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:<\/p>\n
This team is so poisonous to follow because it\u2019s so easy to imagine them being normal and fun.<\/p>\n
![\"Manager](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/GettyImages-2274225717-scaled.jpg\")
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\n This roadtrip was so \u201cunfun\u201d for the Giants that even a bright spot this season like Landen Roupp had a rough time of it. (Julio Aguilar \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n
The complete absence of fun is an especially touchy betrayal because almost everyone involved has offered fun baseball in the past. It\u2019s so easy to picture the alternate universe where everything is clicking, and it\u2019s rather enjoyable. Imagine if a Giants hitter, for example, hit a baseball over the fence on Sunday. A \u201chome\u2019s run,\u201d I believe they\u2019re 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\u2019re told.<\/p>\n
Normal teams can hit home runs. The Giants should hit home runs. The ostensible middle of the order \u2014 Rafael Devers, Willy Adames, Matt Chapman and Heliot Ramos \u2014 hit 107 home runs last season. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014\u00a0you have to close your eyes, open your mind and imagine such a thing with me, dang it \u2014 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<\/a> that somehow turned into an out and two ejections.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n You might think this is just what happens with a team that has a lousy bullpen. Except the Giants\u2019 bullpen has the second-lowest ERA in baseball<\/a>. They\u2019ve 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\u2019t 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\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n