Like a lot of folks reading this, I’ve watched some lousy San Francisco Giants teams. Teams that couldn’t hit, teams that couldn’t pitch, teams that couldn’t field, and sometimes all of the above with some dreadful base running to boot. Teams that failed with old players, teams that failed with young players. Teams that failed following seasons in which they also failed, and teams that failed after the most successful seasons in franchise history.
To be a baseball fan is to be a sommelier of failure, to pick up on notes of terrible that existed in another team from a decade before. At least, that’s what it’s like to be a baseball fan of a normal team. Fans of teams like the Yankees and Dodgers, who have gone decades without finishing under .500, don’t have the same nose for failure that us regulars have. You should feel bad for them, as they’re getting only a sliver of the experience of what it’s like to be a true baseball fan. I don’t believe that either, but I thought we could pretend for a little bit.
And as the Giants blew yet another lead in the late innings on Sunday — their third blown save of a miserable, homerless* and winless six-game road trip — I wrinkled my nose in a way that was hard to place. This might be the most depressing, discouraging stretch of Giants baseball since I’ve been paying attention. There isn’t another season quite like it, and the sommelier skills are useless. These are rotten tannins we’ve never encountered, acrid smells we can’t place. But why? What makes this team so bad?
This team is so repugnant, so completely antithetical to what made you a baseball fan in the first place, for a simple reason. It threatened to keep me up all night, but it finally clicked into place:
This team is so poisonous to follow because it’s so easy to imagine them being normal and fun.
This roadtrip was so “unfun” for the Giants that even a bright spot this season like Landen Roupp had a rough time of it. (Julio Aguilar / Getty Images)
The complete absence of fun is an especially touchy betrayal because almost everyone involved has offered fun baseball in the past. It’s so easy to picture the alternate universe where everything is clicking, and it’s rather enjoyable. Imagine if a Giants hitter, for example, hit a baseball over the fence on Sunday. A “home’s run,” I believe they’re called. Or imagine if anyone on the Giants did that in any of the close games against the Phillies. It would have been fun to watch, which is the point of baseball, we’re told.
Normal teams can hit home runs. The Giants should hit home runs. The ostensible middle of the order — Rafael Devers, Willy Adames, Matt Chapman and Heliot Ramos — hit 107 home runs last season. That’s four players out of 13 position players on an active roster, getting a team halfway to a monster power season, if 200 home runs still works as a benchmark for you.
Instead, the entire team is hitting like a fringe utility infielder from 1985. With one home run, a game on the road trip might have become a positive experience, a two-plus-hour investment of your time that paid a tiny dividend. With two home runs, the Giants could have stolen one of the series. And with three home runs — you have to close your eyes, open your mind and imagine such a thing with me, dang it — the Giants might have had a half-decent, normal road trip. But this assortment of players that should and has hit hundreds of home runs in the past was unable to hit any, except for an extremely long, extremely cursed one that somehow turned into an out and two ejections.
Or, consider what might have happened if the bullpen could hold one lead. Or two. Some teams in baseball lore have been known to hold three in a row, although oral histories can be rife with error and exaggeration. The Giants gave up all kinds of one-run leads on the trip, all of them late in close games, all of them absolutely hazardous to drywall and remote controls.
You might think this is just what happens with a team that has a lousy bullpen. Except the Giants’ bullpen has the second-lowest ERA in baseball. They’ve been good! In theory! But their timing has been absolutely horrible, with some of that sparkling work coming in the mop-up innings of games that were already won or lost. Ryan Walker has given up his runs in one-run games, not harmlessly with two- or three-run leads, which he has had to protect. Those went fine. The close games the Giants absolutely had to have, though, couldn’t be saved. You can see how a team with a bullpen with the second-best ERA in baseball should be fun. They should turn leads (fun) into wins (even more fun). It just doesn’t happen.
It’s everything. It’s Jung Hoo Lee getting stranded every inning when he’s hot, then coming up empty at the plate in the top of the 10th in the series finale because that’s just how baseball is sometimes. Except that kind of permutation is working against every Giant right now, at all times, in every facet of the game. The umpires are against them. ABS is against them. The baseballs have extra atoms on them when the Giants are challenging a called ball, and the atoms vanish into the multiverse when they’re challenging a called strike.
You can imagine Logan Webb’s grounders finding a middle infielder an extra time every game, which would shave an extra run (or two) off his ERA. You imagine him getting rewarded more often than he gets punished, which used to be the status quo around these parts. You can imagine Adames dumping coolers of neon liquid on teammates on a weekly basis, not once every harvest moon or so. You can imagine Jerar Encarnación’s lovable-lunk persona absolutely tickling you in just the right way, so long as it came with even a .200/.300/.400 line and a 19-13 record.
Up and down the lineup, throughout the rotation, you can see that mirror universe that you’re excluded from. Remember when Chapman made that play against the Mets? Do you remember how much that ruled?
That wasn’t even 365 days ago. It was an electric moment, a player doing something unreal at exactly the right time. All of these players are good for moments like this, yet with each loss, each brutal losing streak, the best possible scenario looks like a mad dash to .500, like the failed attempt from the 2024 team, or the 2022 team that actually got there. They’ve already wasted so much time, blown so many chances.
Remember those seasons, when the Giants went on extended winning streaks after it was too late to matter? Not really, and for good reason. At some point, the math gets to a point where one of those duds is the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenarios get so, so bleak.
It’s into this environment that the Giants are bringing up Bryce Eldridge and Jesus Rodriguez, which isn’t very fair to them, but what’s a floundering franchise to do? They’ll be tasked with bringing the fun in a little cooler from Sacramento, no pressure at all. They’ll have to do it on a cold Monday night with jet-lagged teammates, in front of a scattering of shell-shocked fans and ravenous seagulls, and maybe it’ll work. Maybe this will be when the World Series film shifts to a major key and the tempo picks up a bit.
All this doom and gloom doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be excited about Eldridge and Rodriguez. The Giants’ future is getting brighter than it’s been — prospect-wise, at least — in a long time. This could work, but even if it doesn’t, it’s threatening to be fun, if you can imagine such a thing.
Until then, this is an appalling team to watch, and it’s almost certainly made more appalling by the simple fact that they shouldn’t be this bad. They shouldn’t be this bad. I’m not saying they’re going to be good, because the early returns are discouraging, but this is some of the hardest baseball you should ever have to watch. And it just shouldn’t be like that. You could picture the names on this roster combining to be mediocre, sure. You could believe in a scenario where they collectively disappointed and fell short. It wouldn’t take much to imagine a bummer of a season where they fell far short. But this team shouldn’t be embarrassing. It shouldn’t actively turn you against the idea of a night out at the yard.
As always, it would surprise you how quickly these things can turn around. A walk-off win in the late innings, a couple of hitters getting hot at the same time, some luckier bounces, a stadium that isn’t possessed by the ghost of the 1993 Tampa Bay Giants and hates everything this franchise stands for, et cetera. A week’s worth of wins stacking up higher than the losses will get you thinking. A couple of weeks like that will get you greedy again.
So, make that happen, rookies. It’s apparently all on you, now. It’s worth a shot. Because whatever that first month of 2026 Giants baseball was, there was absolutely nothing like it. And once the exorcist leaves and some of these rookies hit some baseballs where they ain’t, hopefully there will never be anything like it again.