Willy Adames and Heliot Ramos homered in Spring Training so the Giants will be good this year

The logic is airtight, you'll find

Spring Training is just beginning, so why be negative? It’s sunny in Arizona, it’s rainy in Northern California but in a good way because we need to keep our snowpack replenished, everybody’s healthy except for Tom Murphy, we’re not going to talk about politics today, and life is good.

So why not look for the upside? Why not accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative? What’s wrong with doing any of that? Is the issue really something as banal as me not really believing that the Giants will compete this year in a tough NL West and a deep skepticism about the direction of the organization and a very clear sense that my heart isn’t in this, even though it’s spring and this is the time for irrational optimism and that’s totally okay?

No. No, none of that is true, other than the beginning of spring being a perfectly reasonable time for irrational optimism. So let’s get started.

Willy Adames and Heliot Ramos have already homered this spring, so the Giants will be good this year.

Boy, that feels nice, doesn’t it? No more of that worry about whether this team will be worth watching this year. The Giants’ biggest free agent signing homered, which proves that he’ll live up to his contract, and the Giants’ most important homegrown hitter homered, which proves that he’ll be able to build on his All-Star 2024 season. What else could you possibly need to tell you how the season will go?

You want to hear about the pitching? The pitching that gave up those home runs in an intrasquad practice? Well, they’re learning what not to do. It was Justin Verlander who gave up the Ramos dinger, and according to Alex Pavlovic, Verlander “dominated his second inning.” That’s what you want to see now, in mid-February, when it really counts. Sean Hjelle gave up Adames’s shot, and while Pavlovic didn’t directly comment on the rest of his day, he did note that that was the only homer of the day, “which mostly featured high-octane fastballs from the likes of Camilo Doval and Randy Rodriguez.”

The vibes, then, are good. Instead of spending the offseason at home, Adames spent it training in Arizona, and getting to know his new teammates. Instead of going back to Taiwan, Kai-Wei Teng learned a new changeup grip at a place in North Carolina that Spencer Bivens recommended. Instead of hoarding his precious number 35 like a Giants legend is entitled to, Brandon Crawford generously allowed Justin Verlander to wear it this season.

And biggest of all, instead of giving his whole preseason speech that he’d planned out, Bob Melvin listened to Buster Posey’s speech and removed the parts that were functionally identical, which is a good thing because it means everybody is on the same page. There is no discord this spring, unlike last spring, when there may or may not have been discord, but it certainly wasn’t reported on so it seemed like there wasn’t any. But there might have been! Unlike this year, which is going great, to be clear.

How much of a difference will any of this make when the season starts in late March? It’s impossible to say for sure. But are we coming into Spring Training with good vibes? We sure are. And for a team with question marks about its true talent level, we’re gonna need those vibes to carry us into the year. Let’s not think about Tyler Fitzgerald’s inevitable regression. Let’s think about Casey Schmitt and Brett Wisely battling it out for one backup infielder job, and the winner presumably getting more than six sporadic ABs before getting sent down to the minors.

We’re here for the vibes. Good vibes only, folks. All of this matters deeply.