MINNEAPOLIS — A few Giants began their Tuesday morning with a field trip: a car ride out to the woods, a little time to bathe in the forest and then a dip in the chilly waters of Lake Minnetonka. Tyler Rogers deeply inhaled the pine-scented air. John Brebbia was in the sun long enough to turn pink. Sean Manaea and Logan Webb tried to outsplash one other with cannonball dives off the dock.
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“Yeah, I know,” Alex Cobb said. “I was bummed I couldn’t go.”
Cobb couldn’t go jump in one of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes Tuesday. He had to assist in another kind of dunking: a baptism and rebirth for a team that endured a rugged April but responded by playing well enough for long enough to give itself a fresh start. Cobb delivered a sturdy seven innings, red-hot Michael Conforto flipped the score with a two-run homer in the seventh and Camilo Doval delivered another dominant ninth inning as the Giants beat the Twins 4-3, leveled their record at 24-24 and set themselves up for a chance to sweep this three-game series at Target Field.
The Giants have won seven of eight to reach .500, and although it’s not accurate to call it a totally fresh start (the Dodgers are 31-19, after all), there’s something invigorating about the prospect of climbing instead of digging.
“What we did in April without a full roster, with some really difficult travel … we knew we were going to get healthy and get on a run,” Cobb said. “A big part of getting where you want to go is limiting the damage. We did a good job in April to battle and not let the skids get too long. And now we’re playing the type of ball we expected to play when we were leaving camp. We’ve had some huge moments from guys who weren’t with us when we broke camp. Just good energy, running the bases hard. So I feel this is more the brand of baseball we want to play. We’re excited at what’s coming up.”
The Giants gathered momentum by fixing several flaws that were dragging them down. Some of the repairs are easy to spot. Conforto was batting .168 as recently as May 9, stalling rallies with strikeouts and leaving runners on base — a somewhat predictable start for a hitter who missed all of 2022 while rehabbing from shoulder surgery. His double helped to set up the Giants’ two-run rally in the sixth when they forced major-league ERA leader Sonny Gray to exceed 100 pitches before he could record an out in the inning. Patrick Bailey and Bryce Johnson drew bases-loaded walks against the Twins’ struggling bullpen. Then Conforto’s homer in the seventh was his sixth in 12 games. He’s batting .333 with 14 RBIs over that stretch.
Target (Field) practice 🎯 pic.twitter.com/2UWjM8ALDO
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) May 24, 2023
“I was able to get into an advantage count and not be late on a fastball,” Conforto said. “(Gray) was pretty good, but we put good at-bats together.”
Cobb said he understood how difficult it was for Conforto to return to game speed after missing a season while stuck in the lonesome world of rehab exercises. He had to do it after undergoing Tommy John surgery in 2015.
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“The game is so fast and so crisp,” Cobb said. “To miss all that time, not have a team to help him rehab and stay sharp, then come into spring training and not miss a beat — now he’s a feared hitter in the box. Seems like everyone in the lineup has good at-bats, but when he barrels it, the ball goes. I mean, that ball kept going today. I didn’t think it had a chance with how high it was. But he backspun it and barreled it.”
The Giants addressed their major league-high strikeout rate in April (27.5 percent) to something nearer to the middle of the pack in May (22.7 percent), partly by changing personnel (David Villar) but also partly by coaxing better performance from others (Conforto, Blake Sabol) — and not by compromising their in-zone aggressiveness.
The Giants’ other obvious improvement has come from the bullpen, which was showing signs of stabilizing even before relievers posted a 1.22 ERA over the past seven games. Scott Alexander’s turbo sinker is getting the results the Giants anticipated. He registered three groundballs in the eighth inning. Brebbia washed himself clean of his rocky beginning and is generating a career-best 37.5 percent whiff rate on his four-seam fastball, which ranks in the 90th percentile among major-league pitchers. Taylor Rogers might need two clean months before he can stand to see his ERA on the scoreboard, and he’s not all the way back to the setup role in front of Doval that everyone envisioned — Giants manager Gabe Kapler chose Alexander over him to pitch the eighth Tuesday — but he’s trending in the right direction.
And if the Giants can get the kind of effective long relief that they received from Manaea and Tristan Beck on Monday, they should be positioned to compete to the end of many more games than they did in April.
But the Giants probably don’t come back from a three-run deficit to win a game like Tuesday without making a few less obvious improvements, as well.
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Too many games in which they trailed in April slipped further out of reach because plays weren’t made in the field, which caused starters like Cobb to throw extra pitches, which forced struggling relievers to enter games earlier than they otherwise would, which turned into a doom loop. But a Giants infield defense that appeared wooden to start the season has shown steady improvement. And the outfield defense, which was a nightly calamity last season, hasn’t been an issue at all.
The Giants entered Tuesday ranked fifth in the major leagues with nine outs above average, including plus-1 in the outfield. Last year, they ranked third worst with minus-33 OAA, including minus-25 in the outfield.
Bailey is an improvement behind the plate. Casey Schmitt has been a revelation with a Statcast-shiny arm anywhere the Giants put him on the infield. And J.D. Davis continues to make plays at third base.
That’s the other factor at work in the Giants’ record-rescuing run: Most of the things that were going right in April are continuing to go right. LaMonte Wade Jr. keeps getting on base from the leadoff spot. Thairo Estrada, who doubled ahead of Conforto’s homer in the seventh, keeps spraying hits. And now that Doval’s drive-thru window has a steady stream of cars, he isn’t fouling up the orders.
Doval’s save Tuesday night was his 10th consecutive conversion, a career best. He’s saved 10 of the Giants’ 13 wins in May while racing into the saves lead among NL relievers.
What is most impressing Kapler about Doval’s run? That he is finding a way to save games when he doesn’t have his best stuff.
“And a day like today, it’s going to be a shorter inning,” Kapler said after watching Doval rip sliders past Byron Buxton and flash a 101.7 mph cutter while striking out three batters. “When he’s on, he’s close to unhittable. That’s no secret.”
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Whether the Giants have been on their game or off it, they understand the value of a mental reset. Human performance coach Harvey Martin added field trips to his breathing and mindfulness sessions with players. They began last season when Cobb and Jakob Junis joined him for a little walk through the woods during a series at Colorado. Giants players have found quiet places for forest bathing outside Detroit and Cleveland. They’ve strolled through the saguaros in Arizona. They explored nature of a different sort the last time they played a series at Dodger Stadium. They rode down to Venice Beach.
“We’re in cities all the time, hotel rooms, fake lighting, sharp lines everywhere,” Cobb said. “It’s good to get outside and be a part of nature.”
Martin, who played baseball at Minnesota State, knew exactly where to organize Tuesday morning’s outing. He knew someone with a place on Lake Minnetonka. A month ago, there was still a sheet of ice in places. But on an 80-degree day, the 50-degree water was perfect for an invigorating dip.
Doval didn’t need to jump into Lake Minnetonka to feel restorative bliss. He received that boost last week when his family visited him in San Francisco for the first time. He joked that his 2-year-old son, Liam, is already riding horses when he isn’t throwing a baseball.
Does he throw a 101.7 mph cutter yet?
“Not yet, but eventually he will,” Doval said through Spanish interpreter Erwin Higueros. “If you pay attention, he throws with the same mechanics as me.”
(Photo of Michael Conforto homering in the seventh inning: David Berding / Getty Images)