DENVER — The Giants’ unforgettable season is primed to get a whole lot more historic this weekend. The record-book revisions began in the series-opener, as the Giants became the first MLB team to 100 wins.
They were also the first to 90, 80, 70, 60 and 50 victories.
The club turned its nonexistent external preseason expectations into jet fuel powering the best team in baseball. In September, San Francisco is 16-6 — the best winning percentage of any month in a season without any slides.
SF has won in countless ways to add up to 100. There have been comebacks, blowouts, walk-offs and narrow escapes. Friday in Coors Field, the Giants (100-54) blasted four home runs to put away the Rockies, 7-2. SF is now one long ball shy of the single season record of 235 set in 2001.
The Giants have only surpassed 100 wins twice before in the San Francisco era. Once, in 1993, they won a SF-era record 103 games but missed out in the playoffs. The Wild Card format wasn’t implemented yet. Bud Black, now the Rockies manager, went 8-2 with a 3.56 era for those Giants.
That 1993 club was constructed much differently than this year’s group. It had two 20-game winners in Bill Swift and John Burkett. These Giants will have none. Barry Bonds blasted 46 home runs and third baseman Matt Williams added 38. The 2021 Giants, though, will break the single-season franchise record in home runs this series without any individual player breaking 30.
Still, Black draws several throughlines between the 1991 “magical but disappointing” Giants and the 2021 team on pace for 104 wins.
“What a great team,” Black told KNBR in the Rockies dugout. “Great players. Great energy. Very unselfish team. That’s very similar to this, as far as unselfishness. Guys who just cared about winning. It looks like that on the other side there. I think the thing that stands out between this current Giants team and our ’93 team: a lot of veteran players. We had veteran players, sprinkling in with a couple rookies.
“Royce Clayton was a young shortstop for us. But you look around the diamond, we had veteran players. Just like the Giants. So that’s a similarity. We had a good bullpen, too, as does this group of Giants. So that’s two things that stick out… I think it’s more about the type of players that we had are similar to the type of players on this Giants team. Just experience, professionalism amongst the players, smart team. We had a smart team, I think this team has some smarts to it.”
Another similarity: both teams crushed the Rockies. In 1993, SF went 10-3 against Colorado. The 2021 club is now 13-4 against the Rockies, matching a franchise-high for wins in the season series.
Coors Field hadn’t even been built yet in 1993. On Friday, it played like a funhouse ballpark as the Giants left it four times — the 17th time SF has hit at least four homers in a game.
Tommy La Stella started the action by leading off with a wall-scraping solo shot. Brandon Crawford added his career-high 22nd of the season into the second deck. Brandon Belt’s sixth inning shot landed a few feet next to Crawford’s and gave SF a 3-2 advantage.
Alex Wood, on a pitch count as he continues to ramp up after his bout with COVID-19, allowed two dinky runs in the first inning but threw three scoreless afterwards. Wood threw 47 of his 61 pitches in the zone and got seven whiffs on his slider en route to seven strikeouts.
Kervin Castro, nicknamed “El Tanque” by his teammates, relieved Wood with two one-hit innings. The rookie has now started his MLB career with 9.1 scoreless innings despite limited minor league experience.
Then the Giants broke open the game with consecutive singles from Crawford and Evan Longoria, then Mike Yastrzemski’s 25th home run. His three-run shot extended the Giants’ lead to 6-2 and brought the team within one of the single-season franchise record.
Yastrzemski and Belt are the first duo to each surpass 25 home runs in a Giants season since Barry Bonds and Ray Durham in 2006. Belt tied Hunter Pence for the most in a season in the post-Bonds era.
Posey’s RBI single up the middle extended SF’s lead to five. Tony Watson pitched a perfect seventh, and despite loading the bases in the eighth, Tyler Rogers escaped unscathed by striking out Ryan McMahon looking in the eighth. Rookie Camilo Doval extended his scoreless appearance streak to 12 with a one-hit ninth.
In 1993, the Giants hit 168 homers and missed out completely on the playoffs. Even with all the similarities, this isn’t that club — in a good way. And with eight games to play, the Giants can make that clear.