After the Giants took 6 out of 7 games leading up to Tuesday — 2 from the Diamondbacks, 3 out of 4 from the mighty Dodgers, greatest team that has ever existed, and the first from the Angels — it was easy to feel like they were unstoppable. For example, had anyone stopped them hitherto this season? They had not. Ergo, unstoppable.
I used multiple fancy words in that last paragraph, so you know it must be true.
And yet, the Angels stopped them. The Troutless, Ohtani-conserving Angels strolled into Oracle Park and made the game a not-game by the fourth inning, putting up 8 runs on Alex Wood and Matt Wisler, compared to Angels starter Andrew Heaney, who gave up just one while pitching into the seventh.
It was, in other words, a garden variety bad loss. Happens to every team multiple times a month. No big deal, nothing to worry about. Shake it off, come back strong tomorrow (or the day after tomorrow if tomorrow is an off day), and don’t think about it again.
Except.
In addition to being just one game out of 162, which you shouldn’t read too much into (which it still is!), the game was also a warning. Because this (gestures indistinctly towards the 100-win pace the Giants are currently on) won’t last all season. This (gestures fairly distinctly towards the starting staff being third in the majors in ERA despite all projections to the contrary) is almost certainly unsustainable. This (stares menacingly at Steven Duggar’s .475 BABIP) is fun for the moment, but might not conitnue being fun through the next moment.
I am not saying that the Giants are actually a bad team who will certainly get swept in every series until an enlarging sun boils all the oceans, but we should manage our expectations here. Before Tuesday, the only games the Giants lost by 5 or more runs were a Sunday game against the Padres and a Sunday game against the Dodgers. In one of the commercials the team has running right now, Mike Krukow says that they’re in every game, and he’s not wrong.
For two months, it’s been a dream season. Even if it doesn’t come crashing back down to Earth, a gentle descent down to Earth is still going to hurt quite a bit. We’ve gotten used to not having to worry about games like Tuesday’s Angels game. Sure, there have been bad losses, but they’ve been bad close losses, ones we could all blame on the bullpen and then go about our lives with the happy knowledge that the Giants bullpen, theoretically the most fixable part of any baseball team, is responsible for all the team’s ills.
But the dream can’t last forever. The Giants are putting a new first baseman on the IL seemingly every day. The starting staff is good, but not this good, and the offense is good, but beatable. Kevin Gausman is going to have a bad start at some point. Farhan Zaidi swallows eight waiver claims every night in his sleep without even realizing it, and that’s not going to give you core, reliable guys in the ‘pen. The Giants will have a bad month at some point, and it will seem like it’s all over.
In other words, the Giants will experience normal baseball things. So far this year, they have overcome them all with aplomb, but there’s no guarantee that that good fortune will continue throughout the year.
And that’s fine. This wasn’t supposed to be the year the Giants competed, remember. Maybe the old guard was going to have some nice years on their way out, but this year was all about setting up 2022 for Joey Bart and Heliot Ramos and whatever other prospects forced themselves into the conversation. Since they’re already on their opponent’s 30 yard line, there’s no use punting, of course, but there could be sacks. Or…interceptions? Fumbles? I don’t know what any of these things represent or how they’re distinct from each other, to be honest.
Look, that metaphor really got away from me and I’m sorry for that.
The point is this: it’s incredibly likely that we’re going to see a lot more games like Tuesday’s stinker than we have so far this year. The smartypantses at Baseball Prospectus have plugged the Giants’ hot start into their computers and calculated that their most likely win total for the year is…82. The Giants, they think, will go 48-59 to finish the year.
There are a lot of reasons BP could be wrong about this, so I’m not taking it as gospel and neither should you. But that poor stretch to end the year certainly is much more likely than it’s seemed so far. And part of that likelihood is that it’s really hard to be this good all year. Even teams that are supposed to be really good aren’t going to be this good all year. So even if there is no grand collapse (a situation that I’m in favor of), the team is still unlikely to keep up their pace.
We have, in other words, just lived through the good times. Like all good times, they seemed precarious and not that good while we were in the middle of them, but that’s just how things shake out sometimes. It’s not necessarily all downhill from here, but there’s a lot more dominated-by-Andrew-Heaney performances in the future than I think any of us would care to admit.