* At completely different points of the season. And it really went down the tubes for a couple months there.
OK, so it wasn’t a typo. But right through the end of May, the Giants were the best pitching team in baseball, or close to it. The Mets had them by a bit on ERA, but the Giants led the world in FIP, which suggests that they were excelling at the things they want their pitchers to excel at. They were missing bats, limiting free bases and keeping the ball in the park. Even after adjusting for Oracle Park, there was an argument that the staff was underrated coming into the season and the numbers back that up.
During this time, the Giants couldn’t hit much. Or at all. Their monthly OPS marks were .683, .686, .676 and .687, and that’s in chronological order, not that it matters much. They were consistently ineffective, and then they reshaped the franchise in mid-June to add Rafael Devers. That’s how you get from a .686 OPS to a .687 OPS in just two short months. According to these calculations, September 2075 should be amazing.
The Giants have turned their offensive season around in recent weeks, and depending on when you pick your end points, they’ve been the best offensive team in baseball for a couple of weeks now. They’re hitting .312/.371/.560 in September, which means the entire team is hitting like an MVP candidate this month. Their strikeout rate has also plummeted, with the lowest rate in the National League. Now, while you might say, “Sure, but they faced Rockies and Orioles pitchers, so that’s less impressive.” Ah, but that ignores the fact that … actually, no, that does count for a lot. Those pitching staffs have been really bad.
Still, you can tell the difference with the lineup, and the Giants also hit well against the Brewers and Cubs, two contending teams. The Giants had five home runs at Oracle Park on Monday night, and that’s just the seventh time there have been that many home runs in a game there. Not the seventh time for the Giants; the seventh time for any team. One thing you might notice about the three Giants teams that had done it before is that each one of them — 2000, 2003, 2021 (x2) — finished their season with the best record in baseball. Hit dingers at home, win baseball games. It’s never been more complicated than that.
Matt Chapman rounds the bases after one of the Giants’ five home runs on Monday. (Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)
The Giants started the season 12-4, and they’re 12-3 over their last 15 games, which means that if you’ve been paying close attention since Opening Day, you’ve seen the Giants be the best team in baseball for almost 20 percent of the season. If a team can bank that kind of success, they can coast in the other games and still make the postseason comfortably. All they have to do is play .500, or even a little worse.
The Giants played much worse outside of their two tears (49-64), and you can see how even a couple extra wins would have made a huge difference. The Giants would currently be in postseason position if they played like a 76-86 team during this stretch instead of a 72-90 team.
This isn’t just a catalog of semi-fun and semi-sad facts. Compare the Giants to other teams on the fringes of the National League postseason race. The Diamondbacks have been one of the best hitting teams since the beginning of last season, but they’ve had a miserable time preventing runs. The Reds have been excellent at preventing runs, but they struggle to score runs. Then there are teams like the Rays and Cardinals, who have been a middle bowl of room-temperature porridge. They haven’t been terrible on the pitching or hitting side, but they couldn’t do enough of either to escape the orbit of .500.
The Giants are an unusual baseball team, in other words. Complete freaks. They do some of the best close-up street magic you’ve ever seen right before they get their hand stuck in the toaster. Other teams are content to be middling all season. However, somehow the Giants managed to mix exceptional baseball with truly awful baseball, with very short transition periods between. They’ve lost 13 out of 14 at home! They’ve gone long road trips across the country without a day off and beat teams that might be in the World Series! It’s been a dizzying, bizarre season.
It’s not for nothing, though. There have been seasons with strong lineups. There have been seasons with strong pitching. Rarely do you get both in the same season, even in medium-sized doses, for a team that doesn’t win the NL West by eight games or more. And there’s one movie scene that keeps getting stuck in my head when thinking about the 2025 Giants.
The engine’s good. The engine’s good.
The Mets own the tiebreaker over the Giants, which means that their current three-game lead in the Wild Card standings is more like a four-game lead with 18 games left. It’s certainly doable, especially if the Giants don’t cool down, but the odds are still against them. Baseball-Reference has those odds at 14.4 percent; FanGraphs, which takes individual player forecasts into account, has them at 4.8 percent. Either way, they’re probably hosed. It wasn’t too little, but it was certainly too late.
Yet how they’re doing it is encouraging. Momentum might not mean anything from inning to inning, much less season to season, but remember where the Giants were less than a month ago. They were losing so many games at home that they were in the middle of all sorts of unsavory Baseball-Reference searches. That linked article had a thesis that translated roughly to, “Uh oh. This same team is coming back,” which was a thought that kept me up at night.
Fast forward a month, and you get an article like this, with a thesis of “Hey, neat. This same team is coming back.” While being reactionary and easily duped is a part of the job description for a columnist, the extra month really did make a difference. I’m going to list a few true statements that are much easier to believe now than they were in July or early August:
• Rafael Devers is an excellent hitter, and Oracle Park doesn’t even mess with his power much.
• Willy Adames will never be the best hitter on his team, but he’s a strong offensive and defensive shortstop, and that should continue next season.
• Patrick Bailey should hit like a regular ol’ catcher, not the worst hitter in baseball history.
• Jung Hoo Lee isn’t an All-Star-level player right now, and he might not ever be. But he’s good enough to be in a starting lineup for the next couple seasons, at least.
• Logan Webb’s newfound propensity for strikeouts gives him a chance to be one of the very best pitchers in baseball. More so than usual, even.
• Robbie Ray still has the potential to thrive.
• Heliot Ramos’ All-Star season wasn’t a complete fluke, and he belongs in a lineup (even if it’s eventually at DH).
• Drew Gilbert seems like he fills empty Kodiak cans with ground glass. Not sure if that’s going to help the Giants keep winning, or if he’ll even be on the Opening Day roster next season, but it sure hasn’t hurt so far. This is by far the least important bullet point, but the Giants have been a little stodgy this season. They need a Road Runner-type who doesn’t know enough to look down and realize he’s not obeying the laws of physics. It’s been too long.
There will need to be tweaks, additions and upgrades, of course. Casey Schmitt has been something of a revelation, but he’ll need to keep impressing to be the obvious, no-doubt starter at second base over the offseason. There will be at least one veteran pitcher added, if not two. They could probably use another corner power bat until Bryce Eldridge is ready. While it’s unrealistic to expect the Giants to hand out another nine-figure contract to a free agent, they should be active during the hot stove, especially on the pitching side.
The engine’s good, the engine’s good. It’s been an ugly ride, but the engine is good heading into next season. This isn’t to say that they’ll compete with the Rockies for the top of the NL West next season (you should see the offseason they’re gonna have), but that there’s more room for optimism than there could have been. A lot more. So while all this recent winning might not be enough to get the Giants into the postseason, it’s at least a proof of concept that they can get into a postseason soon, maybe even next year.
Heck, maybe even this year. But even if they can’t quite make it all the way back, at least you can see how this team could actually work. All of these wins won’t have been for nothing into the offseason. It’ll just be a sign that they need to try again. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s more than enough to have a much calmer, more rational offseason than we were expecting just a few weeks ago.
(Top photo: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)