Keys for the Giants in the second half

The second half of the season starts tomorrow, and the Giants will head to Toronto with a record of 52-45. The last time they had a record that good at the All-Star Break was…2023, when they were 49-41, and sure, their second-half collapse that year led to Gabe Kapler getting fired, inspired multiple stories about clubhouse discord, and marked the beginning of the end of the Farhan regime, but otherwise it went pretty well! Remember how Sean Manaea was solid down the stretch? That sure was neat.

So in time-honored I Don’t Have Any More Interesting Ideas tradition, we’re going to look at five important stories for the second half. Why five? Because it’s a manageable number that still makes it seem like you’re getting a good amount of Content.

We all love Content, don’t we?

Rafael Devers starts hitting

Since coming to the Giants, Rafael Devers has not hit like a star. He’s hit .202/.330/.326 in his first 109 PAs as a Giant, which is way out of line with everything he’s done in his major league career. Even in 2018, his only below average season as a hitter, he hit for a lot more power than he’s shown in San Francisco. Some of that is the park, but more of that is him: Devers’s ISO has dropped 100 points since coming to the Giants, and his strikeout rate has climbed from 23% to 31%. Whatever effect park factors have on a player, there’s more going on.

Obviously, it’s been a tumultuous year for Devers, and he’s been dealing with a disk injury in his lower back on top of that. Devers has insisted that the injury hasn’t played a part in his slump, but players say that all the time when they’re injured, only to admit after they’re healthier that, yeah, it affected them. Hopefully, the four days of rest over the All-Star Break will allow Devers to get healthy and start raking the ball like he did in Boston. If not, we’re probably looking at IL time sooner rather than later, because the Giants need Devers healthy.

Ryan Walker gets his strikeout stuff back

There are a lot of ways in which Ryan Walker’s 2025 is similar to his 2024. His walk rate is basically the same. He’s still giving up a lot of weak contact, and batters aren’t getting a lot of hits off of it. He’s even doing a better job of avoiding his pitchers getting barreled up, and hitters are homering at a lower rate off of him than they did last year.

But he’s not striking nearly as many guys out. 2024 Ryan Walker struck out 32% of the batters he faced; 2025 Walker is striking out 23% (hey, it’s a reverse Devers!). He’s not getting nearly as many swings on his pitches outside of the zone as he did last year, and when he does, batters are making contact more often. They’re making more contact on pitches in the zone too. Batters made contact 73% of the time they swung against Walker last year; this year, it’s 81%. Batters swung through his pitches 12% of the time last year; this year, it’s 8%.

There’s nothing in Walker’s pitch profile that’s radically different from last year: velocity and movement are both very similar (his sinker has a little more movement than it did last year, but not by a whole lot). It could be that the problem is he’s not getting enough first pitch strikes, which puts the hitter ahead in the count, allowing him to lay off pitches that would have otherwise been tempting, in which case the solution is to throw more strikes.

It’s hard to say from afar exactly how to fix this problem, since so much of what Walker is doing looks similar to what he did last year. But if the team’s offense is going to be inconsistent (or consistently below average), then they need their biggest weapons in the bullpen to step up, and that means they need Ryan Walker to get back to who he was last year.

Verlander gets a win maybe

Justin Verlander has not been great for the Giants, but he has generally been a major league pitcher, which, hey, not bad for 42. But that’s also not that good for 42, and the Giants are in desperate need of players who are good. Yes, Verlander has seen multiple potential wins vanish specifically because Ryan Walker has a bad game, but on the whole, even if he maybe deserves to be 3-6 instead of 0-7, that’s still not a particularly strong season.

Verlander was optimistic after his last start that he’d found some life on his pitches, which had been missing for a little while. Getting a few extra days off for the All-Star Break will probably help him, but it’s tough to be a major league pitcher at his age. It’s even tougher when your offense can’t score and your bullpen constantly blows the game, but just focusing on the things he can control, Verlander’s margin for error is smaller than it was just a few years ago. He’s probably gotten a little unlucky with his BABIP and strand rate, so it’s not unreasonable to expect his ERA to come down a bit in the second half, but the Giants need more than that out of him. They don’t need Cy Young Verlander, but Good Pitcher Verlander would go a long way for this team to compete.

Jung! Hoo! Lee!

Remember when he was electric? Lee’s April was a big part of the Giants’ early surge. He was hitting .319/.375/.526 as of April 30, when the team was 19-12. Since then, he’s hit .214/.288/.341, and the team has played .500 ball (more on that in a minute). He’s rebounded in July, with a .324/.366/.486 line so far, but that’s very BABIP-driven, as was his March-April line, though those are the two months in which he’s also had the most power.

More importantly than the precise numbers, though, are the vibes. When Jung Hoo Lee is hitting well, the vibes are fantastic. When he’s not, his ABs are miserable. The way he lengthens the lineup, giving pitchers something to worry about, makes the offense extremely threatening. When he’s just occasionally hitting singles, and not even doing that particularly often, guys can pitch around the hitters in front of him to get to him. For a struggling offense, that can be almost a death sentence for a rally, and the Giants need every rally they can get.

Play better than .500

Okay, yeah, this one is self-evident, but there’s always one of these in a “5 things to watch” article. If you read 5 Things To Know About Your New Keurig, then number 5 is always gonna be, like, “Don’t forget to enjoy your coffee!” Yes! Yes, everyone already knows that the point of having coffee is to enjoy it. You don’t need to put that on the list!

And yet, here I am, putting “Win more games than you lose” on a list of important things for a baseball team to do over the course of multiple months. In my defense, at the end of April, the Giants were 19-12. Since then, they’ve gone 33-33, and looked every bit like a .500 team. Sometimes the offense would come to life just enough for the Giants to lock down a tight win, and sometimes it would be a wild disappointment, but for two and a half months, what we’ve been left with is a team that is crushingly average.

Well, they need to be better than that. So my last key to the second half is for them to be better than that. Stop hovering around the 7 games over .500 mark. When your winning streak winds down, don’t lose a bunch of games to put yourselves back at square zero. Have success, build on it, increase that winning percentage, and make a real run at the playoffs. It’ll take an actually good team to make it, and not just one that’s been coasting since the start of May. Hopefully, the Giants can prove they are that team. Otherwise, well, we’re looking at yet another Almost Five Hundred Season, and we all know that’s not good enough.