So... what's up with this volatile SF Giants offense?
When you're a kid, baseball seems to happen one day at a time. Every day is a fresh start. Whenever that really cool player you love steps up to bat, you want him to hit a home run, because he's a really cool player who can hit home runs. As you learn more about baseball, you realize that the games aren't quite so distinct. What happens one game has an effect on the next. A random injury can have lingering effects on the next few weeks. A bad season casts doubt on the next. Eventually, you realize that everything is connected: years of planning or lack thereof by the front office, the sport's byzantine economics, the imperfect nature of scouting and development. You realize that each team is a behemoth, and that every game - an enormity unto itself - is merely one turn of the gears of a vast and ponderous machine.
But there's a part of kid in you that's still right, even knowing the full weight behind every pitch thrown and every bat swung. What happens one game doesn't have to foretell the next. Swinging and missing on one pitch doesn't have to mean you can't hit a soaring home run the next. And, well, one disappointing and underwhelming season with a roster of cast-offs and faded stars doesn't have to mean that a roster with much of the same issues has to be boring the next year.
Which brings us to the 2023 SF Giants, who so far have been perhaps the most perplexing team in baseball so far. Their biggest contributors so far have been names like David Villar, Mike Yastrzemski, Thairo Estrada, LaMonte Wade, Michael Conforto, and Joc Pederson. Which, hey, features a guy that the Giants signed this off-season for the purpose of upgrading the lineup! Mission accomplished, at least a week into the season.
But the rest of those guys were here last year, and they either contributed to or failed to improve a brand of dreadfully boring baseball, which is why it wasn't too surprising when they struck out 28 times in two shutouts against the Yankees to start the year. And it's why we're both surprised that in their three wins so far this season, the Giants have scored 35 runs. Despite a bit of an ugly start, the Giants have - pardon my French - beat le crap out of opposing teams badly enough to merit enough attention that I'm writing this article about it.
Consider this: in the games they've lost, they've averaged 1.0 runs per game. The decimal is redundant there - four runs in four games of really, really hard to watch baseball. In the games they've won, they're at 11.7 runs per game. That's a double-digit delta right there. That's a football score. When they're winning, the Giants are outpacing the 2009 St. Louis Rams. As brief and improbable as it is, that's truly wild, especially given the players who are doing it.
So how exactly are the Giants capable of such extreme levels of offense? Three reasons. The first, and undeniably the least sexy, is that we're dealing with a really small sample size. Scratch that, a small sample size coming out of spring training. Everyone's incorporating mechanical changes into their regimen, adjusting to bodies that are another year older, and ramping up into the tortuous grind of the baseball season. When a team hits 14 home runs across three games? Wild. Completely unsustainable. In all honesty, probably a bit lucky. When they do it in the first two weeks of the season, you can't use it to set up your expectations for the rest of the season.
But then, it also didn't happen just because some baseball wizard cast a spell and commanded that the Giants be blessed with bountiful bumper crops of crushed balls this week. It happened because the Giants have a lot of players that can look for pitches to hit, and hit them hard. Foolishly or not, I prognosticated that the Giants could win 94 games this year, in part because they have at least nine players who are capable of hitting 20 home runs in a season. I don't think it's probable that they will. But between Pederson, Conforto, Crawford, Yastrzemski, Estrada, Wade, J.D. Davis, Mitch Haniger, and Wilmer Flores, how many of them would you bet can't get to the 20 mark? And with Blake Sabol and Bryce Johnson already on the roster, and Joey Bart lurking as a power threat, there's a lot of cumulative production tucked away. For all their warts, that's a lot of directions for an offensive breakout to emerge from.
Which brings us back to kid you, who understood that anything could happen in a game. And despite the weight of expectations, every season really is its own unique journey. There's a lot of progress the Giants need to make in order to compete for playoff spot, but with so many places for that progression to come from, there's reason to believe that Giants baseball will be exciting again. They're not stars, either, not yet or not anymore, but what the last week has shown us is that the potential is there.
As the season goes on and their production becomes more consistent, we'll see whether their flaws outweigh their potential, or if they can once again grow into the threat they became in 2021. For all my research and all my foresight, I can't tell you which of those fates the SF Giants are destined for, at least not yet. But it'll be worth watching. After a winter of dashed hopes and frustrated resignation, that's not nothing. I can cheer for some really cool players to hit a home run.
