This version of the Giants might actually be a watchable team

I picked a bad week to ignore San Francisco Giants baseball.

Not because the Giants won so much, mind you, but because they were interesting. There were weeks in April and May when I would have paid a lot of money for a single interesting game. The Giants in June, though, have been posting football scores and blowing ninth-inning leads, and they’re doing it for your entertainment. It’s been better for everyone involved.

And when I say that I ignored the Giants, I’m being quite literal. The last box score I looked at was from May, and the last bit of baseball I watched before vacation was Adrian Houser walking the leadoff batter at Coors Field, which will always be a ghastly combination of words. That was enough baseball for me for a while, thank you, and I turned every last notification off.

When I turned them back on, the Giants were a completely different team than the one I was expecting. The Giants are tied for the second-highest batting average in baseball now. They scored 12 runs or more in three separate games last week, and the last time they did that was all the way back in August 2025. That’s not a meaningless comparison, either, as that was right around the time last season that the Giants started looking like an above-average offensive team. If they start looking like that again, two months ahead of last year’s schedule, they could build some actual momentum. A month or so too late, but still.

Here are some scattered thoughts from a Giants writer who was frozen in carbonite on May 30 and only now is thawed out. It’s been an interesting couple of hours on Baseball-Reference, to be sure.

The 2026 Giants are finally the team we were expecting. Now what?

The 2026 Giants have a streaky, imperfect and perfectly capable lineup. They have enough offensive talent to contend, which means they have enough offensive talent for a deep October run. After a brutally slow start at the plate, they’re returning to form.

Even if it weren’t too late to save the season, which it probably is, all this does is highlight what a lousy offseason the Giants had. They went into the offseason with clear, unambiguous needs, and they whiffed on them. They chose two starting pitchers, and they’ve both been disasters. And while I agreed with them that it’s silly to spend money on premium relievers, there certainly could have been a more proactive and trustworthy plan than “sign a bunch of minor-league free-agent relievers.” The Giants started the season with a ramshackle, three-lefty bullpen that led to Ryan Borucki facing Aaron Judge five batters into his season, and it’s been a series of frustrations since then.

The Giants’ homegrown rotation options (Landen Roupp, Trevor McDonald) have offered mostly positive contributions, which is dandy, but that just reminds us that the Giants needed more help toward the front of the rotation, not the back.

So if the Giants can actually hit baseballs like they’ve been hitting them lately, it will be a bittersweet development. Yes, it will be entertaining to watch a lineup that pitchers have to plan for. But it will only make the pitching pitfalls feel much, much worse than they had to.

Lee and Eldridge could salvage the season on their own

Before the season, my annual doom-and-gloom preview posed a bunch of spooky hypothetical scenarios that mostly came true. Sorry about that. It’s been a season bad enough to call the whole operation into question, all the way to the top. The hitters with long-term contracts, to a man, struggled horribly to start the season. Everything was looking like a worst-case scenario, and it all stunk so badly that even a lengthy stretch of hot baseball wouldn’t get them back into contention.

If, however, the Giants can go into 2027 with reasonable, realistic hopes that Jung Hoo Lee and Bryce Eldridge have All-Star potential, it would go a long way toward salvaging this season. That would give them a pair of 20-somethings to dream big on, which is the quickest way to pacify fans after a dreadful season. There’s no cure like young talent.

On May 30, Eldridge had a .192 batting average, a .295 on-base percentage and a single home run in 61 chances. That might be the last time in his career that he’s under the Mendoza line, though, as he’s hit .433/.485/.633 since then, and his doubles are likely to start turning into home runs. Remember that when Judge was Eldridge’s age, he was hitting against the San José State Spartans, not Jacob Misiorowski.

As for Lee, it’s probably fair to define what “All-Star potential” means for him, and the answer is that you’re probably looking at it. A high average. Lots of doubles. Helmets flying off his head. Helmets flying onto his head. It’s a wild ride, and if it keeps up for the rest of the month, he has a good shot at making the All-Star team. If he keeps it up all season, the Giants will have an enviable foundation to build around, just as the prospects start to trickle up to the majors.

Easy, there. Let’s start with the first one, where Lee keeps it going for the rest of June. He’s had hot streaks before, after all. But it’s still worth remembering that he was more of a prospect than a fully formed veteran when the Giants got him, with plenty of seasoning still required. If he starts thwacking the ball around like his childhood idol, Ichiro, even a little bit, you might not remember the 2026 season as the one that fell into the toilet. You might remember it as the one where the Giants’ future identity started to emerge.

(Wait until at least June to take a victory lap for either player, of course. I can’t stress that enough.)

The Kyle Harrison start should be released on Criterion Edition Blu-Ray and 4K (with commentary tracks and other bonus features)

Absolute cinema. It was a stunning and daring vision, a bleak tour through a world of hubris and regret. Five stars.

The answer to “would you still pull the trigger on the Rafael Devers trade today?” is a wee bit different now than it was even before this season started, even if you ignore what James Tibbs III is doing in the Dodgers’ organization. There’s so much recency bias to work through. Devers had been one of baseball’s best hitters for several seasons entering 2026. Harrison has been one of baseball’s best pitchers for a few weeks. Don’t overreact just yet.

It’s not looking great, though, and it looked even worse when the one-time future of the Giants’ rotation carved up the current (and future) lineup. My knee-jerk response is that the Brewers are a different kind of organization, always one step ahead on the pitching front, and that the Giants wouldn’t have unlocked whatever they did with Harrison. Except the obvious response is that the Giants should also be in the business of making young pitchers better. They should out-Brewer the Brewers and out-Ray the Rays. Having the ability to keep up with those particular Joneses is the real reason the Dodgers win more than 100 games every season.

The real question isn’t “Why did the Giants trade Kyle Harrison?” It’s, “Why are other teams better at improving and/or evaluating pitchers like Kyle Harrison?” The answers to that question that will make more of a difference over the next few years than Devers ever could.