The Giants had a good month of April. Remember April, when things were better? They went 14-7 in April, scoring 104 runs and allowing just 64. At the end of the day on April 30, they had a half game lead on the 13-7 Dodgers and the 14-8 Padres. The season was shaping up to be another good one, just like 2021 had been.
Then they stopped winning so much, which if I’m being honest was a questionable decision.
Since May started, the Giants are 25-26, and if you’ve been watching, you know they’ve earned that record. Combining May and June, they’ve scored 248 runs and given up 248 runs. They’ve been aggressively mediocre, stumbling exactly on cue. Bad break goes against DeSclafani? Well, now he’s given up seven runs. Zack Littell is bad now? Well, there’s no one better to replace him. Brandon Crawford goes down for 10 days? Thairo Estrada will make 4 errors at shortstop by the time he gets back.
Yes, the Giants have been injured. Brandon Crawford, as previously mentioned, is on the IL. Anthony DeSclafani and Alex Cobb have been on and off the IL all year. LaMonte Wade Jr is still making his way back. Jakob Junis was a revelation as a starter and he won’t be back anytime soon, and Luis Gonzalez’s back isn’t doing him any favors and Brandon Belt and Tommy La Stella aren’t at 100%. I get it. I do.
But. Most of those injuries were predictable, and the ones that weren’t are mostly to players who were never expected to be vital members of the team. Belt and Crawford are old in baseball years, and some attrition is expected there. Cobb has spent a lot of his career being hurt, and DeSclafani’s a 32 year old who’s dealt with injuries too, and really, if you expect La Stella to be able to play second base at this point in his career, that’s on you.
The Giants shouldn’t have to stress out that Jakob Junis is hurt because Jakob Junis shouldn’t have the third highest bWAR on the team. Luis Gonzalez going down shouldn’t have been a huge deal because Luis Gonzalez shouldn’t be seventh in plate appearances on the team.
The Giants were banking on strong performances from a lot of fragile players, and as fragile players tend to do, a lot of them broke instead. Players in their mid-30s tend to break down. Players with injury histories tend to be bigger risks than those without. Players in their mid-30s with injury histories, also known as “the entire projected starting infield,” are simply going to be out for some period of time, full stop.
The team has had the depth to cover some of those injuries. Junis and Gonzalez and Thairo Estrada filled in well when they had to, but on a team designed to be injured, their jobs were always going to be starter this year. They were just going to start in place of different people throughout the year: Estrada is starting at shortstop this week, then second base the next week, then third the week after that.
My point isn’t that there’s something wrong with their performances or anything like that. My point is that this is the team’s true talent level. If Wade comes back fine in a couple weeks, then someone else will get hurt because the team is full of players who are likely to get hurt. There is no “when the whole team is healthy,” because someone on the team is bound to always be hurt. It will be this guy today and that guy tomorrow, but it will always be someone, and that someone will
The fluke in the Giants season isn’t the last two months of mediocrity. It was the first month of .667 play. These are not the 2021 Giants. The bullpen is worse, the defense is worse, and the catchers are not going to the Hall of Fame. Could they be a little better than 25-26? Sure. Could they sneak into the expanded playoffs? Yeah, I guess. But, absent a remaking of the team as we near the trade deadline, should we expect them to be an elite team like they were last year? No, I don’t think so.
It’s not that the Giants are bad. It’s that they’re not good enough, and if we’re being honest, they were never going to be.