Giants show pop, but lose home opener
Panik, Longoria both go deep, but Mariners come away with 6-4 win.
SAN FRANCISCO >> Peculiar doesn’t begin to describe the first five games of the Giants’ 2018 season, and simply noting that San Francisco is 2-3 after a 6-4 loss to the Mariners on Tuesday in the team’s home opener at AT&T Park doesn’t come close to telling the whole story.
Remove the context and the Giants are a game or two back in the National League West with 157 games to play. I’d be ridiculous to panic.
But if you watched the Giants’ first five games this season, you’re probably not viewing things that way.
And I get it. The first few games of any season draw extra attention — there’s anticipation and eagerness and pomp and circumstance and Brian Wilson running in from the bullpen
in full uniform to throw out the ceremonial first pitch (that last part was weird) — and that makes it easy to overreact to a less-than-ideal start.
So there will be Giants fans who will be quick to tell you that the offense — which took 43 innings to have someone not named Joe Panik cross home or drive in a run this season — is broken and will surely be the downfall of the 2018 squad. And even with a late-game rally Tuesday, it’s hard to counter their argument at the moment — the Giants’ two wins were 1-0 games where the only runs were Panik solo homers.
And there will be others who will declare that the Giants’ pitching is going to be the team’s Achilles heel. After three less-than-ideal starts in a
row, capped by Ty Blach’s short six-run, 10-hit outing Tuesday, you can see how someone could feel that way.
But the fact remains that the Giants have only played five games, and they sit, more or less, exactly where any rational person expected them to be at this juncture of the season.
Yes, the Giants took a strange, history-making route to get to 2-3, stoking the fanbase’s worst fears in the process, but it’s simply too early to write off this team. Five games is only three percent of a 162-game season — the Giants need to play five more games before they’ll have played the equivalent what one game is in an NFL regular season.
You wouldn’t overreact to one NFL game, right? Don’t answer that. Now, I don’t know if the Giants will be fine when it’s all said and done, but before calling for The Purge and the start of The Giant Rebuild, we should probably give this team a bit more time.
(I’m not even saying you need to make it to May, but let’s get to mid-April before we start calling for heads, people.)
All that said, it’s not too early to draw one conclusion from this bizarre start to the Giants’ 2018 season: It’s clear, even after only five games, that the margins for this San Francisco team will be razor thin in 2018.
The Giants’ offense might be improved — though there was nowhere to go but up — but we can all agree that it’s not going to be a juggernaut that’s capable of scoring an average of five runs a game. (Last season the Giants averaged 3.7 runs per game.)
And while the starting pitching was solid in the first two games of the season, the Giants still have a fourman rotation full of question marks. There will be strong outings — it is a talented rotation — but as we learned with Blach on Tuesday, you can’t expect excellence from these guys every time out, and no one on this Giants staff has good enough stuff to get away with a bad game the way, say, a Madison Bumgarner can.
Put those two things together, add in a middle-of-the-road bullpen and defense, and you get a team that will have to parse together their wins in 2018. That’s not a bad thing. That’s not a good thing. It’s just the reality of the situation for the Giants in 2018.
So far this year, the Giants haven’t put together a solid, all-around game. And this, no doubt, is the cause of consternation for those panicking after five contests.
When the starting pitching has shown up — as it did in the first two games of the season with Blach and Johnny Cueto’s tremendous outings and more or less in the next two games — the offense was nowhere to be found (save for Panik’s two home runs).
On Tuesday, when the Giants put runs on the board (it took a while, but someone other than Panik did score) and the bullpen was tremendous — throwing 5 2/3 innings and not allowing a run — the starting pitching and defense weren’t there, resulting in a Giants loss.
Eventually, it will all click — the Giants will have a game with solid pitching, from start to finish, defense that isn’t a liability, and a lineup will put five or more runs on the board. That will be a game that everyone will feel good about, a game that will inspire confidence. It could even happen today.
But it’s hard to imagine that those kinds of games will be frequent for the Giants this year.
No, the Giants are far more likely to pull themselves through this season where, almost every night, they have a broken link in the chain.
That doesn’t mean they’ll be good or bad — it just means that things are going to be hard to predict on a nightly basis.
These Giants could thrive amid a season where the stakes are high and the margins are narrow — succeeding in environments like that has kind of been their thing over the last decade — but it’s too early to tell if this Giants squad has that same DNA that won three World Series titles or is the team that limped their way to 98 losses last year.
For now, the Giants are confident that things will work out. They’re only five games into the season, after all.
“Of course you want to start off strong, want to start off on top, but sometimes that doesn’t happen but you just have to take it day by day,” Andrew McCutchen said. “We’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.”
Whether the Giants are “fine” or not, I’d recommend getting a refill on any blood pressure medication you might be taking now. Given the stakes of the 2018 season, the likelihood is that this campaign is going to be excruciating.
Such is life on the margins.