The Rockies have been an atrocious team on the road this year. They have not been the worst road team in the majors — the opposite of congratulations go out to the Arizona Diamondbacks, who you may remember from such films as Not Winning Away From Home For Two Months Straight — but they have gone 18-50, a .265 winning percentage. Over a full year, that’s a 43-win team, a truly miserable outfit just eking out the title of Not The Worst Team In Major League History.
At home, though, they’re excellent. They’re 45-27 at Coors Field this year, which is the sixth best home record in the majors. As of last Sunday, they had not been swept at home this season. For example, they won their last seven games against the Padres — a reasonably good baseball team — at home this year. They are formidable. They are tough. Despite their overall record, you cannot take them lightly.
The Giants swept them, winning the first two games convincingly and the third dramatically, the way they do. This is because the Giants are good, which is nice.
The Dodgers were supposed to be a juggernaut of a superteam of Avengers and Defenders and Justice Leaguers. The Giants, who beat two of their stars over the weekend, took the season series from them, and currently have a 2-game lead in the NL West. They are not unstoppable — the Braves and Brewers both took the series they played against the Giants recently — but they are, at least, extremely hard to stop. You can go into any game, any series, and reasonably believe that the Giants will win.
It’s been a very long time since we could have any real confidence that the Giants would show up every day. The last time was the first half of 2016, before they collapsed that year in a bullpenpocalypse. The team stormed its way to the best record in baseball at the All-Star Break, weathering injury and seeming nigh-unbeatable. But the second half proved that the team was eminently beatable, just a veritable smorgasbord of beatability. Even the 2014 team, who had already snapped out of their two month-long funk by the time August rolled around, didn’t play like world-beaters in September, going just 13-12 and not quite being able to take home field advantage in the Wild Card Game away from the Pirates.
Friends, despite all that, things worked out okay in 2014.
No, it was back in 2012 when the Giants last felt like, well, giants down the stretch. They went 20-10 after September 1, easily outpacing a Dodger team that went 16-13 over the same span. They hadn’t quite been clicking all year in the way that this team has, but they certainly looked good in September. It would have been a successful season even without a World Series win, but the Giants went ahead and won themselves a World Series anyway, which I think we can all agree was a swell idea.
This team, the 2021 Giants, is the kind of team that can go out and do that, and not just because 2021 is 2012 with the last two numbers switched. They’re a team you can believe in, which is a welcome change from the last several seasons. It’s a change you can believe in, you could say. Maybe that could be a catchy slogan with some workshopping? Well, I’m not doing that, so we’ll never know.
This Giants team is as fun to watch as a baseball team can be. Just look at that last Rockies series. First, a blowout win that got very mildly tense at one point when it looked like Colorado might be able to put themselves in a position to later possibly put themselves in a position to tie the game, perhaps. Second, a blowout win where absolutely nothing good happened for the Rockies. Third, a dramatic late-inning comeback for the Giants, who, down by one to start the ninth, scored 4 runs before Jake McGee breezed through a 1-2-3 bottom of the ninth.
That’s basically everything you could want in a series. Good pitching, incredible hitting — oh, I didn’t mention the 10 extra base on Tuesday, did I? Well, the Giants hit seven doubles, two triples, and a home run on Tuesday — and just a soupcon of doubt that they could come back and win on Wednesday before they very convincingly came back and won on Wednesday. And remember, the Rockies are really good at home. In August, they went 10-2 at Coors Field. They are not pushovers there, and the Giants pushed them over anyway.
It’s not just September. The Giants have done this, incredibly consistently, all year long. Their worst month of 2021 — their worst — was July, when they went 15-10, for a winning percentage of .600. They have won 6 of every 10 games in every month of the year. There is no getting this team down, no demoralizing them. They pick themselves up, and if they lose today they’ll win tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.
Here’s what I want to close on: The 1997 Giants were the first really inspiring Giants team that I remember. They were unanimously picked to finish at the bottom of the NL West before the season started. Instead, they won the division by two games, with Brian Johnson hitting a 12th inning homer against the Dodgers along the way that became one of the iconic moments in franchise history. Whenever they needed a game — desperately needed it — they won. They weren’t the most talented team, but they were the most resilient (they were not the most #ResilientSF team because that hashtag didn’t exist yet and neither did hashtags in general).
That 1997 team, which shocked baseball and electrified the city, finished 90-72. The 2021 Giants are 90-50. They’ve matched the win total of the ‘97 team, with 22 games to go. They’re good. They’re so good. They’re a good team, and it’s incredibly nice to watch.