What's an easy schedule even worth?

At some point this season, if the Giants want to be more than a mediocre team that collapses as soon as it gets within spitting distance of .500, they have to play well on the road. There’s not really any getting around that, no bargaining, no loopholes. They have been awful on the road for the last year, and they could try firing Gabe Kapler again to fix it, but somehow that seems like it just won’t take.

The Giants are currently 1-3 on a road trip that, while it’s certainly not the friendliest possible schedule, sure could be worse. First, they lost two out of three in Colorado, and while Coors Field has historically been a house of horrors for them, in this case they really had no one to blame but themselves. If you only score three runs a game in Coors Field, then you don’t get to rend your garments when the Rockies come back in the late innings. You’re not doing your job as an offense, and that’s all there is to it.

Similarly, the Dodgers are a very good baseball team, and I don’t want to minimize that. But right now, they’re banged up. They’re beatable. This is the time to strike if you have any ambition to strike at any point this year. There will never be a more opportune moment to show that you, the San Francisco Giants, belong in the playoffs.

I don’t want to be hasty here, considering that there are three games left in the series and all, but last night, the San Francisco Giants did not show that they belong in the playoffs.

As the Giants were coming out of the break, much was made about their having the easiest strength of schedule of any team in baseball. That was a link to Twitter, but in case that doesn’t work, we also have screenshot technology to show you what’s going on:

So the Giants would seem to be sitting pretty. All they have to do is execute, which does bring up one minor problem: they are extremely bad at executing.

The Giants’ high water mark for the season came on May 28, when they ended the day 2 games over .500. Since the 6-game losing streak that followed the win on that day, every time the Giants have gotten to one game under .500, they’ve lost. Once it was against the Rangers, once against the Astros, once against the Angels, once against the Cubs, and once against the Guardians. And while the Guardians are legitimately good and the Astros have at least come on strong since that series, the rest of these teams could all be classified as Nothing Special.

You know, like the Giants!

To be fair, the Giants this year, as you would expect, have had an easier time against sub-.500 teams than against over-500 teams. They’re gone 29-38 against teams over .500, and 19-15 against teams at or under .500, which is a pretty significant difference. Facing predominantly those sub-.500 teams should give them a nice little boost, right?

In theory, sure. In practice, I think we all know it won’t. It’s just not in the Giants’ character to take advantage of an opportunity like that. I mean, they already failed in Denver. And the Dodgers, while beaten up, certainly aren’t hopeless, at least, not with Shohei Ohtani and Teoscar Hernandez and Gavin Lux all still kicking around. But they were beatable, and they scores the winning run solely because Heliot Ramos and Luis Matos did not communicate well in the 8th inning.

The 2024 Giants have offered a lot of tantalizing hints about what a good version of the team could look like, from the couple hot weeks that Michael Conforto has had (nonconsecutively, like Grover Cleveland), to that one week Luis Matos had, to Hayden Birdsong mowing down Rockies like that was going to keep him from getting sent back down to the minors (Kidding! I’m mostly kidding!).

But they’ve also severely struggled to find themselves. You try not to make too much of one series, but the offense failing to show up in Denver is concerning. They’ve only scored 3.6 runs per game this month, which isn’t nearly enough to compete. And maybe worst of all, we’ve seen this movie before.

Last year, the Giants had a good first half and then collapsed in the second. This year, they did not have a good first half, but the offensive numbers in July aren’t portending anything promising. The fact that they get to play the A’s four times doesn’t help, because they are not reliably good enough to beat the A’s. Worrying about strength of schedule is for teams that are good enough to beat up on bad teams. That’s not the Giants. Even last year, they split the season series with the A’s, devastating all of us who wanted to see them win that coveted Bridge Trophy, and that A’s team was atrocious.

My point is this, as much as I have one: strength of schedule will not save the Giants. It has already not saved the Giants, and it will continue not saving the Giants. The Giants lost last night at least partially because the left fielder and center fielder couldn’t decide who was going to catch a ball. That is not a team that is a favorable schedule away from competing. This is a team that has steadfastly refused to take the next step to being above-average again. There are worse teams to root for. But there are a lot of better ones too. At least they won’t play the better ones that much over the next couple months.