Sep 22, 2021

  • Tim KeownESPN Senior Writer

    Shut

    • Senior Writer for ESPN The Magazine
    • Columnist for ESPN.com
    • Author of five books (3 NYT all-time-sellers)

The San Francisco Giants accept been the best team in baseball for well-nigh half-dozen months now, through 151 games, 227 abode runs, and at least a million roster moves. And every twenty-four hours of those nigh six months, and each one of the 137 days that they woke upward in first place, they have been described, collectively, with endless derivatives of the discussion surprise.

They are surprising considering very few people saw this coming, which means they were not pre-anointed by the proper experts, who are traditionally balky when it comes to albeit even a temporary lapse in expertise. The Giants were given 9-ane odds to make the playoffs. Their win-full was projected at 74.five, a number they surpassed on Aug. xiv. This very website projected even worse.

"I think it's notable that all of our players and our staff and our arrangement were enlightened of the projections and the expectations at the beginning of the season," says Giants manager Gabe Kapler. "I call up those projections and expectations tin can provide a lot of motivation, especially with veteran players who believe in themselves. I think that motivation tin go a long way toward bringing out pinnacle operation, and this is really about how those players have taken those projections and seen them as an opportunity."

Somewhere embedded in at that place -- Kapler tends to choose his words like he's selecting simply the right fruit out of a bin -- lies an essential truth: we've become hopelessly fond to opinion, both having them and reacting to them. We're obsessed with predictions, too, rendering the games useful only as tools to measure our wisdom. And and so, despite the durability and repetition of the Giants' achievements -- 97 games don't merely win themselves -- they keep to be regarded as something of a fluke.

In search of proving our own hypotheses correct, we've ceded a sense of wonder, an ability to exist surprised. Which means, whether or not they defy their preseason World Series odds (100-1, for the record) the Giants have washed their office to reanimate the joy that comes with realizing that wild, borderline-preposterous things -- things like a squad of Austin Slaters and Darin Rufs being better, simply barely, than a squad of Corey Seagers and Mookie Bettses -- can be celebrated regardless of whether you saw them coming.

After all, this run has been nothing if not entertaining. The Giants and Dodgers have engaged in a remarkable season-long race in the NL West, with massive implications riding on the flavour'south final 10 days. The NL West loser -- and it'due south wrong/unfair/ludicrous to put that label on a 100-plus-win team, but rules are rules -- will have to win the historically unpredictable wild-card game to earn the right to play the NL W winner in the NLDS. (Which means, stupidly, that one of the two best teams in the NL is guaranteed to be eliminated earlier the NLCS.) Until then, though, each team pretty much has to win every solar day considering it's a well-nigh-guarantee the other squad will, too.

Buster Posey calls it "healthy urgency," and here's an example: The Giants had a season-high nine-game winning streak, scoring at to the lowest degree six runs in each game, that ended Sept. xiv; over that nine-game stretch they gained merely 2½ games on the Dodgers. Over this past weekend they shell the NL East-leading Atlanta Braves two out of three, and it felt similar a missed opportunity.

Every fourth dimension they've lost two or 3 in a row, it felt safe to believe they were on the ropes, that this time -- finally! -- they would revert. This -- finally! -- is when we see that they are who nosotros thought they were, and every fourth dimension that happens they immediately reel off iv or five in a row and nobody can believe it all over once again. The squad's slogan is "Resilient SF," a nonspecific and malleable message that probably started when everybody in marketing missed a borderline. Suitable in a what-the-hell way for 100 wins or 100 losses, it now feels oddly prescient.

"This really is unique," says Giants starter Alex Wood. "The consistency, to win calendar month in and month out. To do what nosotros've done over the course of the season shouldn't go unnoticed."

THE REASONS WHY the Giants are something entirely different than we thought tin be plant upwards and down rosters in both San Francisco and Triple-A Sacramento, but Brandon Crawford is a proficient identify to kickoff. He'south a 34-year-old shortstop playing at a near-MVP and articulate-Gilt Glove level. A career .254 hitter, he'due south hitting .301. He's got 21 homers, 81 RBIs and a .900 OPS. He plays defense similar he can encounter the ball exit the bat before it happens and knows where it'due south going earlier information technology gets there, which allows his range to far exceed the limitations of his foot speed.

Kapler, wearing a T-shirt that reads, "Dingers and Deadlifts," says, "First off, Craw trained for this. When the new group came to the Giants, I remember Brandon was in a place where he was not pleased with how the game was starting time to view him: potentially as a platoon bat, potentially as a shortstop that was still good just no longer at his peak. I think he took that very seriously and said, 'I can evidence y'all that's not true.' The motivation is what I find well-nigh fascinating."

It flows -- like Crawford's historic pilus -- from him to Posey to Brandon Belt and Evan Longoria. A team filled with players -- Ruf, LaMonte Wade Jr., Mike Yastrzemski, Tyler Rogers -- whose talents proved resistant to the assessments of many other teams has been led by the resurgence of a handful of guys representing a who'southward who of a 2013 All Star Game.

"Before the flavor started, you could envision one of these veteran players having a career year," Kapler says. "Just I think it would have been difficult to envision Evan Longoria with a .900 OPS, Brandon Crawford playing at an MVP level, Buster Posey being the virtually valuable catcher in the game, and Brandon Belt existence on footstep for one of the best years of his career."

The temptation is to presume at that place's something mystical at work. Instead, head of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi has simply devised a surreptitious formula to maximize production by taking two or 3 roster spots and filling them with a rotation of five or vi guys each, and so Jay Jackson can go Stephen Duggar tin can become Mauricio Dubon can become Thairo Estrada tin go Camilo Doval then routinely they're passing each other on I-80 between Sacramento and San Francisco. Zaidi has utilized the players with options in a vertiginous mistiness: Estrada, starting with his kickoff telephone call-up on June half-dozen, had 5 separate stints with the team and was optioned to Triple-A Sacramento last week. Dubon's journeying is even more peripatetic; he was recalled from Sacramento on Sept. 2, optioned to Sacramento Sept. iii, recalled Sept. 4 and optioned back on the 13th.

And the 6-5, 11th-inning win over the Braves terminal Friday was, at the very to the lowest degree, mystical-adjacent. In this business nosotros like to use the word microcosm a lot, partly considering information technology condenses a raft of different concepts only more often than not because information technology sounds smart. This game, though, was and then distorted and ridiculous information technology somehow stood for the whole. It began with Donovan Solano: Information technology was his first game back after spending 10 days on the COVID IL, and he spent those 10 days alone in a hotel in New York after contracting the virus despite existence vaccinated. The squad sent him some weights, a bat and a weighted ball. He lifted the weights, swung the bat in forepart of a mirror, threw the ball into a mound of pillows and ordered raging quantities of room service.

Freed and salubrious, he returned to the team Friday and was tasked with the job of pinch hitting with the bases empty and two outs in the bottom of the 9th, his team downward a run and Braves closer Volition Smith on the mound. With 2 strikes, he drove a back-pes slider over the wall in left to tie the score and give the Giants xvi pinch-hit homers this flavour. (Again, mystical-adjacent.)

In the bottom of the 11th, with i out and the bases loaded, the pitcher's spot came upwards and the Giants found themselves with no remaining position players to send to the plate. This is i of the potential problems with the radical employment of a deep roster; pinch striking by matchup -- every bit early on as the third or quaternary inning, for example -- depletes the number of available players in an extra-inning game.

But two weeks before, at Kapler's request, Giants motorcoach Nick Ortiz took the atomic number 82 on putting together a spreadsheet addressing precisely this scenario. (Because of course he did.) Which pitcher would give them the best chance of driving in a run from 3rd with fewer than two outs? Rookie Sammy Long was an option, but he might have been needed in the bullpen if the game went all night. Then Kevin Gausman, the previous night's starter, was the choice of both the spreadsheet and the state of affairs, and he headed to the cage under the stands and cranked the machine up to 100 at the get-go of the inning to get set, just in case. (Considering of class he did.) When the time came, Gausman became the seventh thespian to announced in the leadoff spot and worked the count total. At this point, the logical motility might have been to just stand up there -- a walk would take won the game, a double play would take ended the inning -- but Gausman swung and pulled a lazy fly to right field that was far enough, by near 4 feet, to allow Crawford to score. (Because of course it was.)

"I want to make ane thing articulate," Kapler says at ane indicate: "There's nada we are doing, or take done, that is especially novel. All teams are training with machines, all teams are intensifying do, all teams are using data to make decisions. But at that place's a tendency to look at u.s.a. and say, 'You guys are probably doing something different.'"

Credit must be assigned, of course, and that territory can exist difficult to traverse. (And it'southward one reason Kapler chooses his words then meticulously.) An emphasis on Zaidi'south roster-building and the daily piece of work of Kapler and his league-tape 12 coaches can be seen as a diminishment of the work and production of the players. An accent on the resurgent older players and the emergent young ones can be seen as a diminishment of everyone else.

"The internet of all this is information technology's been very collaborative," Kapler says. "At times information technology's not recognized how influential our players are in their own evolution. I say it all the time because I believe it to exist true, but right now information technology'due south actually standing out."

MLB force-feeds a theme into every postseason, and this year it'south "Built for October." Last week, the Giants were the starting time team to display the T-shirts and soak them in champagne when they clinched a spot. They celebrated without reservation or apology, deep into the night. At that place's no guarantee this team is built for October -- allow the predictions resume -- merely it was definitely built for every month that came before it.