It’s still not good, but it’s not all bad.
The San Francisco Giants wrapped up their season-best homestand on Wednesday, going 5-2 by taking three out of four games from Cincinnati and two out of three from Los Angeles. It was a polar opposite performance from the previous disaster of a road trip where the Giants went 3-6, gave up 63 runs and scored only 28.
If it seems like you’ve watched two different teams in the past two weeks, it’s because you have. The Giants were without Brandon Crawford and Denard Span, who were out with respective injuries. When they returned, the Giants dropped the first game, then turned around and won five straight. The combined pitching staff ERA is down to 2.73 over the last seven games, instead of the 6.93 of the nine before that. The power is coming back on offense: Brandon Belt doubled his home run total in the last week to bring him to eight on the year and Buster Posey batted .455 over the six games he played.
So yes, it is possible to become a rebranded team in the course of seven games. While the Giants are still quite a few wins from being at .500, they’re also no longer the lifeless, hard-to-watch group of guys that at one point held the worst record in baseball. Their confidence is back, their demeanor is changing and they’ve given fans a couple of reasons to not totally toss this season in the trash.
Posey’s power surge is one of those reasons. The one-time NL MVP is having one of the best months of his career. In May alone he’s hit six homers, one being a no-doubt-about-it walk-off in the seventeenth inning.
“Great homestand,” said Posey Wednesday, despite a 6-1 loss to the Dodgers. “You have to be happy with it. We won the series here, obviously we would’ve liked to come away with the win today, but we have to be happy going in to the off-day tomorrow.”
The turnaround probably couldn’t have come at a better time either. The Giants will travel to NL Central’s first place St. Louis for a three-game series against the Cardinals this weekend, then head to Wrigley Field for a four-game series against the defending World Series champs.
To put it simply: the Giants are in a much better position for their road trip than they were a week ago, physically, mentally and spiritually. Now at 17-25, they still have a lot of work to do. However the road trip showed fans, and more importantly themselves that the Giants can’t be written off just yet.