Memorial Day check-in: SF Giants hope miserable start offers valuable lessons
SAN FRANCISCO - Memorial Day is generally considered the first major checkpoint on the baseball calendar. The season is roughly a third of the way over, meaning the “small sample size” argument is no longer completely relevant. And through 53 games, there have been far more negatives than positives when it comes to the 2026 San Francisco Giants.
At 22-31, the Giants aren’t just on pace to miss the playoffs by a wide margin, but to finish with 95 losses with a -140 run differential. They’re second-to-last in the National League, and whether it’s their atypical plan for of top prospect Bryce Eldridge or the offense’s historic inability to draw walks or the shocking trade of Patrick Bailey, this team has garnered national attention for all the wrong reasons.
“I think we learned a lot of tough lessons,” rookie manager Tony Vitello said after Sunday’s win over the White Sox. “There are some fresh faces. There’s definitely a bunch of fresh faces on the coaching staff, learning how guys and the game are different from spring training until now.… You do need to know what it’s like to get punched in the mouth.
“It does add some value, even though it kind of stings at first. At this point, we’ve been punched in the mouth, the gut, other body parts, so hopefully that serves us well. Times will get even tougher than they’ve been at some point, and knowing how to handle that - or knowing that you’ve been through it and how to get through it together as a group - is valuable.”
In fairness to Vitello’s group, the Giants have played better baseball over the last two weeks or so. Despite getting swept by the Diamondbacks in Arizona last week, they’ve taken two of three from the Pirates, Athletics and White Sox while splitting a four-game series in Los Angeles against the Dodgers. Over their last 14 games, they’ve won seven and lost seven.
To dig themselves completely out of this hole - and have any shot at the playoffs - they’ll have to play a lot better than .500 baseball over the next third of the season. That’s no easy task for a team that’s yet to win more than three in a row or record a series sweep this season.
“You look up and down the lineup, there’s guys. Same thing with the pitching. You’ve got guys that have a track record of having great years,” said starter Robbie Ray. “We just haven’t played up to our standards, what we expect of ourselves, but these last two games were encouraging, for sure.”
There hasn’t been one catch-all reason why the Giants find themselves nine under .500 and tied for the second-worst record in the National League. Rather, it’s been a little bit of everything.
The offense ranks last in runs per game and walks (more on the latter in a moment).
The starting rotation leads the majors in runs allowed and ranks 27th in ERA.
The closer-less bullpen has a fine 3.29 ERA, ranking seventh in the majors, but hasn’t been a true lockdown unit.
The stars, from Logan Webb to Rafael Devers to Willy Adames to Matt Chapman, haven’t performed like stars on the whole.
Even the injury bug has played a role, with Webb, Heliot Ramos and Jung Hoo Lee all on the shelf.
"With the roster we have, I think we have more than enough talent to make it to the postseason. We just have to focus on continuing to win series and leave this one behind,” Adames said after the team was swept in Arizona.
If there is a single area where the Giants have been most disappointing, it’s been the inability to draw walks.
San Francisco’s walk rate of 5.8 percent is last in the majors and well below the league average of 9.4 percent, but that doesn’t contextualize just how poor the Giants’ plate patience has been. As ESPN’s Paul Hembekides recently pointed out, when accounting for league-adjusted walk rate, no team has been as bad at drawing walks since 1879.
The first season with Vitello at the helm isn’t lost quite yet , but the Giants will need a lot to go right after stumbling hard out of the gate. There have been occasions where this team has gotten lukewarm only to fall back to room temperature. To compete, they’ll have to mimic the summer months and get hot in a hurry.
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