In the first half of 2021, the Giants hit more home runs than any team in franchise history. They hit three more in a 7-2 victory against the Cardinals on Friday night, their fifth straight win. This kind of dinger-fueled win isn’t a surprise anymore. But that doesn’t mean it’s normal.
The Giants have 135 homers this season, which means that they’ve hit more home runs than they did in 10 of the 13 seasons since Barry Bonds left. Those were full seasons, mind you. The Giants have played one game in the second half.
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The Giants are on pace to hit 245 home runs, which would be a franchise record. That means they’re hitting home runs at a higher clip than they did when Bonds hit 73 in 2001, and they’re hitting them at a higher clip than when a Hall of Famer with 521 career home runs was hitting cleanup behind a Hall of Famer with 660 career home runs. This is not a franchise that lacks historical home run titans, yet the Giants are clubbing more home runs this season than any of them.
There are a lot of reasons the Giants have had the best record in baseball for a month, and why they had the best record in the National League for the month before that. The conversation probably starts with the dingers, though.
Mike Yastrzemski hit two home runs Friday, including a three-run homer in the seventh inning that gave the Giants a 7-1 lead. LaMonte Wade Jr.’s eighth home run of the season was a three-run shot in the fifth that allowed everyone to take measured breaths during some mid-inning bullpen weirdness. The Giants aren’t wholly reliant on the home run – they’re 9-11 in the games in which they haven’t homered this season, which isn’t bad at all – but they’re especially dominant in the games in which they hit them.
But a 7-2 win takes a village, and Yastrzemski and Wade didn’t work alone. Donovan Solano and Curt Casali added two hits each, and Logan Webb pitched four strong innings in his return from the injured list. Jay Jackson pitched in his first major-league game since 2019, inheriting bases loaded and getting out of the jam, then pitching a clean eighth inning for good measure.
“It wasn’t the soft landing we were hoping for,” manager Gabe Kapler said about getting Jackson into his first major-league game in two years, “but that’s baseball.”
If the first win of the second half looked a lot like some of the wins from the first half, that’s also because it came with its fair share of roster calamity. To make room for Jackson on the 40-man roster, the Giants shifted Evan Longoria to the 60-day IL, which means he won’t be eligible to return until early August. Webb was starting in place of Kevin Gausman, who was placed on the family medical emergency list before the game. Brandon Crawford left the game in the eighth inning with what Kapler described as a “hamstring cramp,” and will be re-evaluated Saturday.
Brandon Crawford exited the game after grabbing his left hamstring pic.twitter.com/wAoRldP3Az
— SF Giants on NBCS (@NBCSGiants) July 17, 2021
It was the perfect representation of the Giants’ season so far, then. They hit a lot of homers. They enjoyed strong starting pitching. They got nervous watching a bullpen that bent without breaking. And one of the key contributors walked off the field with Giants trainer Dave Groeschner as everyone watching muttered curse words. That’s the 2021 Giants, all right.
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It’s still somehow working better than it’s worked in decades.
It’s easy to make too much about the first game of a season, or the first game of the second half. The Giants lost Opening Day in excruciating fashion, after all. Every person in that dugout had some variation of “Here we go again” run through their mind, but then they returned to the ballpark the next day and forgot about it. There is no existential threat that comes with losing the first game of the first half, which means there’s no existential threat that comes with losing the first game of the second half.
Still, it feels dandy for a team to pick up exactly where it left off, both for the players and fans, and that’s exactly what the Giants did. There wasn’t a “Once in a Lifetime” moment when you might tell yourself, ‘This is not my league-best record.'” This was the team that went into the All-Star break Sunday with a winning steak, more or less.
The roster news was milder than it could have been, too. Gausman left to join his wife, Taylor, who was hospitalized with complications related to her pregnancy, but while Kapler didn’t want to guarantee that the Giants right-hander would make his next scheduled start, there was reason for optimism. Crawford is day to day, and the word “fluids” was used instead of “MRI,” which suggests an abundance of caution, not crisis. Longoria’s schedule hasn’t changed, so the shift to the 60-day IL was procedural more than anything.
All of it served as a reminder that for as well as things are going for the Giants right now, they definitely aren’t going perfectly. And on a night when the Padres and Dodgers combined to score 34 runs in their respective games – not a typo – it was a reminder that the National League West is much tighter than it should be, considering the first-place team has a .644 winning percentage.
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The Giants have struggled with injuries, just like most teams in baseball, but these injuries have affected some of their most productive players. According to Baseball Prospectus’ invaluable Injury List Ledger, the Giants have lost more days and more production because of injury than several other teams in the National League (subscription required), yet they’re still in a better position than any other team in baseball.
It’s the home runs, then. The home runs and the starting pitching. The home runs, the starting pitching and a bullpen with a sneaky-reliable foundation, as shown by Tyler Rogers calmly closing out the ninth inning on eight quiet pitches. The home runs, the starting pitching, the bullpen with a sneaky-reliable foundation and the depth that allows them to survive several injuries to key players. The home runs, the starting pitching, the bullpen with the sneaky reliable foundation, the depth that allows them to survive several injuries to key players and …
Well, most of it, so far. Most of it worked in the first half, and the Giants have already tied a major-league record for winning percentage in the second half.
There are surprise teams that make you wonder when the regression is coming, and the Giants definitely have several of those throughout their history in San Francisco. But this team is a rare example of a surprise team that makes you wonder more about when it’ll finally be whole again.
Until the Giants are whole again, though, they’ll expect to keep hitting dingers, getting strong starts and having enough depth to overcome any setbacks. In that sense, the first game of the second half was the same as it ever was. Nothing they did made you think differently.
(Photo of Mike Yastrzemski: Jeff Curry / USA Today)