Five reasons the SF Giants will NOT make the playoffs this season
As the All-Star Break wraps up, the SF Giants are going to return to action and continue fighting for a spot in the playoffs. Currently 49-41 on the season, the Giants would currently be the third (and final) Wild Card team in the National League. However, they only have a half-game lead on both the Milwaukee Brewers and Philadelphia Phillies. It's easy to envision the Giants finding a way to make a push to win the division, but if they find themselves on the outside looking in once again, it will be because of these five reasons.
SF Giants starter Ross Stripling throws a pitch against the Brewers. (2023)
Darren Yamashita-USA TODAY Sports
1. A rotation with more holes than Swiss cheese
Starters, starters, starters. More than anything else in recent memory, the playoffs have been dominated by ace starters who can put the team on their back and will them to victory. It’s why the 2010 Giants became the ultimate underdog story, why they lifted three championship trophies in the decade. The rotation that can go the deepest the most tends to come out on top in the playoff gauntlet.
If the playoffs started today, who are the Giants turning to for a five-game series? Logan Webb would probably start, sure, but his slow start has raised questions he must continue to answer. Alex Cobb, one of the Giants’ two All-Star selections, has earned the right to back him up. After that, though, who? Tristan Beck? Anthony DeSclafani has been wildly ineffective after mid-May, Alex Wood’s been too injured to count on, and neither Sean Manaea nor Ross Stripling have panned out quite the way the Giants had hoped.
There are guys who can eat innings, and guys who can dominate once through the order, but you can’t bullpen game your way to a World Series win. Not when you’re likely to go up against Spencer Strider, Clayton Kershaw, or even Shohei Ohtani twice in a series. Even if the Giants totter into the playoffs, they’re not long for it without 3-4 no-doubt starters.
2. An offense that's been hot while losing and cold while winning
The 2023 season, for all of its unexpected developments, has been extremely neat. The Giants started off quite bad. Then some reinforcements from the minors arrived, and they got quite hot. Once the luster from that streak wore off, the Giants struggled again before the All-Star Break.
The reason it’s been a perplexing season, then, is that their individual performances haven’t correlated with their record at all. At the start of the season, I predicted that as many as nine players might break the 20-HR mark. In April and May, when the Giants hovered around six games below .500, that didn’t look like a far-fetched proposition. They might have been striking out a whole hell of a lot, but they were at least hitting bombs - 46 total long balls in their first 27 games.
It looked like the lag had corrected itself at the turn of June, when the Giants scored at least 10 runs in 6 of 7 series. San Francisco turned on the switch and started putting up decent numbers in the days around those "football score" games. But then the Giants, in the midst of their biggest winning stretch in recent memory, went ice cold for long periods. It seemed fluky at first, but since the calendar flipped to July, the Giants have scored only 20 runs in 9 games.
How does a team with incredible offensive potential lose all those games? Simple - the Giants have been one of the worst teams in the league at hitting starting pitchers. In nearly half their games in June, they didn’t score until the 5th inning. And even when they did win, they tended to feast on wounded middle relievers to put up big innings. Even the start of their big winning streak only happened because Colorado's relievers choked away massive leads in the late innings.
The glass-half full outlook says that this variance means it’s entirely possible for the Giants’ team offense to bounce back and improve their results in the second half. But combined with the starting pitching questions, there’s no reason to believe the Giants should win more games. They’ll have to pitch better AND hit better, and relying on improvements on both ends is leaving a bit too much to chance.
SF Giants catcher Patrick Bailey walks on the field at Oracle Park. (2023)
Robert Edwards-USA TODAY Sports
3. The reinforcements have already arrived
Speaking of half-full situations, let’s go back to the rookies. The Giants have introduced a massive group of rookies that are exceeding expectations. That’s great! The Giants are also now relying on a massive group of rookies to lead them to the postseason. That’s, uh, a little more murky.
Normally, there’s a “let the kids play” rumbling as vets start to drag late in the season. That won’t be the case this year, now that six rookies have reached 100 at-bats or 20 innings pitched. What happens when those rookies start to hit the wall? No farm system is deep enough to support two groundswells of talent a year, let alone one as long-suffering as the Giants’.
And the struggles have already begun. Casey Schmitt, who lit the world on fire for about two weeks after his callup, is hitting just .095 with no extra base hits in the last 30 days. Heliot Ramos and Luis Matos haven’t lived up to their billing as wunderkinds just yet, which is probably because it’s hard to become a star at 21 years old! And for all their promise, guys like Bryce Johnson, Sean Hjelle, Cole Waites, and David Villar (stretching the rookie designation a bit here, but still) haven’t been able to fully break out of AAA.
At least the Giants have been able to rely on Blake Sabol (.763 OPS, 10 HRs) and Patrick Bailey (.293 batting average, second coming of Buster Posey). Those two represent the absolute best-case scenarios for a Rule 5 draft pick and an intriguing first-round prospect, respectively. Even the performances of players like Ryan Walker and Tristan Beck have already represented pleasant surprises. Expecting more rookies to suddenly become everyday starters is a little too much right now.
4. Kyle Harrison won't be Madison Bumgarner
For all of the guys who have made surprise appearances early on this year, the biggest prize of them all is Kyle Harrison. The hard-throwing lefty has been the top LHP prospect in all of baseball, and rightfully so. But he’s been working through his lessons at AAA at a natural rate, and now a hamstring injury has pushed back any chance of his debut for at least a few more weeks.
While that’s great news for Harrison’s 2024 Rookie of the Year campaign odds, it’s not so great for a Giants team that would desperately love for him to come up to the big leagues and match the lofty expectations put on him. At this point, it just doesn’t seem like there’s time, no matter how well he pitches. He seems on track to be an extended September call-up, and while he very well might be a force right away in the majors, he’ll be a rookie on a pitch count and a handful of starts. That’s not a recipe for “immediate top-of-the-league starter,” and it shouldn’t be! Harrison will be dominant, in all likelihood, but you can’t rush greatness.
The 2014 playoff push is Bumgarner’s legacy, but it’s easy to forget just how special his 2010 was, too. He got his first extended action in late June that year, which allowed him to post 110 innings of 3.00 ERA ball. He was as much a question mark then as Logan Webb was in April of 2021, but the early experience allowed Bumgarner to become the Game 4 starter in the NLDS, NLCS, and World Series. Without the stability Bumgarner provided, the Giants probably don’t make it past the Phillies in the NLCS, let alone win it all. It’s just not realistic to expect Harrison to go from quick study at AAA to that kind of playoff bedrock all in the span of a few short weeks.
5. The SF Giants don't scare you
Despite all of the objections, there's still a chance. The Giants aren't out of it, not by a long shot. But if they don't make the playoffs, then it's not just going to be with a whimper. It's going to happen with a bang, an implosion, if you will. The simple fact is, compared to all of the other championship hopefuls, the Giants just don't scare anyone.
Camilo Doval is different, and deserves every ounce of praise he's drawn as San Francisco's only front-line All-Star pick. But past him? Even some incredible seasons from LaMonte Wade Jr., Patrick Bailey, and Taylor Rogers just don't amount to much in the grand scheme of things. Mike Yastrzemski is a bona fide stud, and one of the Giants' most valuable players, but nobody's going to pitch around him in Game 5 of the NLCS. When the going gets tough, who do the Giants lean on?
Right now, it looks like unless they make a huge swing at the trade deadline, that's how it's going to be this year; a Rays-like machine made up of good ballplayers that will get mowed down by the league's elite. If Logan Gilbert can make them look like a team of Johnnie LeMasters, then something is needed to get this team through August and September. They wanted Aaron Judge because he could carry them when everyone else was down. But Judge is still in New York. If the Giants can't have him, then they'll need to invent him. Otherwise, it's going to be a long, cold winter in San Francisco.
