The Giants are going to the postseason.
Last night with clinch night, with San Francisco winning a game against the Padres that was never especially close, and it was appropriate that the Padres were their opponent on the night they clinched. San Diego was supposed to be one of the titans of the division, and instead the Giants stepped right over them to lock up baseball’s first postseason spot, seemingly not even breaking a sweat.
They won’t be satisfied with just a postseason berth, though. They have a multi-game lead in the NL West, and even with the mighty Dodgers charging hard in second place, the Giants will absolutely be disappointed to miss out on the division title. They don’t want the consolation prize of the wild card game. They can win the division, and they want to win the division, and they think they should win the division.
To that I say, what?
Go back to February. If I told you in February that the Giants would host the Wild Card Game this year, you, a Giants fan, would have been ecstatic. Well, first you’d have demanded some way to verify the information, but setting that aside, if I convinced you somehow that that would happen, it would have been a shock. This wasn’t supposed to be their year, you know. They had two superteams that were unequivocally going to finish ahead of them in the NL West. Their rotation was cobbled together out of one-year deals to guys no one else wanted. Their offense had been good in 2020, but that was a short season and you couldn’t trust that those numbers meant anything. They couldn’t compete with the creme de la creme.
Instead, friends, the Giants are the creme de la creme.
It’s slowly become the new normal over the course of the year, but let’s take a moment to consider how this is staggering. Last year, they missed the playoffs by one game, but they were the fake playoffs, expanded from five teams to eight, and it never really felt like they deserved to be there. This year, other than a lull for a couple of days at the beginning of September, the Giants have continuously had the best record in baseball for months, and they have won every way there is to win. They’ve won blowouts and nail-biters; they’ve scored early and hung on, and trailed all game before ninth-inning comebacks.
It feels like everything I’ve written this month has been marveling that the Giants are actually for real, but that’s only because I’m still trying to not be stuck on that. Sure, you can add Darin Ruf and LaMonte Wade Jr and whatnot, but this is in large part the same team that went 77-85 in 2019. Posey, Belt, Crawford, Longoria, Yastrzemski, and Dickerson have all been major pieces of both teams, and Steven Duggar’s gotten about the same number of plate appearances too.
They’ve just gotten better. We can go into all the coaching and analytics and everything that’s behind it, but the fact remains that the core of the Giants offense, who were not young two years ago and are even less young now, have undergone a staggering improvement that you do not expect to see in today’s game (Yastrzemski and Dickerson have gotten worse this year, of course, but on the whole, it fits).
And that’s why the 2021 Giants are going to be a postseason team this year. Even with all the success they’ve had, it still seems off to say, but they deserve it. After years in the wilderness — the worst team in baseball in 2017, bad in 2018 and 2019, mediocre in 2020 — they’re back. This wasn’t supposed to be their year, but here they are. The team was supposed to have to wait for Joey Bart and Heliot Ramos to sniff .500, and Marco Luciano to be one of the top teams in the league, but they ignored all that.
Is it too much of a cliche to say “Nobody believed in us?” Well, that’s too bad, because it’s true.
They got here anyway, with veterans and rookies and contributors both unexpected and very expected. They beat aces when they throw out bullpen games. They’ve gotten 146 innings of 123 ERA+ ball from Anthony DeSclafani. Darin Ruf is now one of the best hitters in the league.
The Giants are a playoff team. It’s fun. It’s cool. I like it. Let’s do this every year.