The Giants, emotionally eliminated from the postseason when they didn’t sweep the White Sox, and mathematically eliminated a week ago, just finished a road trip against three winning teams, all of whom are fighting for a playoff spot, and went 7-2, making it their best road trip of the year.
In fact, just saying it was their best road trip of the year is underselling it; it was by far their best road trip of the year, and one of only three in which they won more than they lost. The first such trip came in late May, against the Pirates and the Mets — that was the 4-run comeback every game stretch, which in retrospect was probably not sustainable. The second good road trip came at the beginning of August, when they went to Cincinnati and Washington, and as you might recall, Blake Snell threw a no-hitter.
And now, a third successful road trip, and the Giants are coming home for the last series of the year sitting at 79-80 instead of 76-83, which would have been a perfectly reasonable (and possibly optimistic!) assumption coming into the trip. We’ve been talking about the Giants all year in deserverdly unflattering terms, so how did they do it?
Well, lean in close, because I’m going to tell you the secret.
(whispering) We’ve been underrating the Giants all season.
Were the 2024 Giants a good team? No. Were they a trainwreck? Also no.
The Giants were certainly not good enough in 2024, but if we’re being honest, they weren’t that bad. For all the moaning and complaining and whining in Giantsland (some of it right here, and please tell your friends to subscribe), this team was mediocre, not awful. They were disappointing, not hopeless.
Think of it like this. Before losing last night, the Giants got to .500 on the strength of the first eight games of their road trip. Could the Pirates have gotten to .500 with a week-long hot streak? The Angels? The Nationals? The Blue Jays? We’re not even into the true dregs of the league, the White Sox and Marlins, here. And the answer is no. None of them could do that, because they had dug themselves a much larger hole than the Giants had.
The 2024 Giants were frustrating. God, they were frustrating. They were the kind of team who, when they needed a win to get back in the playoff race, would politely decline. But they would have won enough leading up to that game to make it at least possible. That was just never on the table for the Rockies, for example.
Perhaps, at this point, you are saying to yourself that yes, the Giants are better than the worst teams in the league. Congratulations, Giants, you are saying, your voice thick with sarcasm. How nice for you, Giants, that you could have been worse.
Am I arguing that this was a good season? Of course not. But there’s a mentality among sports fans that if you’re not first you’re last. There’s this idea that every season that ends in missing the playoffs is an equal disappointment, that an 81-81 season is indistinguishable from 70-92.
This Giants team, we heard again and again this year, is awful. Miserable. Can’t do anything right. Hopeless. Pointless. An embarrassment. A travesty. Heads must roll. Every head must roll. Let’s find some additional heads and make them roll too, just to drive the point home.
But they really weren’t that bad. Yes, a lot of things went wrong, but a lot of things went right too, and in general, those things were more important. Heliot Ramos being good is a way, way bigger deal than Thairo Estrada being bad. Tyler Fitzgerald’s breakout, BABIP-fueled as it was, mattered a lot more than Nick Ahmed’s collapse or the continuing mediocrity of Brett Wisely or Donovan Walton. The team did a lot of things wrong — gosh, I could have written two newsletters a week all season about the things they did wrong — but some massively important things went right too.
And in a truly lost season, that’s not necessarily the case. Nothing really good happened in 2017, and in 2018, the high point was Dereck Rodriguez’s breakout, which was clearly unsustainable (in particular, the way his velocity collapsed as the season went on was a massive red flag). Maybe both Ramos and Fitzgerald will collapse next year like Rodriguez did in 2019, but they both look like major leaguers, and have weathered slumps, then rebounded to perform well again.
As Giants fans, we have seen worthless, hopeless seasons of baseball, and this simply wasn’t one of them. This was something else entirely: it was ordinary. This was an ordinary team having an ordinary season, and the playoffs haven’t yet expanded enough to let them in.
That is, of course, a curse in its own way. To be that close to success without tasting it hurts more, in its way, than to finish 25 games out of the wild card after giving up on the season in June. The Giants technically had hope for most of the year, and the longer you have that hope, the more it hurts to see it dashed. I have been watching this team all year too, so I’m not insensitive to the ways they’ve been unpleasant.
But on a day-to-day basis, they were, essentially, fine. Sometimes they won, sometimes they lost. They weren’t the best team in the league, but I promise you, the best teams in the league also looked like crap for long stretches this season. Have you followed a Yankees fan on Twitter this year? I have, and I promise you, they are livid with their team and want Aaron Boone fired before the playoffs start. Dodger fans have almost given up on October because their pitching is so injured. From June 1 to August 13, the Phillies lost more than they won. The Guardians are an excellent defensive team, but incredibly average in both pitching and hitting. The Brewers have a great group of position players, but extremely suspect pitching.
Every team is like that this year. The Giants are worse than them, but not disastrously so. I know they should have been better, but every good team’s fanbase thinks that they should have been better. You are living in a decent apartment, jealously staring up at the mansions on the hill that no one actually lives in. It could be better, but it could have been better for everyone, and it wasn’t.
This season feels like it was a disaster for the Giants, but it was really just par for the course. It wasn’t the team’s goal to finish .500 or .500ish, and they should have been better, but we, as Giants fans, are not unusually cursed. The Giants aren’t even the most disappointing team in the west, considering that the Rangers won the World Series last year and are currently 75-83. A lot of fanbases have it worse than us.
Is it too Pollyanna-ish to say that it could have been worse? Are my glasses too rose-colored in the wake of another disappointing year? I mean, maybe, but all I know is this: the Giants have played more successful games than a bunch of other teams — they just wrapped up a 9-game road trip that was great, in fact! If you’re going to be a sports fan, you can take those wins, appreciate them, understand that you do have it better than a lot of other teams, and also demand more.
With all due respect maestro, I don’t think most semi thoughtful fans think the Farhan Giants are a train wreck. It’s understood they have a bright thoughtful (usually) front office and their team is the personification of sound sabermetrics. Rather, it’s that they are so so mid. So boring. And the fact they continually finishing .500 is math telling us, “hey, that’s all I can do. If you want better than this, you need stars.” But nothing ever really changes bc the farm system is mid. Because Farhan’s skill set doesn’t extend beyond uncovering value to player development. Thats his shortcoming, really, the entire organizations shortcoming and nothing gets better than mid until the Giants become a top farm system. Until then we keep getting something between train wreck and not good.
Cromulent is a perfectly cromulent word to describe the Giants.