With the first four games of the year out of the way, I thought it would be fun to look at what new information has popped up that we can rely on. What lessons can we gleam from the first 2/81 of the Giants’ season?
Nothing.
That was easy. What should I talk about now?
Oh, I kid. I like to make jokes here. But it’s so easy to look at everything that happens in the first few games of a season and give the events meaning; specifically, the meaning that you already thought would happen before the games. Bullpen meltdown on the first day? That just means that you were right and Farhan doesn’t know how to build a bullpen! Mediocre start for Johnny Cueto? His career is going to end in a Giants uniform. No offensive production from Mike Yastrzemski? Turns out that HBP at the end of Spring Training that everyone said was no big deal is a pretty big deal!
And look, any of those things could be true. Just like it could be true that Evan Longoria and Buster Posey rediscover their forms from 2012, or that Kevin Gausman has figured it out, or that Donnie Barrels will rock a .600 BABIP all year (well, maybe not that last one). These things are on the table.
But. You have no idea which of them will come true. There’s no way to tell this early in the year. You can catch bad vibes from Brandon Belt’s at bats (the hole in his swing is back!!!!), or get really excited that Jake McGee opened the year with two shutdown innings, but their seasons could turn around in one game.
Yes, the defense currently seems like it’ll be indicted as a war crime by late May, but it won’t necessarily stay that way all year. For example, one year, the defense committed three errors in the first game of the season (a loss), then the team lost the next game, and then they committed three errors again in the third game of the season (also a loss), including multiple backbreakers in the bottom of the 7th that allowed the tying and winning runs to score. After three games, the team’s top three pitchers looked shaky to awful, the defense was abysmal, and there were multiple dead spots in the lineup.
The year was 2012. Things turned out fine.
Now, this obviously isn’t to say that the team looking bad means they’ll win the world series, even if Calvin makes a good argument here:
But let’s consider how the 2012 Giants, a team we know was not a disaster, looked after one weekend of baseball. Of Tim Lincecum, Madison Bumgarner, and Matt Cain, the best ERA belonged to Cain, and that was 7.50. Brandon Crawford, on the team pretty much solely for his defense, committed that error that cost the team Game 3. The two guys fighting for the starting first base job had OPSes of .523 and .282; the guys trading second base starts had OPSes of .333 and .000; Angel Pagan’s OPS was .300; Jeremy Affeldt, breaking the bank with a $5 million salary, had an ERA of 9.
Oh, and the team that swept them — the Diamondbacks — had won the division the year before. So they were already in a hole to the likely best team in the division. Which was not ideal.
Now, of those disasterous starts, how many of them were harbingers of the season the player would have? Lincecum’s was; 2012 was the start of a sudden and precipitous decline for him. He Who Shall Not Be Named, fighting it out with fellow lefty Brandon Belt for the first base job, ended up with a .608 OPS on the year, so .523 wasn’t too far off. Of the two second basemen, Emmanuel Burriss was awful, and Ryan Theriot was bad, though not quite “has no business on a major league field” bad.
As for the rest them, though, nope. Bumgarner had a very nice season before a rough patch near the end of the year, while Cain had the best year of his career. Crawford’s defense was as advertised and he ended up hitting enough to be a legitimate major league player, while Brandon Belt had a perfectly respectable .781 OPS on the season. Affeldt ended up having a solid season. Some of the poor performances continued through the year, but they weren’t predictive of anything.
The 2021 Giants aren’t likely to be particularly good, but the fact that they dropped two out of three to the Mariners isn’t why, and it’s also not a litmus test for the season. They’re a flawed team with some bright spots and some holes, and if on Tuesday the bright spots are shining and on Wednesday the holes are dark and perilous, that’s to be expected. A solid win against the Padres is more fun to watch than a dispiriting loss, but no matter how the game had turned out last night, it wouldn’t have been a defining moment for the 2021 Giants.
A game at the beginning of the season is just one game. We all know what a small sample size is and why not to pay attention to it. Yet, when the season starts, it’s hard to ignore the only information you have. But stay strong. It’s gonna be okay.