What if there’s nothing wrong with the Giants?

The San Francisco Giants won yesterday and finally break a 7-game losing streak. All of those games were at Oracle Park, of course, and part of a larger, historic failing on their home turf that has caused a shaggy season to completely unravel. Without using yesterday’s lone win as some signal that the rest of 2025 is okay, let’s consider the possibility that these hopeless, helpless, and sub-average 60-64 Giants are exactly where they should be.

Their Cactus League-winning 21-6 Spring Training record wasn’t a mirage so much as a nice surprise. Their 19-12 record through April 30th an extension of that. Their 41-29 mark through June 13th… perhaps a fluke? Certainly more a mirage than a reality. Since that point, they’re 19-35, tied for the worst record in baseball with the perpetual losers, the Washington Nationals. We already know that the Giants’ championship era of the 2010s is long since over, and what this data point suggests is that the franchise is firmly entrenched in a loser phase. As bad as the Nationals? No, but this team hasn’t been a winner in a long time.

Since the franchise’s historic collapse in the second half of the 2016 season (30-42 after a 57-33 start), the Giants are 680-710 (.489). That’s 17th in wins and 14th in losses. The teams ahead of them in the L column (Dbacks, A’s, Nats, Reds, Rangers, Angels, O’s, Tigers, Rockies, Pirates, Marlins, Royals, and White Sox) have some playoff appearances and even a couple of titles, but the teams with fewer losses over this stretch (Padres, Twins, Blue Jays, Mets, Phillies, Mariners, Cardinals, Cubs, Red Sox, Rays, Guards, Atlanta, Brewers, Yankees, Astros, Dodgers) are generally considered to be healthier franchises in better positions to succeed. Even on the Giants’ own terms, you can look at the winning percentage split as pre-All Star Break 2016 and post-All Star Break 2016. From 2009 (their first winning season since 2004) to the first half of the 2016, they were 665-559 (.543), the fifth-best mark in the majors; and, of course, they had the most championships of any team during this stretch.

So, the Giants have been down for a while, 2021 excepted — but what an exception! It’s best to admire that as the unique little bird that it was and not think too hard about it. Otherwise, the Giants have vacillated between mediocre and bad for nearly a decade to this point and it doesn’t seem like a positive change is imminent. This post wasn’t inspired by the latest run of futility or even yesterday’s paltry win; no, it was sparked by Alex Pavlovic’s tirade in Thursday’s Giants Talk podcast:

(3:54 mark) “To me, this is worse than anything you and I have covered in the last few years, because, again, they’re fully healthy, and this is a lineup full of dudes who are going to end up, a lot of them at or pretty close to their career norms, numbers-wise. You can point to little things here and there. (Matt) Chapman clearly not the same since he got hurt, (Rafael) Devers had a rough stretch after he got traded. But overall, if you look at the lineup every day, how many guys are you going to pull? This is the group. […]

(5:27) “People who I’ve trusted for a long time and I’ve known for a long time are just like, ‘We have no idea what’s going on here.’ That’s kind of a scary thing to be in here because they’ve made a lot of changes the last few years, and here they sit again in August, doing this again — except almost worse, because they’re doing this all at home.”

This is certainly the largest contrast between vibes and performance that we’ve seen in a very long time. The Giants really flipped the script by canning the stale, anxiety-addled regime that had stalled at the franchise after six seasons of optimization, but perhaps Buster Posey’s smile and unshakable confidence were too infectious. Fans dreamed a little too big. At the end of the day, these Giants are a massive disappointment, but they’re not far off from recent disappointments. The only difference is that they have more All-Star type players under contract long-term.

What makes me think that? “We have no idea what’s going on here” could’ve been said by anybody with the Giants since the second half of the 2016 season. I’m certain Bobby Evans said exactly that as those Giants turned to ash. Or the September 2018 squad going 5-21, the worst month in the franchise’s history. I’m sure Bob Melvin thought that as his All-Star Padres flailed to an 82-80 record in his second and final season with them. Buster Posey was a winner on the field, but he’s a novice in the executive office. I’m sure his ideas for breaking out of a team-wide slump have already been tried.

In the preseason projections, the Giants looked like a team that would hover around .500. As elite as Rafael Devers’ bat has been, it’s probable that the very best days of it are behind him, to the point that his addition isn’t 80% of the Bonds + Kent + some random dudes version of the Giants that we got around the turn of the century. The franchise and Bob Melvin seem to be outmatched by the sport since the new rules went into effect for the 2022 season, and overall the franchise still feels like it’s trying to generate one last hurrah in a mode that people are — somehow — still expecting from a franchise whose championship era was a decade ago.

Until Bryce Eldridge and the next wave of players join the squad, the Giants are still stuck in the past. Yes, the Devers trade netted them that elite (or formerly elite) bat that had been eluding them, but it all goes back to player development. The championship era was defined by either a well-planned and expertly scouted or completely fluke crop of generational talents; but that’s usually the case with successful teams. A little bit of luck — which, to be clear, the Giants have had since 2021! — and a lot of solid planning coming to fruition.

We know Buster Posey & Zack Minasian have put together a plan, but it’s implausible for it to have been realized in a single offseason. This is a rebuild that restarts the one that was never finished by Farhan Zaidi, which was started after the Giants refused to rebuild in the wake of 2017. This means that despite how the Giants have looked the past few months, and as historically awful as they’ve been at home, as clueless as they are in scouting and as outclassed as they are within their own division, the National League, and, really, the sport itself, the Giants are where we should have expected them to be at this point in the decade.