Giants ride Justin Verlander's first win to series victory over Braves

New York Times

24-07-2025

Justin Verlander's first win this season will get most of the attention following the Giants' 9-3 win over the Braves, and rightfully so. It didn't feel right that one of the winningest pitchers in baseball history appeared incapable of getting one more win. It put more pressure on the bullpen and the lineup. It put pressure on the defense, and it certainly put pressure on Verlander before every pitch. The winless streak (16 games in a Giants uniform) was inexplicable enough to make everyone around him start slipping on banana peels.
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The spell has been broken, though, and what's left is a fairly unremarkable game story. A guy who's won a lot of games in his career just won another. A hitter who's hit a lot of home runs in his career hit a couple more to help him. The Giants scored a lot of runs with players who've helped propel lineups before. What's remarkable about the unremarkable story is that it shouldn't be remarkable, and yet here we are, remarking on it like there's no tomorrow.
Or, to use a cliché, the Giants got their first series win of the second half with a succession of all dog-bites-man stories. No, they were even more boring than that. Verlander keeping his team in the game and pitching well enough to win is more like a dog-stares-vacantly story. Matt Chapman hitting a home run is a dog-barks-at-that-Wendy's-commercial-with-the-doorbell-that-should-be-illegal story. As in, they're complete and utter non-stories. Rafael Devers hitting two home runs is more of a story, but certainly not a surprising one. It's what he's supposed to do. It's what they're all supposed to do with some regularity.
The Giants wins over the last two games have been a showcase of players doing what everyone's been hoping they'd do. The gap between expectations and results has made this one of the more frustrating Giants teams in recent decades, but every so often, a game entices you to ask, 'What if that gap closes entirely?'
Go back to Verlander's start, an arduous yet encouraging grind. He threw five innings and allowed just six baserunners, but five came on walks, which tells you the kind of game he had. The walks came from attempted corner-painting, not a basic lack of control, and that's just how he has to pitch now, at least at times. But he wasn't easy to square up, either.
In the bottom of the fifth inning, with two outs, the Giants held a 3-0 lead. There were two on, and the tying run was at the plate. Verlander was at 97 pitches, and he knew that he was going to throw one or two more pitches, at most. He also knew that, with a 2-2 count, he was going to have only one more chance to go out of the strike zone. This was his chance to uncork the best possible pitch he could throw in the situation.
Yep, that qualifies.
Verlander was voting before Drake Baldwin was born, but he can still spin a curveball that looks like a strike for 58 feet, and he needed a perfect one to get the win. Pitcher wins aren't exactly a hip or modern stat these days, but that doesn't mean it's not cool to see one earned by a majestic final pitch like that. It was like watching Verlander go against the final boss of a video game that had dispatched him 16 times before and finally nail his special move. He didn't yell 'Shoryuken!' after he let the pitch go, but it would have been justified.
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At the same time, don't overthink what the Giants expect from Verlander. It's pretty much this sort of outing right here, no more and no less. While that would have made him a five-and-dive pitcher back in Verlander's prime, it's a much more respectable job description these days. It will do just fine, assuming the Giants can score runs around him.
This brings us to the game's most important development — and probably the second half so far. The Giants' bats are awake. They're at least hitting the snooze every 30 seconds. And they didn't just wake up against a struggling Braves staff, but in the final game of the Blue Jays series. Wednesday's win gives the Giants four straight games in which they've scored five runs or more, the first time that's happened since June. They scored nine runs in consecutive games for the first time since early last season.
It's all a reminder that the 2025 Giants haven't seen the best out of every hitter on the roster. Some hitters have barely come close, and there certainly haven't been two red-hot hitters at the same time. Some hitters have shown their best stretches, only to cool off, like Mike Yastrzemski and Jung Hoo Lee, but most haven't.
Chapman's performance in May was close to what the Giants are hoping for, but his June injury scuttled that momentum. His opposite-field, two-run homer gave the Giants — and, just as importantly, Verlander — a three-run lead, along with a hope that he'll pick up where he left off before the injury. The Giants haven't had long stretches where he's powering the entire team, but they know he's capable.
Devers' first two home runs of July are a reminder that, holy cats, it shouldn't take until the final week of a month for this guy to hit his first home run. He's supposed to hit these things often. When the Giants traded for him, the question was if his 30 home runs this season would count toward breaking the Curse of Barry Bonds, not if he'd hit 30 homers at all. Then the Oracle Park power-sucking mosquitos got to him, and it looked like he'd never hit a home run again.
But Devers can hit baseballs like this! He can do it often enough to get paid hundreds of millions of dollars! It shouldn't be a surprise that he got both cheeks into a pitch over the plate. It's kind of his deal.
Willy Adames didn't do much in the series finale, but that's ok! He shouldn't have to do everything. That's the point of having more than one good hitter. Maybe some of the other good hitters can do something. Patrick Bailey was just 1-for-4, but that's ok! His one hit was a double, and he continues to hit like a normal catcher instead of a modern-day Jeff Mathis. That's what he's supposed to do. Once you get a couple hitters performing up to expectations at the same time, it makes other players seem that much more helpful, too.
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Will the Giants be buyers or sellers at the deadline? If you know, hit me up on Signal. But if they're going to be buyers, they'll need to prove it with games like this. And to be clear, the definition of a game like this is one where a bunch of mostly normal stuff happens. It just happens in the correct order with the correct timing, benefitting the Giants in a way that was mostly projected to happen.
And when it's put like that, it starts to become reasonable to think this team has a shot. They'll need a few more games like this over the next week to really hammer the point home. Anything less, and they're right back to the confusing and frustrating team that makes these kinds of offensive outbursts seem unusual in the first place.