Giants takeaways: A third of the way through the season, run scoring remains the issue

New York Times

26-05-2025

The Giants have finished exactly one third of the 2025 season, and they're even more confusing than they were at the start. They scored eight runs in four games over the long holiday weekend, but they won two of them. They haven't scored more than four runs any of their last nine games, but they also haven't lost ground in the NL West during that stretch. They're comfortably ahead of preseason expectations, and they're closer to the best record in baseball than they are to the Diamondbacks, but they're still making you say words like 'dunderheads' when there are kids around. They're making you say much worse words when there aren't any around.
Advertisement
So what did we learn over the holiday weekend, which culminated on Monday with a tepid 3-1 loss to the Tigers? Not much that we didn't already know. The Giants can prevent runs. They often struggle to score runs. Let's use these takeaways to explore larger truths, then, applying them to the season writ large. Here's what we learned over the first third of the season, all of it reinforced over the weekend.
There were a lot of reasons for Giants' historically impressive start, and some of them were sustainable. They weren't the best defensive team, but they were a sure-handed one. They weren't the fastest team, but they ran the bases well. They had a staff with so many talented pitchers that legitimate big leaguers were optioned to the minors or moved out of the rotation before the season even started.
Then there was the business of how they scored runs. It was fun when Wilmer Flores kept getting perfectly timed late-game hits. It was fun when the telecasts would show an on-screen graphic that demonstrated how productive Giants hitters were with runners in scoring position. As long as it kept going, the Giants were going to be unstoppable.
It did not keep going. Now the on-screen graphics are lambasting their efforts with runners in scoring position in May. Whenever a team is winning because of a lopsided record in one-run games, a hilariously high BABIP or disproportionate success with runners in scoring position, wait for the other shoe to drop. Don't just wait. Expect it. Convince your acquaintances and workplace enemies to make a cash wager with you. There will be regression, and it will be mean.
When the hits aren't falling with runners in scoring position, the Giants can only be carried by individual hitters in the middle of a hot streak. It was Mike Yastrzemski, Flores and Jung Hoo Lee in the first month of the season, and it's been Heliot Ramos in May, at least until the road trip. It's cheating to write something like, 'If the Giants didn't have any hot hitters, boy, they would be in a real pickle,' because that's true for every team. But it's a legitimate point to make for a team with three starting position players who haven't been hot for more than two or three games in a row.
Advertisement
Yastrzemski has cooled off. Lee has had a mostly dreadful May, although he currently has a seven-game hitting streak. Flores is still helping quite a bit, but he was never going to be the lineup savior he was in the first two weeks. The Giants' ultra-consistent starting lineups have helped build continuity for the regulars, but it's also put their bench in a tough spot. There are nine starters with 120 PA or more, but that leaves six reserves who aren't seeing more than a few pitches every week. They've hit .193/.262/.300 in 260 PA this season.
The Giants are facing a hard truth that shouldn't come as a big surprise to anyone: They aren't a lineup powered by individual greatness. They're a lineup that needs consistent production from most of their nine lineup spots. Right now, they're getting below-replacement-level-production from three spots. Four if you consider 'the bench' to be its own position. The Giants had 1,971 plate appearances going into Monday's game. More than a third (38.6 percent) of those PA have gone to players who are hitting at least 20 percent worse than the league average. That's a group that includes three starters and five reserves, and Willy Adames' .617 OPS is the best among them.
You've heard the idiom 'greater than the sum of its parts' to describe lineups before, and that was always the path for the 2025 Giants to make the postseason. Right now, some of those parts are on the fritz. It might be the sort of thing that gets fixed by unplugging them and plugging them back in again. It might not be, which would be a much bigger problem.
There's no quick fix. Bryce Eldridge is both too young to drink legally and two levels removed from the majors, and that's ignoring that he's just getting ramped up after an early-season injury. Marco Luciano is making strides with his plate discipline if you inspect his numbers with a magnifying glass, but not so much that he's an immediate answer to any of the team's questions. Jerar Encarnación will likely rejoin the team after the road trip, but it's goofy to expect him to save the entire lineup, and that's coming from one of his biggest boosters.
Forget about getting more production out of the catching spot if it's not coming from Patrick Bailey himself. His historically unproductive second half from last season has bled into the first third of this season, and he's hitting .202/.266/.282 over the last 365 days. He just might be a .600-OPS guy who sticks in a lineup because of his Gold Glove defense, and that would still be valuable. The Giants need him to get back to the .600 OPS, though. It's not like there's anyone even remotely close to being ready behind him.
Advertisement
Forget about getting more production out of the shortstop position if it's not coming from Adames himself. His franchise-record contract is off to a worst-case scenario kind of start, both defensively and offensively, but there's still two-thirds of the season left. The Giants should — and will — stick with him a heckuva lot longer than two months. Any reasonable solution begins with him hitting closer to his career numbers.
That leaves LaMonte Wade, Jr. as the lone struggling hitter who isn't entrenched in his position, but it's unfair to put everything on him. More production out of first base — whether it's from him or someone else — is a must, but the problems run much, much deeper than a single position.
Answers? Other than 'maybe the struggling hitters should hit better,' I'm fresh out. It's not hard to notice that the Giants have too many pitchers and about 29 teams don't have enough, which means the trade deadline will be a heckuva test for the Buster Posey-Zack Minasian regime, but a deadline addition isn't going to be a panacea, either. You don't always get to go to the Marco Scutaro store and pick out the hottest available hitter to carry a lineup.
Everything else seems to be in place. The Giants have a bullpen that's the envy of the baseball world, even with their closer struggling. They have a rotation that's getting better, even as it gets younger. They have continuity and a clubhouse that gets along, by all accounts.
That all counts for a lot, but I'll just come right out and say it: The Giants will need to score more runs if they want to make the postseason. The last two-thirds of the 2025 season will depend on how well or poorly the Giants hit.
That's right where they were at the start of the season, too. Maybe they're not so confusing after all.