The San Francisco Giants’ start to the season has been nearly perfect. Five wins in six games validated that the team’s red-hot preseason in Arizona was not a red herring.
Yes, the Giants return to Oracle Park for their 2025 home opener riding justifiably high. They’re playing good ball.
But is six games — a series win in Cincinnati and a sweep of the Astros in Houston — enough of a sample size to be worthy of trust?
Is the Giants’ first three percent of the season sure to be a reflection of the next 97?
Of course not.
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But seriously, the 5-1 start isn’t all its cracked up to be. The Giants are hitting .202 over their first six games — a bottom 10 mark in baseball — and that’s barely underrated their expected number of .208. Their on-base percentage is also in the bottom 10. They’re a top-10 team in strikeouts at the plate, and they’re running an at-bats-per-home-run rate that is unquestionably unsustainable.
This team won games when it struck out 16 and 17 times, respectively. Then again, it lost the game when it struck out only once.
It’s early. It’s noisy. It’s unquestionably a small sample size and baseball is so, so weird.
That doesn’t mean the Giants aren’t buying what they’re selling.
“If you don’t know by now, we’re pretty good. And we’re going to be good,” Landon Roupp said after the sweep of the Astros.
While I question if the guy with the 6.75 ERA should be delivering that message, it’s not to say that Roupp is wrong. There’s a lot to like and plenty you’d like to extrapolate from the 2025 Giants. The defense looks strong. Wilmer Flores has four home runs in six games, matching his homer output from 71 games last season. The starting pitching has been steady (3.34 ERA, three strikeouts for every walk, 1.11 WHIP), and the bullpen could easily be the best in baseball.
Save for the Flores becoming Hank Aaron, isn’t this exactly what we expected from San Francisco?
Pitching, defense, and opportunistic hitting up and down the lineup.
I know that’s what new boss Buster Posey promised. So far, his team has been delivering in March and April, with the last six games counting. The 5-1 start might only be good for third-place in the downright unfair National League West, but it’s the best start for the Giants since 2014. I don’t need to tell you why that’s interesting.
I don’t question whether the pitching or defense is sustainable. I might even expect more from the starters, with Logan Webb and Justin Verlander working on some new, promising changes to start the season—changes that could push their performances up a notch.
It is fair to wonder if this team can keep scoring, though.
Not to play a semantics game, but the thing with opportunistic hitting is that it isn’t consistent. If it were, it’d just be called “good.”
The Giants are unquestionably doing damage at the plate. Their 10 home runs are fourth in the National League (with the Cubs and Dodgers, who played two and three more games than the Giants, leading the way). It’s good stuff — the Giants have tried to manufacture runs for years now, but that’s not how success comes in the modern game. Don’t forget, the last time the Giants made the playoffs — 2021 — they led the National League in homers (241). The past three seasons, all lacking serious playoff contention, they’ve averaged 8th place.
Baseball’s a complicated game, but this is not a complicated formula. The most direct route to scoring runs is to hit balls over the fence where no one can catch them. It might not be the kind of baseball Posey and his title-winning Giants are famous for playing, but they played in a dead-ball era. We now live in a world of pitch design, swing-path optimization, torpedo bats, short porches (isn’t Yankee Stadium a joke?), and maybe-maybe-not juiced balls.
Yes, things have changed in the last decade. Early signs are the Giants — be it at the executive level, field level, or both — understand that. And even if they don’t, they’re certainly executing it.
The challenge? Well, 81 games in a ballpark is far-and-away the worst in the majors for home run hitting. Oh, and 156 more games, total.
It’s simply too early to believe these Giants are a different version than we’ve seen in recent years.
But it’s also too early to say that they aren’t.
I guess we’ll find out one way or another.
Originally Published:
Source: Paradise Post
