The San Francisco Giants' resurgence continues after besting Dodgers over the weekend
By Pedro Moura
FOX Sports MLB Writer
In the category of most surprising start to the 2021 MLB season, there are several contenders.
There are the Tampa Bay Rays, who were thought to have regressed after their World Series bid but are pacing the tough American League East.
There are the Boston Red Sox, who were thought to be in the middle of a rebuild but are right behind the Rays.
There are the Atlanta Braves and Minnesota Twins, who were supposed to be good but have been varying degrees of bad.
But above them all, there is one runaway winner: the San Francisco Giants. Public projection systems pegged them for 70-something wins in 2021. Monday will mark the one-third mark of their season, and they continue on a blistering pace to win 101 games. They won three of four over the mighty Los Angeles Dodgers this weekend at Dodger Stadium, including a tight 5-4 victory on Sunday.
The last time the two teams met, it was the Dodgers who notched the resounding victory, a series sweep in San Francisco. The thought went, if the Giants couldn’t hang with the Dodgers when the favorites were injured, they would get routed over the ensuing months.
One series doesn’t disprove it, but it’s another data point in a long list that San Francisco has logged this year. Sure, Mookie Betts missed the finale because of an allergy flare-up, but Cody Bellinger and Zach McKinstry are back. These Dodgers had been beating everybody of late.
What is making the Giants good? It might be more of a matter of what is not.
They have raised their baseline level of competency. Their pitchers now walk fewer hitters than any other National League team, while their hitters are a close third in the league’s walks leaderboard, of course behind only the Dodgers and San Diego Padres. In both cases, that’s nearly a 25% improvement from a year ago.
Notably, this is not a case of a total revamp to the major-league roster looking effective early. This is a case of a roster mostly made up of returnees improving their play. The Giants have by far the oldest offense in the league. In average age as calculated by Baseball Reference, the other 14 National League teams range from 27.6 to 29.5.
The average age of a 2021 San Francisco Giant hitter is 30.9.
Braves general manager Alex Anthopoulos may have said it best a few years back, when he told the Los Angeles Times that his instinct whenever a player struggled was to find him a new home and locate an outside replacement, but Farhan Zaidi’s was to find a way to make the player better with in-house intervention. Zaidi, of course, is now in his third season as the Giants’ president of baseball operations.
Anthopoulos traced Zaidi’s skill to his history working for the low-budget Oakland Athletics, who could not always (or often) afford to acquire a replacement. Anthopoulos and Zaidi worked together for two years in Los Angeles. With the Dodgers, Zaidi led the acquisition and development of Max Muncy. With the Giants, he has acquired Mike Yastrzemski and Kevin Gausman, two 30-year-olds who didn’t reach their potential until arriving in San Francisco relatively late in their careers. But he has also supervised the resurgence of veteran after veteran: Brandon Belt, Buster Posey and Evan Longoria. Each member of that trio – 33, 34, and 35 – is logging better statistics in 2021 than he had in at least five years.
As Muncy put it Sunday: "They were never a bad team. They just couldn’t put it together. They’re a good team."
"Putting it together" is a nebulous concept. But it might look something like what Posey is experiencing after sitting out the shortened 2020 season: more patience and more power. He’s healthy, and he’s resting more frequently than ever before in an attempt to keep it that way.
By Clayton Kershaw’s estimation, Posey, his contemporary, is arguably playing better than he ever has.
"That’s a big addition," said Kershaw, whom the Giants pounded for their five runs on Sunday. "Their starting pitching has been really good as well. They got a lot of pieces over there, on both sides of the ball. …They’re a good team."
If it sounds like that phrase is being repeated, perhaps it’s because it’s new enough that it needs to be said. Opponents don’t need to note that the Dodgers are good. For the Giants, this success was unexpected, at least from the outside.
The industry still does not see them as potential 100-game winners. But nor are the Giants seen as a 75-win team anymore. As their manager Gabe Kapler noted over the weekend, one key to the Giants' success this season has been their consistency. They haven’t slumped for an extended stretch. Even the Dodgers and Padres, right there with them in the West, can’t say the same.
Now they have to keep it up, but they've already accomplished a lot.
Pedro Moura is the national baseball writer for FOX Sports. He most recently covered the Dodgers for three seasons for The Athletic. Previously, he spent five years covering the Angels and Dodgers for the Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times. More previously, he covered his alma mater, USC, for ESPNLosAngeles.com. The son of Brazilian immigrants, he grew up in the Southern California suburbs. Follow him on Twitter @pedromoura.
