era and their lowest since 2015.
“It looks like he’s in his legs a little bit more,” Melvin said of Wade, who finished with three hits. “(He’s) gonna start driving some balls.”
Chapman’s two-run blast that tied the score in the fourth was no wall-scraper, leaving his bat at 109.1 mph and traveling an estimated 421 feet to straightaway center.
It was Chapman’s second home run in as many games and — if you count his Little League homer Friday (a double and two errors in the scorebook) — his third of the series. In 11 games since July 24, Chapman is batting .357 (15-for-41) with four homers, four doubles, eight RBIs, 10 runs scored and seven walks.
Fitzgerald’s 11th of the season — and 10th in his past 16 games — padded the advantage in the eighth, driving in Wade after his second hit of the game. Michael Conforto doubled home two more and then traded places with Jerar Encarnacion to make it a five-run inning, more than they had totaled in any of their previous four games.
“We ended up opening up what was a really close game for a while,” Melvin said. “But obviously the Wade homer was huge.”
Lowering his ERA to 4.40 in three starts since returning from Tommy John surgery, Ray was dominant other than for a stretch of two batters — two pitches, really — in the second inning. After Stuart Fairchild went down swinging for the second out, Jeimer Candelario connected with an 0-1 heater to open a 1-0 lead, and Santiago Espinal sent the next pitch — another fastball — into the seats to make it 2-0.
“Even the two home runs, I felt like I made pretty good pitches,” Ray said. “I feel like everything is starting to come together. The walks were down today. Command was better. My last start (allowing three home runs) was more of a learning start, how to pitch through not feeling great and fighting my delivery a little bit.
“Today I felt really good. … I threw some really good curveballs. Some good sliders. Fastball was good. Guys are going to hit home runs, even on pitches that are exactly where you want to throw them, so I think just being able to refocus, get back in the zone and not shy away from contact was the biggest thing.”
The Reds put only two other runners on base against Ray and stranded men at third base in three separate innings, including Elly De La Cruz twice.
In the third, De La Cruz reached on a fielder’s choice and advanced to third when Curt Casali’s throw on his stolen base attempt sailed into center field but was stranded there when Ty France bounced out to Wade at first base. In the sixth, he represented the tying run when T.J. Friedl hit a slow roller toward Chapman.
Similar to his game-saving play earlier this season in New York, Chapman charged the ball, barehanded it and fired an accurate sidearm throw just in time to first base to end the inning. While the stakes weren’t quite as high — in the sixth inning compared to the ninth — the degree of difficulty may have been even higher. Melvin noted this one was hit with some funky backspin.
“It was slow, but I knew it was a do-or-die play,” Chapman said. “I was just trying to get a grip on it. I got a good grip on it as soon as I grabbed it. I knew it was spinning, so I tried to just play it on the spin. Once I got it, I just threw as hard as I could from down there.”
It was Espinal who used his dynamic speed to reach third in the fifth, swiping two bases after a leadoff single.
All it would have taken was an opportunistic ball in play to push across Espinal with less than two outs, but Ray reared back and struck out the next three hitters. He slowly backpedaled off the mound after powering a fastball past Jonathan India to end the inning with his ninth strikeout of the afternoon.
The pitch was clocked at 97.3 mph, his fastest of the day by a full mile-an-hour and his hardest fastball since undergoing major elbow surgery and missing 16 months.
“In that moment I kind of knew that I was coming to the end of the rope and just tried to reach back for a little bit more and see how much I had in the tank,” Ray said. “I felt like it came out pretty good, looked up and saw 97 and was pretty happy with it.”
Catcher Jakson Reetz had a locker in the visitors’ clubhouse with Curt Casali expected to go on the paternity list.
The Giants are off to Washington, D.C., where they will finish up their road trip with four games against the Nationals. RHP Logan Webb (8-8, 3.49) gets the ball in Game 1 against LHP Patrick Corbin (2-11, 5.88) on Monday (3:45 p.m. PT), RHP Hayden Birdsong (3-0, 2.97) will be recalled to start Tuesday and LHP Blake Snell (1-3, 4.29) will make his first start since his no-hitter on Wednesday before LHP Kyle Harrison (6-4, 3.69) goes Thursday in the series finale.
