SAN FRANCISCO -- The Giants haven’t been playing their best baseball recently, a trend that became painfully obvious after they dropped their second series of the year to the club with the worst record in the National League. 

With a 10-3 drubbing at the hands of the Reds on Sunday afternoon at Oracle Park, the Giants took their sixth loss in their last eight games and missed another chance to gain ground in the National League West, where they trail the first-place Dodgers by six games and the Padres by 4 1/2 games. 

Given the stiff competition in the division, the Giants can ill afford to waste opportunities to beat up on lesser teams, though they couldn’t take care of business against the cellar-dwelling Reds, who went 4-2 against San Francisco this year. 

“I don’t think we played good baseball in either one of those series, obviously,” manager Gabe Kapler said. “I don’t think that’s any big revelation.”

It was an all-around sloppy performance for the Giants, who watched the Reds erupt for seven runs -- all with two outs -- in a disastrous third inning that put the game out of reach early.

Anthony DeSclafani breezed through his first two innings, but he couldn’t stop the bleeding in the third and was knocked out of the game after recording only eight outs in his second start since returning from the injured list. Brandon Drury opened the scoring with a two-out, two-strike RBI triple to right-center field, and Tommy Pham followed with another two-strike hit to extend the Reds’ lead to 2-0.

“It’s tough because some of those at-bats with two strikes, I probably could have put the guy away earlier with maybe better executed sliders and whatnot,” said DeSclafani, whose ERA spiked to 9.95 over five starts this year. “I feel like I either didn’t execute to get the out or fell behind. I felt like I was yanking my slider all day. It was really not an effective pitch. That wasn’t good. But any of the guys, when you’re ahead in the count, you’ve got to put away.”

Joey Votto then appeared to hit a chopper to first baseman Brandon Belt for the final out of the inning, but the ball was called foul by first-base umpire Gabe Morales, keeping the at-bat alive. One pitch later, Votto smoked a double to right field that easily scored Pham from first after Mike Yastrzemski threw to second base instead of going home.

DeSclafani subsequently walked Donovan Solano on four pitches to bring up Matt Reynolds, who hit a fly ball to center field that was misjudged by Austin Slater and fell for an RBI ground-rule double. Albert Almora Jr. added a two-run single to stretch the Reds’ lead to 6-0, bringing DeSclafani’s afternoon to an end.

“I think things snowballed a little bit in the third inning, obviously,” Kapler said. “I actually think [DeSclafani] was fine. We didn’t play our best defense behind them. Some balls found holes. We had some mental errors in that game that didn’t help us. There was the Votto ball that looked fair to us that was called foul. It was a pretty major turning point in the game for any number of reasons. But I thought Anthony threw strikes and got weak swings.”

The Giants consistently played clean baseball en route to winning a franchise-record 107 games in 2021, but they’ve been burned by more mental and physical mistakes this season, an unexpected development for a team full of veteran players.

In addition to the third-inning miscues, reliever Jarlín García was late covering first base on Nick Senzel’s grounder to the right side with two outs in the fifth. Belt made a diving stop on the play, but he was charged with an error after throwing the ball behind García and into foul territory, allowing the Reds to score another pair of runs.

“We have to do a better job of concentrating, especially when games are beginning to move fast and sometimes seemingly spinning a little bit out of control,” Kapler said. “Those are the moments we need to calm down and in a high level of concentration run through plays in our minds before they happen. That’s just an area of improvement for us. It’s really hurt us this year.”

The Giants will attempt to regroup after Monday’s off-day, though Kapler plans to use the break in the schedule to meet with his coaching staff and discuss ways to improve their processes. With three consecutive series against sub-.500 teams -- the Tigers, White Sox and D-backs -- looming, the Giants still have a prime opportunity to try to chase down their division rivals, but they recognize that they’ll have to tighten up their play regardless of the caliber of their opponents.

“There’s some work to be done on this off-day,” Kapler said. “I kind of had in my brain, it’d be a good day to kind of reset and everybody take a blow. But I think for me and some of our staff, it’s a good time for us to get together and talk about how to right the ship and get back on track.”