One more loss means a long winter's nap

One of baseball's truisms is that there's always a tomorrow. Except now. San Francisco has used up its allotment.

Saturday was another evening of offensive ineptitude, this time coupled with some horrid starting pitching, and the result was a 5-2 NLDS loss at Chicago that left the Giants one game away from elimination.

Yeah, you're right. Just look away. (SF Gate / The Chronicle)

In 27 postseason innings the Giants have been held scoreless in 25. That's all well and good when your pitchers are throwing shut outs. When they're imperfect, you're looking at trouble.

Trouble on Saturday came in the form of Jeff Samardzija. San Francisco's $90 million man lasted just two innings, giving up six hits and four earned runs while  effectively burying the offensively-challenged Giants before the game truly got underway.

Making his postseason debut, The Shark was pure guppy in this one. A run in the first, set up by Dexter Fowler's leadoff double and cashed in by Ben Zobrist's two-out jam shot to right was the first pothole. Samardzija then drove into a ditch one inning later when the Cubs scored three times, including two on a gut punch bases-loaded single by starting pitcher Kyle Hendricks.

There was some protest from the Giants in the third. Doubles from Joe Panik and pinch-hitter Gregor Blanco plated one run, and Brandon Belt's sacrifice fly drove home the second as the Giants cut the Cubs lead in half at 4-2.

Blanco celebrates a hit; we needed something positive. (SF  Gate / The Chronicle)

The G-Men knocked Hendricks out of the game in the fourth, just not in the way one might've hoped. Angel Pagan's line drive caught the Chicago hurler on the forearm and bounded away for an infield single. Hendricks wasn't seriously hurt but had to leave the game in favor of swingman Trevor Wood.

The Giants might have been better with Hendricks. Wood kicked off a parade of Chicago relievers that shut the Giants down the rest of the way. He also provided the final run of the game, turning around a George Kontos offering for a solo homerun in the fifth.

The offense after than consisted of singles from Belt and Brandon Crawford and a throwing error on Madison Bumgarner's pinch hitting effort. For the second straight night the total number of hits was six, and for the second straight night the Giants did little with them. The impotence was even more galling on Saturday because the Cubs tried to help, offering up three errors. No San Francisco batter had multiple hits, and the back-to-back doubles in the third marked the only time the Giants had two hits in a frame.

The bullpen was actually decent in the wake of Samardzija's meltdowwn, Wood's long ball excepted. Kontos, Ty Blach, Derek Law, Javier Lopez, Hunter Strickland and even Santiago Casilla kept the Cubs in check. How bad does your starter have to be to make Caasilla's numbers look good? Six combined innings of work surrendered just one run on three hits.

So it's back to the wall time for the Giants, who now know their unbeaten streak in elimination games has to grow by three or what looked for 90 games like the makings of a celebratory parade will instead seem like a funeral march.

The hope of a fans base is placed on the wide shoulders of Madison Bumgarner (15-9, 2.74 ERA). who will need to continue his postseason invincibility when the series shifts to AT&T Park on Monday. The Cubs will send 2015 Cy Young Award winner Jake Arrietta (18-8, 3.10 ERA) in search of a clincher.

San Francisco has won eight straight elimination games, including three in bouncing back from a 2-0 deficit in the 2012 NLDS. They'll need to recover that kind of magic, along with an offense, to Houdini their way out of this one.

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