The Giants did something...good?

Are we sure?

On the one hand, you don’t want to read too much into one game. The Giants had a good win against the Marlins with a late-inning comeback, but they’re still 3 games under .500 with a -11 run differential. The Marlins, meanwhile, are 11 games under .500 with a -36 run differential. The Giants should beat them. The Marlins are awful in a way that the Giants, despite their many frustrating games so far in this young season, are not.

It should not be inspiring to beat a team like that in the late innings, especially when their two best relievers were unavailable due to overuse. It should not be an unequivocal positive that the Giants managed to squeak past them. I should not watch that game, get kind of inspired, and think, “You know, maybe this team won’t be so bad this year.”

But hey, beggars can’t be choosers. Right now, Giants fans will take what they can get, and that game was fun as hell.

If you watched yesterday’s game, before the comeback, you had a sense that you had seen this game before and it was not going to end well. Of course the Giants were going to get shut down by a pitcher who had no business shutting them down. Of course they were going to mount some half-assed late inning comeback that would go nowhere. Of course they were facing another dispiriting loss in Miami, the home of so many dispiriting Giants losses. That’s just how the world works.

And then, as if by magic, it wasn’t. Patrick Bailey, instead of hitting into the inning-ending double play that seemed inevitable, hit a sacrifice fly, bringing the Giants to within a run of Miami. Jung Hoo Lee singled in Mike Yastrzemski to tie the game, and then sweet, wonderful Wilmer Flores singled in Nick Ahmed to give the Giants the lead. Tyler Rogers, Ryan Murphy, and Camilo Doval would all not blow the lead out of the bullpen, and the Giants walked out of Marlins Stadium with a win.

The thing about that last paragraph, which was entirely accurate, is that it doesn’t say everything. It doesn’t say how dull the Giants had been this year in their losses, how they’ve spent just about every game since the 2023 All-Star Break strangling any stray hope that they could inspire you to feel good about following them. It doesn’t get into that whole sordid history of the Giants in Miami. It just describes the things that happened in a normal baseball game between normal baseball teams.

But the Giants haven’t felt normal in a long time. They have spent the last several months of regular season play being utterly helpless at the plate. They have been uniquely awful, as far as major league offenses are concerned. They have been full of players who should have been good but weren’t, and at some point you internalize that and realize that the team should be good, but it isn’t, and that’s because it has all of these types of players, and other than Wilmer Flores, they’re taking every at-bat.

So that’s the background against which a comeback win facing a terrible team is inspiring. These Giants don’t do that. They haven’t done that for a while now. They have been committed to wearing down your desire to watch them through good swing decisions that don’t actually work. “We do things the smart way!” the Giants tell us. When we ask if that leads to wins, they change the subject.

So no, it doesn’t matter that the Marlins are Very Bad, because the Giants were, for one night, fun. And now we can dream about them continuing to be fun. We can say that we remember when they were worth watching and they might be worth watching again. We can talk about their heart, and how maybe they won’t end up being the most unclutch team in the history of baseball, and now, at least, kind of mean it.

Most importantly, we can find a reason to have hope.

I don’t know about you, but the Giants baseball I’ve watched so far this year has left me feeling pretty hopeless. It’s just gonna be the same old crap again, I relentlessly thought. I needed a game like last night’s to feel the excitement of a young season. Rationally, I know that it doesn’t change much and that there are all sorts of reasons to pooh-pooh it, but emotionally, it was great.

It really doesn’t matter at all that the Giants came back against the Marlins. Means nothing, when you think about it. It also couldn’t matter more. It means everything when you watch it. That tension is what makes baseball baseball. I’m glad the good part finally came back.