The Giants Are Playing Their Best Baseball of the Season, and the Brewers Series Just Proved It
Forget the record for a second, if you can manage it. Over the last five games this team beat the best record in baseball twice, walked one off in extra innings, and hung sixteen runs on a club that came in 67-40. This is the best the Giants have played all year, and I am done pretending otherwise just because the standings say I should.
Where this actually started
I wrote a column a couple weeks ago that we should build this team around Bryce Eldridge and start asking hard questions about the bullpen, because the season, in any meaningful sense, was over. I stand by every word of that. But something has been happening on the field since then that I would be lying to you about if I did not write it down, and it started on July 25, when this team was coming off a sweep in Kansas City and a five-game losing streak that had the whole operation looking exactly as lost as the record suggested. Rafael Devers opened that game with a two-run homer, watched a five-run lead nearly evaporate the way this bullpen has made a habit of, and then delivered again in the tenth with a walk-off single. Skid over. Record: 43-60. Nobody was throwing a parade. But something changed that day, and it did not stop changing.
Two out of three from the Angels, then the Brewers arrived
The Angels series that followed was not a coronation — Mike Trout made sure of that, going 4-for-4 with a hand in two homers off Carson Whisenhunt to avoid the sweep and send the Giants to 44-61 on July 26. But two of three against a bad Angels club, capped by a walk-off, is a series win, and a series win is a series win no matter how the last game of it goes. Then the Brewers came to Oracle Park with the best record in the sport, 67-40, and this is where the stretch turned from encouraging into something worth actually writing a column about.
Tyler Mahle spun six shutout innings and Grant McCray's fourth-inning homer did the rest in a 3-0 series opener that blanked the majors' best offense cold, and the Giants improved to 45-61 on July 27. Milwaukee answered the next night, riding 13 hits to an 8-2 win in which Bryce Eldridge's eighth-inning homer was the only real answer this team had, dropping the Giants to 45-62. That is the part of this stretch that keeps it honest — this was not a flawless run, and a team with this record does not get to pretend it was. But then came Wednesday.
Sixteen runs, and it was not a fluke
Daniel Susac hit his first two career home runs in the same game. The Giants scored sixteen runs on seventeen hits, put up a seven-run sixth inning, and buried the best record in baseball 16-3 to take the series. Heliot Ramos went 4-for-5 with three RBIs. Luis Arraez had four hits of his own. Logan Webb went six innings and allowed two earned runs and got to pitch with a lead so large it barely mattered. Eight different Giants drove in a run. That is not one hot bat carrying a corpse through a random Wednesday. That is an actual offense showing up all at once, against the one team in baseball with the least business losing a series to a fourth-place club in July.
Add it up and the last five games read 3-2, and on paper that does not sound like much. But look at who is in the loss column: Mike Trout having the best game of his season, and a Brewers lineup that had won 67 games doing what Brewers lineups do for one night out of three. And look at who is in the win column: two beatings of that same 67-40 Brewers team, one of them by shutout, one of them by thirteen runs, plus a walk-off that snapped the worst stretch of the season. I will take that ledger against almost anybody's last five games right now, and I have watched enough of this team's ugly baseball this year to know the difference when I see it.
The honest version
None of this changes the math on the season. The Giants are 46-62, the front office still has real decisions to make with the trade deadline arriving Monday, and five good games in late July do not erase four months of a lineup and a bullpen that could not get out of their own way often enough to matter. I am not going to stand here and tell you this team is contending for anything. But I have also spent a lot of this season telling you exactly how bad it looked, and I am not going to turn around now and refuse to tell you when it looks good. Devers is swinging it. Eldridge keeps doing damage every time it counts. Susac just introduced himself with two homers in one afternoon. Mahle, Webb and the bullpen behind them just shut down the best offense in the sport twice in three days. That is not nothing. That is the best baseball this team has played all year, and it happened right in front of us. Go Giants.
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