So the Giants aren't in the playoffs
Four years in a row! One more and they get another disappointing baseball season
The extremely expanded playoffs start today, involving more than half the teams in the league, and the Giants aren’t one of them.
You can blame Rob Drake’s three acre strike zone for this if you want, and that’s not totally wrong, but on the other hand, there are way more teams in the playoffs than there should be. If you put yourself in a position where it comes down to the last day of the season, well, that’s because you weren’t good enough to make the real playoffs. This was the point of postseason expansion in the short season: if you get left out, it’s because you deserve it.
The Giants deserved it. Now, if we’re being totally honest here, the Cardinals and Brewers also deserved it, but them’s the breaks. After winning the first game of Friday’s doubleheader, the Giants were one win away from the postseason, and they didn’t get it on Friday night, and they didn’t get it on Saturday, and they didn’t deserve to win by three runs on Sunday, which is apparently what they needed to do:
They shouldn’t have had to do that! They also should have not been in the position where that was on the table.
Also, JFC, that’s just a horrific game from Rob Drake.
But regardless of how we got there and regardless of how the Giants didn’t, the playoffs start today. It’s a weird playoff system for a weird year: 8 teams make it in each league, the same number as used to be in each league. When they get to the LCSes and World Series, they’ll be held in neutral parks. They’re cutting off days to cram more games in and still finish on time; travel between parks will now be minimized.
We’ll never know, of course, but I’m pretty confident the Giants would not have started the Second Even Year Dynasty this year. They’d have gotten the Dodgers, a superior team who won every series against them in 2020, in the first round. If they’d somehow made it through that, then they’d have had to deal with the Padres (or the Paul Goldschmidt Cardinals), another superior team who won every series against them in 2020. And after that another good team, and then a fourth good team, and while any baseball team technically has a chance in any series, an inferior team is tremendously unlikely to win four series in a row.
Every one of the Giants’ weaknesses would have been immediately exposed in their first playoff series against the Dodgers. The team had an inconsistent starting staff, an up and down bullpen, and a lineup that would often just disappear against quality opponents. They made the most out of their talent by exploiting matchups and putting guys in good positions to succeed, but that only takes you so far when you stop playing the Rockies.
The Rockies, by the way, did not make the playoff field. Very surprising! We’ll dispatch a correspondent to get to the bottom of this.
The playoff field is less interesting to me personally because the Giants aren’t in it, but it’s not unfair to the team. They were granted a massive amount of leeway, and used every bit of it, then tried to push a couple inches further. The answer, as always, was, “Be better,” which they probably couldn’t have done. The Giants were supposed to be extremely bad coming into the year, and instead they were a win away from .500. Could be worse! Could also be better, but there’s no use dwelling on a not-that-good team getting a mediocre result. They didn’t make it. It happens, and then you move on.
Even if Rob Drake’s strike zone was fucking trash.