Since Wilmer Flores checked his swing in the 2021 NLDS, the San Francisco Giants have played 375 regular season games. There’s no stat on Baseball-Reference or FanGraphs to confirm this, but it’s possible that those 375 games featured the highest ratio of boring-to-exciting games in the last couple decades, if not franchise history. The Giants were a dull team in 2022, and they were even duller in 2023. Not awful. Just dull. Very, very dull. And for the first 45 games or so this season, it seemed as if they had gotten even duller, which should have been impossible.
Then their most exciting player (at the time) suffered a season-ending injury. Even the most optimistic Giants fans were rattled. It was a team without a pulse. It was a team that wasn’t offering a lot of reasons to watch. Watching a Giants game was as exciting as watching QVC with the sound off, but less useful.
Turns out that the Giants were hoarding all of the excitement, putting it all into a water jug, like a collection of pennies. They were just waiting for the right time to smash that sucker open and let the excitement pennies spill out all over the floor. Are you not entertained?
The Giants defeated the Pirates on Thursday, 7-6, after allowing a grand slam and coming back in the late innings. They defeated the Pirates on Wednesday, after allowing a grand slam and coming back in the late innings. They lost to the Pirates on Tuesday, but that’s probably because they made the mistake of getting a big lead before the late innings.
It would be incredibly easy to make too much about this series, but it would be just as easy to make too little about it. You can sum up the big takeaway in a sentence:
You can see how the 2024 Giants might be capable of something more.
Likely to achieve that something more? Destined to achieve it? Absolutely not. I used a weasel word in that sentence for a good reason. But for the first month-and-a-half of the season, the Giants looked incapable of doing anything that was remotely exciting. It was veteran after veteran, hitting ’em where they were, missing the ball entirely and playing a completely uninspired brand of baseball. Sure, you could lean on the “it’s early” crutch — and, boy, did I ever — but that wasn’t an evidence-based analysis. It was an appeal to anecdotes from seasons past. It was another way of saying, “Maybe the Giants are actually the 2019 Nationals. Did you ever think about that, smart guy?”
Here’s some evidence. The Giants might be capable of something more. Let us count the ways.
Matt Chapman was hitting .205/.255/.331 just 13 days ago. Two weeks ago, he looked like a disaster free-agent signing. He was going to opt-in for 2025, and you were going to suffer through a half-dozen articles explaining why he was poised for a comeback. You were going to roll your eyes so hard that your ophthalmologist would tell you to stop following baseball entirely.
Now he’s hitting .249/.313/.440 for the season, which is an absurdly Chapman-esque line, but the only response to this is, “Hitting? You’re talking about his hitting?”
Chapman hit a three-run homer to pull the Giants within one run in a game that was assumed to be lost on Thursday, but, no, it’s not his hitting that was the star of the show. You knew he could pick it, and it’s the main reason why J.D. Davis is on the A’s right now. Chapman’s current slash line for the season is almost identical to Davis’ line for the Giants in 2023, but there’s only one player who can do this:
Spin cycle 🌀 pic.twitter.com/O7uNJMkhnK
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) May 23, 2024
Matt Chapman is an absurd third baseman. He shouldn’t exist. He goes against the laws of nature, and there should be a congressional hearing about all of this. However, we will table the discussion for now, and your only job is to recognize his genius. He ended Tuesday night’s game with a magical play, and it was somehow not his best defensive game of the series.
If Chapman hits and fields like this with just some semblance of consistency? The Giants are capable of an awful lot. I haven’t sifted through the comments of the Baggs-Eno collaboration on Chapman’s swing speed, but I’m assuming a couple of you have to repent.
It wasn’t just Chapman, though. Patrick Bailey is back from the concussion IL, and he threw an absolute dart to wipe the possible tying run off the bases in the ninth inning.
A Bailey Bullseye 🎯 pic.twitter.com/EbYzzKEJBT
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) May 23, 2024
Bailey is hitting .292/.347/.461, and he had the kind of series that left you feeling happy for Joey Bart after he hit a grand slam. Good for him. He worked hard, and he’s in a much better spot now.
Both the Giants’ and Pirates’ bullpens were absolutely gassed, with a lot of relievers unavailable for both teams, but the Giants made it work. Randy Rodríguez handled a high-leverage, eighth-inning situation like he was built for it. Probably because he was. He’s more than halved his walk rate from last season, and he’s becoming the late-inning bullpen monster who was prophesied so many years back. A couple of Rogers boys handled their jobs with aplomb. The bullpen has issues, some of them serious, but the late innings isn’t really one of them. Especially if Rodríguez was just promoted over Luke Jackson in the bullpen hierarchy (which he should be).
It was still just one win. The Giants are still a game under .500, and their run differential is still completely underwater. They faced a pair of tough young starters and came out on top, but they also faced a team that’s been struggling. Their previous series was against the Rockies, who are incapable of playing good baseball in San Francisco. Marco Luciano booted another ninth-inning grounder at a horrible time, which is going to happen, and the next time the Giants might not be so lucky. They haven’t found their Tristan Beck replacement yet, with both Keaton Winn and Mason Black struggling horribly in the majors this season, and Beck on the IL for a while longer.
However, the adjective we’re using isn’t “guaranteed.” It’s “capable.” The Giants just had a pair of rousing comebacks, with contributions from young players (an Heliot Ramos’ dinger started the comeback) and veterans alike. Forget the box score, though. The Giants looked alive. They looked relevant. They looked capable.
It was an impossible scenario just 10 days ago. Now, though? You’re not sold, but you’re also not selling your shares in the team. Bob Melvin has something to work with, apparently.
It might not actually work, but you can see how it might be capable of working. The Giants are a long way from guaranteed contenders, but at the very least, they’re reminding you that it wouldn’t be ridiculous if they got there.
(Photo of Chapman celebrating his home run: Justin Berl / Getty Images)
