This is what a good baseball team looks like
Like a team that will lose 3-2 to a very bad team sometimes. Baseball!
It’s not that I think Giants fans took 2021 for granted. We all, as a group, enjoyed every minute of the 107-win season. It was the team’s first winning season since 2016, and their first season-that-fans-felt-okay-about-in-September since 2014. They won a great playoff race, and had a .600 winning percentage every month, and until the NLDS, everything went their way.
What I’m supposing here is, maybe the season was too good?
Now, I don’t mean that it’s bad that the Giants won a lot of games or that good things happened to them. But from the fans’ perspective, I think we’d forgotten what it was like to root for a good team, day-in, day-out. Because last year’s team was wildly out of the ordinary, and now they’re our basis for comparison.
What do you mean they lost 5 in a row? Good teams don’t lose 5 in a row!
Well, good teams do lose 5 in a row; it’s just that the good team you followed most recently was too good and they didn’t.
The bullpen is too unreliable! You can’t have a good team with a bullpen that falls apart like this!
Bullpens have bad months sometimes. It doesn’t mean we’re back in August 2016 or anything, but it happens. It just didn’t happen last year, during the freshest comparable season in your memory.
The offense is going cold for games at a time! You can’t win like that!
The Giants have scored the fifth most runs in baseball. They are scoring slightly fewer runs per game than they did last year, but it seems much worse because they’re giving up more runs because of the bad defense.
The defense keeps giving away games! That’s unacceptable!
Okay, yeah, fair.
But here’s the thing: with everything that’s gone wrong so far, the Giants are currently on pace for 91.5 wins. That’s better than the 1997 team. That’s better than the 2014 team. That’s only a half win away from the win total of the 2010 team. Those were all good teams. This is a good team.
They just have flaws. Last year, they didn’t have flaws. That was the weird thing, the abnormality. Every time something went wrong, two other things went right to make up for it. Bullpen blew a late-inning lead? Not to worry, LaMonte Wade Jr is up in the 9th. Offense had an off night and only scored one run? Well, Anthony DeSclafani threw a shutout. Problem solved!
This year, they’re not quite so charmed. Last year, they overperformed their Pythagorean record by four games; this year, they’re right on. Last year, their worst month was July, when they went 15-10; this year, they were 13-14 in May. Last year, they DFA’d Aaron Sanchez, who had a 3.06 ERA, because they correctly figured they could do better; this year, they’re having trouble keeping 4 members of their rotation healthy. Last year, the nine — nine! — relievers with the most innings on the team all had ERAs at or under 3; this year, half the bullpen has an ERA over 5.
The point of this isn’t to get lost in the weeds of how last year’s team was one (1) Buster Posey better or anything like that, but to drive home the point that last year’s team was not normal. It’s hard to remember what regular baseball teams look like when your two most recent examples of Good Baseball Team You Watched A Lot are the 2021 Giants and the 2020s Dodgers, both of which were (and are) way outside those norms.
This one isn’t. It’s a normal good team, with flaws. Tyler Rogers didn’t have a .350 BABIP last year, because last year was a magic year built out of mithril on top of a rainbow. This year is a nice house in a good neighborhood. I can promise that about 15 other fanbases are jealous of what we have, even if it’s not as great as what we had last year. We should still celebrate our good teams, even when they’re not transcendent.
I’ll admit, though, the fucking Warriors being a win away from another championship isn’t helping my point here.