Snakes in the grass

Also on the dirt. There are like 26 of them in the same building all the time.

As it turns out, the 2026 Giants turn into a bunch of incompetent morons when they play the 2026 Diamondbacks. Sure, there’s always at least some incompetent moron in their game, but against other teams they’re capable of turning it down from time to time. This has turned out to not be the case against the Diamondbacks. That isn’t ideal, as situations go, but their first six games against Arizona have told a clear story: these guys suuuuuuuuuuck.

There’s a lot of highly technical data that goes into analyzing this kind of streak, so I made a table to illustrate what’s been happening between the two teams in just about every game this season. However, since Substack doesn’t have any kind of table integration, I did the next best thing and took a screenshot of it:

Please let me know in the comments if you have any questions about this complex, enlightening document.

While we can’t definitively state for sure that the Giants won’t rally to go 7-0 against the Diamondbacks for the rest of the season and thereby take the season series 7-6, we can at least file that under “phenomenally unlikely” and, instead of taking it seriously as a possibility, acknowledge that it is not technically impossible before completely ignoring the possibility.

So: the Giants will lose the season series to the Arizona Diamondbacks. This will mark the fifth consecutive year the Giants lose the season series to the Diamondbacks, with Arizona winning 7 out of 13 in each of the last three years, and 10 out of 19 in the year before that.

Those were competitive games and series, though. As much as you don’t want to lose more than you win against anyone, going 6-7 (that one’s for the kids!) against a team isn’t a sign of an organization in disarray.

Unfortunately, going 0-6 against a team is absolutely a sign that this organization is in disarray.

Remember Tim Lincecum? I guess I can assume you do. Remember how as soon as Paul Goldschmidt came on the scene and started torching him every time the Giants played the Diamondbacks, it was extremely dispiriting? And remember how Lincecum never regained his Cy Young form after facing Goldschmidt? You might have been tempted to look at that situation and say, oh no, Goldschmidt broke Lincecum. He had been rolling along, and then he pitched in Arizona, and then he stopped rolling. It’s all Goldschmidt’s fault!

It wasn’t, of course. Lincecum’s body was starting to break down under the strain of being an undersized pitcher who’d been in the majors for years. Goldschmidt was not a cause of this. He was an effect. 2009 Lincecum probably retires Goldschmidt handily most of the time. 2012 Lincecum was not the same guy, and it showed in his results.

In this metaphor, Tim Lincecum represents the Giants and Paul Goldschmidt represents the Diamondbacks, in case that’s not clear. Something inside the Giants is broken, and they might be able to hide it some of the time, but as soon as they face their Goldschmidt, the Diamondbacks, the jig is up. There is no more hiding. There is just the reality of their godawful play in every respect, and once you see it happen, you can’t deny it.

Here’s how the two teams have performed against each other this year (not including yesterday’s game):

Do you see that difference in runs? That’s a 21-run difference! In 5 games! That’s 4 runs per game! That’s a lot! The average score of those games was 7-3, though including yesterday’s results, the new average Giants-Diamondbacks score is 6.5-2.8. And if you’re wondering how the Giants will score 0.8 runs, just remember, the Giants will do literally anything to keep from scoring an entire whole run. If they have to shave two tenths off of it, so be it.

My point, as much as I have one, is this: the San Francisco Giants are a very bad baseball team. I know that this is a novel conclusion and you might want to reject it, but just try to sit with it for a minute. It might turn out that you’d been feeling the same thing for a while now. They’re a very bad baseball team, which you can see just about every night. You can especially see it, though, when they go up against the Diamondbacks. As much as you can claim a 22-34 team has been “exposed” by playing a better opponent, that’s what’s happening here. The whole league has the Giants’ number. The Diamondbacks just seem to have it a little bit more.