SAN FRANCISCO — The Giants are a team still searching for an identity at the All-Star break.
They are relying on their young players. Except when they aren’t. They have a deep well of pitching depth. Except for all those weeks when they’ve scrambled to cover innings. They took on more than $400 million in salary commitments prior to Opening Day while acquiring Blake Snell, Matt Chapman, Jorge Soler, Jordan Hicks, Robbie Ray and Jung Hoo Lee, punting a pair of draft picks and dipping past the luxury tax threshold in the process, while attempting to patch every conceivable leak on their roster.
Except the leaks remain. Water-resistant teams do not spend a mere four days in four months above .500.
No, the Giants cannot identify as a winning team at the break. But they cannot identify as a losing team, either. They’ve never submerged deeper than six games under .500 and they’ve created buoyancy at times when the undertow appeared the strongest. As a result, they remain viable contenders in a National League wild-card race that resembles a tangle of handlebars in a downhill stage.
There aren’t many coherent takeaways when it comes to the Giants’ first-half identity. Even many within the clubhouse remain unsure about what kind of team the Giants are supposed to be. So for now, perhaps the more productive exercise is to rule out what they are not:
They are not a pitching and defense team
Not every year can be like 2012, when the Giants used five starting pitchers — Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, Madison Bumgarner, Ryan Vogelsong and Barry Zito — to start 160 of 162 regular-season games. Heck, there might never be a year like that again in baseball history.
But it’s almost impossible for a team to create stability with an unstable rotation. And the Giants failed the building code inspection in every conceivable way. They didn’t have a five-man group from the outset because Snell wasn’t ready after signing his contract just two weeks prior to Opening Day. Then Snell sustained (and re-sustained) a groin injury. Keaton Winn’s elbow flared up again. Kyle Harrison’s box jump drill resulted in a sprained ankle. Mason Black wasn’t ready. For nearly a month, the Giants rotation was down to Logan Webb, the MLB innings leader, and Hicks, who is very much not going to be among the MLB innings leaders in a year where he’s converting to starting from a short relief role.
Snell’s inconsistency and unavailability put a huge damper on the Giants’ rotation depth. (John Hefti / USA Today)
A first-half rotation plan in smithereens caused all kinds of stress on the rest of the pitching staff. Entering their weekend series against the Minnesota Twins prior to the All-Star break, the Giants had thrown the most relief innings in the major leagues. Their starting pitchers were recording fewer than 14 outs per game, which was the lowest total in the majors.
Nothing tells the tale better than this: The Giants went from May 18-19 to June 30-July 2 without a starting pitcher getting a win in consecutive games. And when that six-week streak finally ended, it was a 30-year-old rookie in a bulk innings role (Spencer Bivens against the Los Angeles Dodgers) and a 22-year-old rookie starting his second major-league game (Hayden Birdsong at Atlanta) who were credited with the wins. (By the way, when’s the last time the Giants got a win from a starting pitcher in three consecutive games? You probably don’t want to know. It was May 3-6 of last season. Webb, Sean Manaea, and Alex Cobb were the winners over that three-game stretch.)
Bob Melvin all but managed in a MacGyver bomber jacket while attempting to piece games together and puzzle through bullpen workloads. So you will not be surprised to learn that the Giants have generated the 25th least value from their rotation in terms of Wins Above Average. They stood at minus-2.2 WAA entering Sunday. Overall, their staff has generated minus-4.0 WAA, which was even less value than the Oakland A’s had created from their pitching staff. Only the Arizona Diamondbacks, Toronto Blue Jays and Colorado Rockies received less value from their pitchers in the first half than the Giants did.
Entering the season, the Giants hoped to ride a pitching-and-defense model to one series victory after another, dovetailing the groundball tendencies of Webb, Cobb and Hicks with Chapman and non-roster invitee Nick Ahmed locking down the left side of the infield. It was a cogent plan. It didn’t work out that way. Chapman has been fantastic at third base and he’s the team leader in WAR. Ahmed, who was released on July 9, caught the ball at shortstop when healthy. But his one-dimensional skills were no longer enough to warrant a place on the roster. You cannot lean into a strength that you do not possess.
The good news is that the Giants’ most problematic area is also the area that has the most internal solutions. Snell finally looked like a passable version of his Cy Young Award-winning self in a July 9 start against the Blue Jays. And more help is on the way. Maybe it isn’t the greatest idea for a team to pin its hopes on two rehabbing pitchers (Ray and Cobb) who will be searching for touch and feel as they are poised to make second-half returns. But that’s something to stick on the bulletin board, at least. It’s more than many teams in the Giants’ position can do.
They are not a high-scoring team
It might surprise you to learn that the Giants’ position player core grades out well in Wins Above Average — better than the Atlanta Braves, St. Louis Cardinals and San Diego Padres, the three teams that sit atop the NL wild-card standings. The Giants offense was scoring 4.42 runs per game entering Sunday, which makes them the epitome of average. The major-league mean is 4.40 runs per game. That’s an adequate output when you are one of the best in baseball at run prevention, which the Giants most assuredly have not been.
But the Giants have hit fewer home runs on average. If not for a breakout season from All-Star outfielder Heliot Ramos, they wouldn’t have a reliable run producer. After all the breathy talk about Soler becoming the Giants’ first 30-home run hitter since Barry Bonds in 2004, the 32-year-old designated hitter is on a pace to hit less than 20. And Soler has become so allergic to RBIs that the only contact he gets with runners on base is dermatitis.
Perhaps it became tougher for the Giants to establish an offensive identity after Lee, their leadoff hitter and former KBO star, sustained a season-ending shoulder dislocation after just 37 games. But across baseball, it’s been an offensively constipated season. And in too many games, the Giants have gotten stopped up by opposing starting pitchers. As a result, when they win games, it’s often the result of a late-inning rally.
They sure as heck aren’t a running team
Team president Farhan Zaidi had every latitude to speak freely at Melvin’s introductory press conference in October. The show for the cameras included the newsy tidbit that the Giants had agreed to extend Zaidi, their top baseball executive, through 2026. It was a move designed to create the appearance of stability in the front office as the Giants geared up for an aggressive winter in which they’d take their best shot at Shohei Ohtani and, if that failed, Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
Zaidi was critiquing the previous year’s team. He came to the fact that they finished last in the majors in stolen bases during a season in which the rules had been altered to incentivize more risk-taking on the basepaths. He called it a smoking gun.
“I mean, that just can’t happen,” Zaidi said. “To be that much of an outlier just shows it was a real deficiency.”
More than half a season later, the Giants are last again in stolen bases. They rank second to last in stolen-base percentage. The gun is still smoking. And the net effect is even worse when you consider that Giants pitchers also have allowed the most stolen bases in the major leagues. It’s an area that the Giants tightened up in recent weeks as pitchers did a better job varying their looks and times and giving catchers Patrick Bailey and Curt Casali a snowball’s chance of throwing a runner out.
But it’s a pretty bad look when the Giants acknowledge something cannot happen again … and it happens again.
If the Giants have demonstrated one consistent quality, though, it’s that …
They are a resilient team
To paraphrase the cliché, it isn’t better to be plucky than good. But you’d rather have pluck on your side than not.
The Giants entered the Minnesota Twins series with eight walk-off wins out of their 26 home victories, which was the second-most among major league clubs. When the Giants came back for two runs in the ninth to beat the Toronto Blue Jays 4-3 Tuesday night, a clover-studded rally that included two seeing-eye grounders, a walk that included a borderline call with two strikes, and a wild pitch that scored Tyler Fitzgerald with the winning run, it marked the Giants’ fifth walk-off victory in their last 10 wins at home.
The Giants have sustained some of their most crushing losses and bounced back the next day to author some of their most satisfying victories. They’ve won 23 games this season in come-from-behind fashion. They seem to save their toughest at-bats for the closers and relief specialists who are supposed to be among the game’s most difficult matchups. Only the New York Mets have scored more runs than the Giants after the seventh inning.
It’s a credit to the players and also to Melvin and his coaching staff that the Giants have kept their nose in so many games that they came back to win. Those comeback victories have been exhilarating at times. They’ve also been exhausting. They forced Melvin to use relievers Tyler Rogers and Ryan Walker a major league-leading 46 times in the team’s first 93 games.
In other words, it’s not a sustainable way to win. Those kinds of victories are too mentally and physically taxing to hope to repeat several times a week. Every high-achieving team is resilient to some extent, but it cannot be their only defining quality. You can’t show up to the ballpark and expect to rely on late-inning moxie. It’s better to know that something more tangibly consistent will show up every day: a quality start, a steady stream of power hitting, a twitchy-fast lineup that forced opponents to rush their way into making mistakes.
Despite the run of walk-off wins at home, it’s not as if the Giants have played over their heads in all these close games. From the start of June through July 11, they’ve played 23 games decided by two runs or fewer — more than any major-league club. The Giants are 11-12 in those games. So there’s optimism to be found there. Even without any semblance of rotation stability, the Giants rarely found themselves hopelessly out of a game. A little more on the run prevention side in the first six innings, and a little more on the run production side against opposing starters, and you can squint and envision a team that is capable of playing over .500 in the second half.
They’d better. The Giants haven’t banked first-half wins like their teams did in 2016 or 2021. So as uphill as it might have felt to try to win series with a whispering hint of a rotation, the real climb hasn’t begun yet. The Giants’ best baseball of 2024 had better be in front of them. If not, it’s going to be a long and dull final two months on the shores of McCovey Cove.
The Giants’ search for a first-half identity resulted in one important discovery, though.
They are a consequential team
The game at Rickwood Field reminded them. The celebration of life for Willie Mays reminded them.
The accolades, the tributes, the video montages in the days and weeks after Mays’ passing on June 18 — all of it resonated with Giants players, coaches and officials who were reminded that they are not merely competing for one of Major League Baseball’s most historic franchises. They are wearing the same colors that Willie Mays wore while playing with a style and talent that was so undeniable that his appeal was universal. It was no small feat in American history for a Black man from Alabama to be lauded as a universal hero within his country at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement.
For all that was spent and sacrificed to create a formidable Giants roster this season, it’s a group that hasn’t appeared greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a group that lacks a clear identity. But if they are searching for something to bring them together, perhaps they can start with something simple but powerful. They can glance at the memorial patches for Mays and Orlando Cepeda that will adorn their uniforms for the rest of the season.
Or they can reflect on something that Webb said to himself on the day of Mays’ passing, when the right-hander called timeout in the sixth inning after he saw the news on the Wrigley Field scoreboard.
“I needed to take a moment to think about it,” said Webb, “and be prideful for the jersey I was wearing, the hat I was wearing, knowing Willie did the same.”
(Top photo of reliever Luke Jackson walking off the mound after a pitching change: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
