Dylan Cease Nearly No-Hit One of the Worst Giants Teams I Can Remember

Eight and a third hitless innings. A first-inning grand slam off Logan Webb. A 10-0 beatdown at home. If you were looking for proof that this team is going nowhere, Wednesday handed it to you gift-wrapped.

I have watched a lot of bad Giants baseball. I sat through the post-dynasty hangover, the 2017 slog, the years where the whole roster felt like a placeholder. So understand me when I say this: the team that took the field at Oracle Park on Wednesday afternoon is one of the worst Giants clubs I can remember watching, and they spent nine innings proving it in front of their own fans. Dylan Cease and the Toronto Blue Jays did not just beat them. They embarrassed them, 10-0, and it was not even that close.

Cease carried a no-hitter into the ninth inning. Eight full innings, not a single hit, and the only reason the record book will not say "no-hitter" next to his name is that Heliot Ramos led off the ninth with a clean line-drive single to center. That was it. That was the entire offensive output of a major-league lineup on a Wednesday at home: one hit, in the twenty-fifth out of the game. Cease got a standing ovation from the San Francisco crowd on his way off the field, and honestly, good for the crowd, because at least somebody at Oracle Park did something worth cheering. He threw a career-high 118 pitches, 81 of them for strikes, and struck out 11 to push his American League-leading total to 148. He looked like an ace. The Giants looked like a Triple-A tune-up.

And it started early, because of course it did. Kazuma Okamoto ripped an opposite-field grand slam off Logan Webb in the first inning, the exclamation point on a five-run frame before most of the building had settled into its seats. Five runs. First inning. Game essentially over before the Giants had recorded their third out on offense. When you are the kind of team that cannot buy a hit, spotting the other side five in the opening inning is not a deficit, it is a mercy-rule countdown.

Here is the part that actually stings, and I am not going to pretend it away: Webb was not even the problem after that. Take away the grand slam and the first inning and he retired thirteen straight. He worked seven innings and allowed five hits, only one of them after that first frame. That is a competent, professional start from the one guy on this roster who keeps showing up like it matters. And it bought him a 10-0 loss, because the lineup behind him could not scratch out a single run to make his afternoon mean anything. That is the Logan Webb experience in 2026. Grind through seven, hand the ball over, and watch a lifeless offense waste it. If I were him I would be looking at the standings and the schedule and wondering what exactly I am pitching for.

The back end just piled on the misery. Toronto tacked on two unearned runs off Spencer Bivens in the eighth, the kind of runs that only happen to teams that have already quit on the day. Then in the ninth, with the game long decided, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. launched a two-run homer off Ryan Walker, and the very next batter, George Springer, took Walker deep to left too. Back-to-back bombs in garbage time, because when you are this bad, even the mop-up innings find a way to humiliate you. Ten to nothing. One hit. A standing ovation for the other team's pitcher.

What bothers me is not that they lost. Teams lose. It is how completely, how quietly, how unremarkably they lost. There was no fight in this. No rally that made you sit up. No sign that anybody in that dugout was going to make Cease work for it. They just took it, inning after inning, until a man in a Blue Jays uniform was one out away from doing something he will remember for the rest of his life at their expense. That is not a slump. A slump is bad luck stacked on a good process. This looks more like a team that is simply not very good and has stopped hiding it.

And it all lands the same place every one of these columns lands lately, because this franchise keeps forcing me back to it. This is an organization that has spent years telling its fans that October is coming, that the plan is working, that the next step is close. Then it puts a team on the field that gets no-hit into the ninth by one guy at home in July. You cannot sell hope and serve this at the same time. Wednesday was not an off day. Wednesday was the honest version of what this team is right now: bland, beaten, and a long, long way from anything worth staying up for.

I keep waiting for this Giants team to give me a reason to write something else. To be angry instead of bored, disappointed instead of numb. Instead they hand me a 10-0 loss where the highlight was their opponent's standing ovation. Ramos broke up the no-hitter, and I am genuinely glad he did, because the alternative was unwatchable. But one ninth-inning single is not a silver lining. It is the last thing you cling to on an afternoon that told you everything you needed to know. This is one of the worst Giants teams in recent memory, and it is not particularly close.

More coverage: Giants section · Columns · Bay Area Sports Blog home