After Tuesday’s game, the good vibes from the Rockies series had died a brutal, horrible, Game of Thrones-style death. The Giants blew a 6-2 lead in an agonizing ninth inning, one of those innings where the failures built and built and suddenly found themselves propagating themselves with compound interest, where every Giants fan watching knew exactly what was going to happen, that even when they were up 6-4 the game was as good as lost. The Giants managed to preserve the tie going into extra innings, of course, but didn’t score in the top half of the tenth and watched the Pirates walk off on the first pitch of the bottom of the inning.
It was awful. It was dispiriting. It was the kind of game that makes you tweet “Season over” in late May, and sure, you objectively know that’s an overreaction, but in the moment what you’re actually thinking is “This franchise will never be worth watching again and I will still dedicate years of my life to following them for some reason and why am I such a goddamn sucker,” so really just saying “Season over” is toning it way down.
Then last night, they came back from a 5-0 deficit with an inspiring extra inning win. Never mind! Everything’s great!
It is kind of incredible how fast your opinion on your team can turn around due solely to one comeback. Around the seventh inning yesterday, everything about the Giants was coated in cyanide. Luis Matos and Heliot Ramos are coming down to Earth. Marco Luciano can’t field. Luke Jackson doesn’t have it. Camilo Doval isn’t a true lockdown closer. Blake Snell is a disaster of a signing. Bob Melvin is like Bruce Bochy if he never won anything. Just rampant, endless, entirely deserved negativity.
And then the Giants scored one in the eighth and one in the ninth to tie it, and four in the tenth to win it. Suddenly, there were so many positives to think about! Matt Chapman is turning it around. LaMonte Wade Jr is an OBP machine. Patrick Bailey makes the whole team better. Luis Matos can put together some clutch at-bats. Randy Rodriguez might just be a dominant bullpen arm. Tyler Rogers is having one of his good years. Ryan Walker is just about unhittable.
This was the same team yesterday as it was the day before, but coming off a great win instead of an awful loss seems to have changed everything. Suddenly all the doors that shut on Tuesday are a bit ajar again. Yes, it’s still stupid and inane to do any scoreboard watching in late May, but the Giants are just one game out of the final Wild Card spot. This time yesterday, the Wild Card thing would have been laughable, but today? It’s downright premature-but-mildly-plausible!
This is the emotional whiplash that comes from playing every day, sure, but there’s something else too. Social media encourages you to have the most extreme opinion possible in order to get attention and drive engagement. So the Giants can’t just be a mediocre team that has the talent to be better but can’t quite get there. They have to be a walking disaster, a national punchline, a perennially irrelevant farce of an organization, a way for Charles Johnson to grab liberal Bay Area cash and funnel it straight to Marjorie Taylor Greene.
And…they’re not really any of that. They’re a team with some players who are underperforming and a few who are overperforming. I don’t think they’re particularly good or particularly bad. They’re not particularly anything. They aren’t good enough to make a deep playoff run, but they might be able to string together enough entertaining games to make the season fun.
Is that enough? Should it be enough? In 1998, the Giants won 89 games and missed the playoffs. Was that a worthwhile season? In 2015, the Giants were looking pretty good, then got decimated by injuries and limped to an 84-win finish. Was that a waste of time? The 2009 Giants couldn’t hit, still won 88 games, and missed the playoffs. That’s not even getting into 1987 or 2000 or 2016, when they got in but didn’t advance.
If the Giants can turn it around enough to be a watchable team for the rest of the year, then I think that’s enough. There’s absolutely no chance that they’ll be the best team in the division, and they won’t be one of the three best teams in the league. Expecting them to play in that league right now is just setting yourself up for disappointment. I just want a team that doesn’t lose more than it wins, and one whose future looks brighter than its past.
This isn’t their year, and that’s fine. Not every year can be your year. Those can’t be the standards right now. But the continued development of Matos, Ramos, and Luciano can and should be the standards. Keaton Winn and eventually Tristan Beck coming back healthy and Jordan Hicks continuing his hot streak as a starter and Logan Webb doing Logan Webb things and maybe Blake Snell not being a disaster at some point would all be great. But I don’t think this team should win every game. All I ask is that every time they have a game like Tuesday’s, they follow it up with a game like Wednesday’s.
This encapsulates my feelings over the past 48 hours. Perfect.
'Watchable' - si, Maestro.
In this tilted crapshoot, that's all we can ask for.