Giants are a good team, but their best days lie ahead
It's only May, which means it's still too early to make big-picture declarations about the state of a major league team.
Surviving and thriving over a 162-game season requires a combination of skill and luck, of durability and depth and an ability for a long list of people inside an organization from a top executive all the way down to a bullpen catcher to repeatedly make sound decisions.
So while it's too early to say the Giants, at 19-12, are a World Series contender or a good bet to repeat as NL West champions, here's a safer, more responsible declaration to make at this time of year.
The 2022 Giants are clearly a good team, and they have the potential to be great.
The first unofficial baseball stock reports typically don't come out until the quarter pole —another 10 days from now— but the same could be said about the Giants at this juncture of last season. An eventual 107-win team was off to an 18-13 start, but they had already demonstrated the ability to fill up the strike zone on the mound and punish mistakes at the plate.
In early May, no one was projecting
the Giants to outlast the Dodgers in the best division race in major league history, but their formula was working. This year, with Buster Posey enjoying retirement and All-Star Kevin Gausman building his Cy Young candidacy for the Blue Jays instead of the Giants, the formula is back, albeit with a few slight tweaks.
A week ago, fans were critical of Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi for his lack of urgency during the offseason. The team was four games into a five-game skid, their longest since the first half of a truncated 2020 season, and
a once-potent offense was silent. Anthony DeSclafani and Alex Cobb had already hit the injured list and projected staff ace, Logan Webb, was struggling to live up to expectations.
As the vaunted Dodgers extended their lead in the NL West and the star-led Padres continued to keep pace, the Giants were closer to last place than first. It sure didn't help Giants fans when they looked at the standings and saw their team sandwiched between the Rockies, a perennial disappointment, and the Diamondbacks, a group that was fortunate to only lose 110 games last year.
What a difference a week makes.
After ripping off their fifth straight win on Wednesday to sweep the Rockies at Oracle Park, the Giants are still a third-place team, but one that very much looks the part of a club with 90-to95 win potential. And as the Giants of 2010, 2012 and 2014 showed, all that matters is that you have a ticket to the dance.
Just ask the 2021 Giants, who learned that no matter how early that ticket is
secured, there are no guarantees you can stay until the lights turn on.
So what's the sense in writing about a good team with the potential to be great in May? Why read a book that won't be widely reviewed for several more months?
The justification here is that if the past informs the present, the Giants' immediate future looks quite bright.
Consider the start to this 2022 season, one in which only a single Giants player, left-hander Carlos Rodón, looks like a clear All-Star. With a 1.80 ERA and a league-best 53 strikeouts, Rodón is a
bonafide ace. The rest of the Giants? They've been pretty good, but in the case of Webb, Alex Wood and other key members of the pitching staff, there's room for improvement.
As for the lineup, there are a number of players faring well, but no one setting the world on fire. Brandon Belt has been excellent when healthy, Joc Pederson was a force in April before slumping in May while Wilmer Flores and Mike Yastrzemski have been far more consistent after relatively quiet starts to the season.
It's a decent group, no doubt, but not one that's propped up by a couple of
superstars.
And yes, that's why there's reason to believe the Giants' best days are ahead of them.
Through five weeks of play, the Giants have been good, but not great, solid, but not spectacular. Maybe that's the story of the season, an 85-to-89 win team that manages the ebbs and flows of the year better than most.
But the guess here is there's another gear.
There's a point when Pederson, Yastrzemski and LaMonte Wade Jr. all catch fire at once. When Webb starts looking like the version fans saw a season ago. When Tyler Rogers and Camilo Doval form one of the best bullpen combos in baseball.
There's a point when the Giants have firmly established themselves as capable contenders, and when Zaidi pushes in those chips. San Francisco's top baseball executive might never “win the offseason,” but dating back to his days in Los Angeles as the Dodgers' general manager, his track record suggests he'll go gambling at the trade deadline.
It didn't take long for the 2022 Giants to show us they're pretty good. Their best days, however, should still be a ways down the road.