Latest news with #2025Giants
New York Times
17-04-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
It's still early, but the Giants are rolling past their opponents in impressive fashion
After an 11-4 win against the Phillies on Wednesday night, the 2025 Giants are at exactly 100 runs scored on the season. They're averaging 5.55 runs per game now, which is third-most in baseball, behind only the Cubs and Yankees. Enough of their hitters are still struggling to justify an article centered around those struggles. Advertisement It's a complicated team. Also, by most indications, a pretty good one. The Giants are 13-5, and if you want to find another team in franchise history that started the season with the same record, you'll have to go all the way back to … 2022. Which wasn't the best team of your lifetime. Still, it's impressive that this year's team is banking a lot of these wins away from Oracle Park, with their road record moving to 9-3. The last time a Giants team started this hot on the road was … 2022. My goal isn't to bring you down after another Giants win, especially a thumping like that one. The goal is to remind everyone — myself included — that we still don't know what the eventual story of the 2025 season will be. It's not enough to blurt out a team's record through 18 games and claim it proves anything. If you're going to be bullish about the 2025 Giants, you'll need more details than just the wins and losses. So if you're in the market for unfettered optimism, you'll have to dig for tidbits, nuggets and factoids. Maybe a morsel or two. The good news is that the best reason to be bullish is also the simplest one to cite and comprehend, and it goes something like this: The Giants have now scored a lot more runs than their opponents this season. 4️⃣ runs in the first 😎 [image or embed] — SFGiants (@ April 16, 2025 at 4:24 PM It seems obvious because it is obvious, but that doesn't mean it's unimportant. The Giants have scored 100 runs and allowed 64. That's good for a Pythagorean record of 13-5, which just happens to be their actual record. You might think that a team's Pythagorean record is something that only nerds care about. Well, allow me to disabuse you of that notion and … wait, no, that's entirely correct. It's definitely just for nerds. But allow me to explain why we care about it. Back when it started becoming a popular tool, I was a skeptic. Any team can be on the wrong end of a miserable blowout. Pick any of the 100-plus-win teams in baseball history and dig through their schedule. The ugly games are in there. So what the sabermetricians were telling us is that a couple extra ugly games — combined with an absence of wins in which the blowout roles were reversed — made that much of a difference? Advertisement Pretty much. A Pythagorean record can point you in a lot of different directions about the strengths and weaknesses of any given team, but its best utility is as a proxy for overall team strength. In order to have several uncompetitive losses, a team needs to roster pitchers who are capable of creating and contributing to that kind of avalanche. In order to have a lack of uncompetitive wins, a team needs to have a lineup that's unlikely to sustain an offensive attack for very long, with the exception of an explosion every month or three. So it's not enough to say, 'The team's Pythag record is lopsided because Reliever X is the one giving up all the runs in garbage time.' The best teams don't have one of those relievers. Sometimes a team will need their 13th man on the staff to pitch in a high-leverage situation. In Wednesday's win, Lou Trivino came into a tie game in the fourth inning. He had to protect a two-run lead in his second inning of work, and he had to get four outs to finish that inning, with the Phillies getting a runner on via the worst rule in professional sports. Trivino did it with aplomb. He was a big part of the Giants' win, and a byproduct of his outing is that he helped the team's run differential. I'm not going to do an ordinal ranking of the Giants' high-leverage options out of the bullpen, but Trivino is closer to the bottom of the list than the top. Yet he still gave the Giants two quality innings when the outcome of the game was very much in doubt. It seems like a minute detail, but makes a substantial difference over 162 games. It even makes a substantial difference over 18 games. The best teams don't make you wince when the bullpen door opens. The best teams don't have a reliever who makes you wince at all. It's early enough to where a couple of dreadful games could deal a huge blow to a team's run differential, so don't get cocky. But if you're looking for reasons to believe in the fast start, a good one is that there doesn't appear to be a lot of smoke and mirrors with how the Giants are winning games. They're scoring a lot more runs than their opponents. That's how. This game was the third time the Giants have scored 10 or more runs this season, yet it's only their 18th game. Is that some sort of franchise record? It is not. Here's a table that isn't exactly meaningful, but it sure is fun. Sometimes bad teams score a lot of runs early in the season, and sometimes championship teams don't score them much at all. Sometimes a team has Willie Mays or Barry Bonds. The list is also a way to ride the ups and downs of year-by-year league scoring contexts. A special shoutout goes to the 1985 team, who scored more than 10 runs only twice. They didn't do it at all at home that season, which partially explains why they're still the franchise leader in walk-off wins. They also scored 20 total runs in a doubleheader at the Astrodome, somehow. I love that team of weirdos so much. Advertisement Anyway, if you're looking for a way to be even more impressed with this year's team, note that the Giants have had the toughest schedule in baseball so far, at least according to Baseball-Reference's SOS (strength of schedule) metric, which is based on how many runs their opponents score. Except the Giants have been one of the best teams in baseball when it comes to runs allowed, which suggests that their opponents are scoring most of those runs against other teams. That's a tricky combination to pull off. One more tidbit? You greedy … OK, zoom in on how the Giants scored their 11 runs on Wednesday. They did it without a home run. The last time they did that was in 2017, and what I love about the list of teams to do it is that it's mostly populated by two types of teams: The ones that were absolutely incapable of hitting homers, and the ones with legitimately potent lineups. This year's team might not have a 30-homer hitter, but you can't say that they're incapable of hitting a homer. It's early. We still don't know the story of the 2025 Giants yet, and you can let the 13-5 start from the 2022 Giants serve as a reminder, if needed. If you're looking for positive signs, though, you'll take a team scoring a lot more runs than their opponents, even though they've had a remarkably difficult schedule so far. Nobody has to believe just yet, but it's sure easier to believe than it is to poke holes in the fast start.
New York Times
27-03-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
The best-case scenario for the 2025 San Francisco Giants
Some seasons require a lot of imagination to come up with a best-case scenario. Some seasons take more imagination than is humanly possible, and you catch yourself saying things like, 'First, let's assume that Air Bud is real and wants to join the Giants. Second, assume that Commissioner Manfred allows a dog to play in the majors. Third …' Advertisement This is not one of those seasons. You can talk yourself into a best-case scenario for the 2025 Giants just by sticking with reasonable potential outcomes. You don't have to dig deep and imagine ridiculous scenarios, like a 2024 draftee skipping the upper minors to win the MVP. It's not all going to depend on a 42-year-old pitcher setting a new career high in innings. It's about smaller individual victories, like Player X staying healthy, Player Y repeating his production and Player Z taking a little step forward. By stacking reasonable positive outcomes together, you don't just get a team that reaches the postseason. You get a team that convinces you they belong. The odds can turn quickly against an imperfect team. Imagine someone flipping a coin and getting three heads and four tails, in that order. You might have even done it once yourself without even noticing. That exact permutation has less than a 1-percent chance of happening, though. The odds are 50-50 for each event, but once you start stacking up the if-then scenarios, you get lost in the weeds of probability quickly. That's why success and parades and team reunions for the 2025 Giants every 10 years isn't their likeliest scenario. It'll take some high-percentile outcomes from at least a couple players on the roster just to make the postseason at all, and when you start multiplying the odds of several of the better outcomes together, it quickly moves from possible to unlikely. Just know that at least the 2025 Giants are flipping coins, metaphorically speaking, and that's not the worst place to be. They're not playing keno or rolling handfuls of 20-sided dice, with probabilities that don't take much to get into one-in-a-million territory. Pick any player from the Opening Day roster and look at them through a reasonably optimistic lens, and it starts making sense. Here are a couple players I picked at random, but you can play along with anyone you want: It's unreasonable to expect Casey Schmitt to have a .350 OBP and super-utility his way to 400 at-bats. It's entirely reasonable, however, to hope he can be a helpful player, someone worth a win or so over a full season. It's unreasonable to expect Christian Koss to be a latter-day Andres Torres, emerging from the transactional mists to become one of the biggest surprises in baseball. It's also entirely reasonable to hope he can be a useful utility player, someone who helps the team win. Those are just the players on the edges of the roster, though. When you do the exercise for the expected regulars, starting pitchers and high-leverage relievers, a reasonable best-case scenario comes into focus. It's unreasonable to expect LaMonte Wade Jr. to be one of the five-best first basemen in baseball, but it's entirely reasonable to hope he does what he did last year, just with more at-bats and better health. It's unreasonable to expect Robbie Ray to win his second Cy Young, but it's entirely reasonable to think he'll be a better starting pitcher than a lot of the ones the Giants will face. Advertisement This is not the same as asking yourself 'What if all of the bad and mediocre players are really good now?' If you want to do that for a team that's down and out, go for it. You have examples from just last season. The Tigers were so far removed from the postseason picture that they traded their second-best pitcher at the trade deadline, and then they played amazing baseball for the final two months. The Royals went from a 56-106 season in 2023 to the postseason in 2024, and they did it with a) one of the greatest single seasons from a shortstop in baseball history and b) four starting pitchers throwing at a high level and staying healthy all season. If someone wrote a best-case scenario for them before the 2024 season and suggested Michael Wacha and Seth Lugo would combined for 373 innings, 62 starts and a 3.14 ERA, they'd get roasted in the comments. And they would have deserved to. It was ludicrous until it actually happened. That's not what I'm asking you to do here. Which is good, because the Giants don't play in the 2024 AL Central, but the larger point stands. It's possible for the Giants to make the postseason — comfortably, even — without daydreaming about Justin Verlander throwing 200 innings or Willy Adames having a 40/40 season. Just stack up the potentially solid and productive seasons from players who are entirely capable of them. These kinds of parlays happen to teams every season. It's not enough to have success stories on the roster. The Giants will need to avoid the disappointments, too. It would have been unreasonable to expect Heliot Ramos and Tyler Fitzgerald to do what they did last season, but they did it, and if a time traveler had tipped you off, you would have taken out a second mortgage to bet on the Giants making the postseason. Except Thairo Estrada completely lost the strike zone, and Wilmer Flores was physically compromised and couldn't hit a lick. It took Jorge Soler and Blake Snell months to get going. There were plenty of other disappointments, and those seasons were the mirror images of what this exercise is calling for. It would take some unexpectedly positive outcomes for the 2025 Giants to play up to their best-case scenario, but it would also take a dearth of unexpectedly negative outcomes. Baseball isn't always that accommodating. Still, teams can go far with a quantity-of-quality approach. Giants fans don't need anyone to explain that to them. They've seen it. They remember teams like that fondly. It's true that the Giants don't have a Murderer's Row of classic sluggers, but they also don't have a lineup filled with players who shouldn't be in the majors. You won't find José Canseco in his prime, but you also won't find Ozzie Canseco in decline. Back in 2012, the Giants lost the first two games of the NLDS at home, which meant they had to win three straight in Cincinnati to avoid elimination. While the feelings were still raw, I tried to be optimistic and realistic at the same time. Advertisement I like to use the New York Times Yardstick of Perspective. That is, what would appear on the front page of the New York Times sports section? Maybe there's an 11-percent chance the Giants can win three straight games in Cincinnati, but it wouldn't make the front page of the New York Times. 'Good Team Beats Good Team Three Straight Times' isn't a catchy headline. The Giants beat the Reds three straight times and didn't stop there. Now, over a decade later, I can still use that same rubric, except things have changed. I actually work for the New York Times company now. I can call an editor in the middle of the night and say, 'Listen, the 2025 Giants made the postseason. You have to put it on The Athletic's home page and send out push notifications. This is important. Trust me. This is front page news. Above the fold.' The people in charge would ignore me. More than usual, even. It just wouldn't be a big enough story. Stuff like that happens every season. It wouldn't be a man-bites-dog story, and it wouldn't even be a dog-bites-man story. It would be a dog-licks-man-and-looks-sweetly-stupid-while-doing-it story. The best-case scenario for the 2025 Giants is that they make the postseason and get frisky once they're in there. It's not impossible! It's not the likeliest scenario, but it's not impossible. And on Opening Day, you're allowed to treat yourself to some optimism. Don't ever take Opening Day for granted. It's like 'The Purge,' but for happy thoughts. For one day, all happy thoughts are legal. The Giants don't have the best roster in baseball, and they might not even have the third-best roster in their division, but they have enough quality players on the roster to dream a bit when the mood strikes. Have fun with it, and keep reality at a distance until you can't anymore. (Top photo of Matt Chapman: Justin Berl / Getty Images)
