SAN FRANCISCO — Spencer Bivens held the baseball and the San Francisco Giants’ season in his right hand.
This wasn’t a scenario that existed on a whiteboard in spring training. Or on a computer screen. Or as the most outlandish thought bubble in the minds of the Giants’ chief architects and decision-makers. Such is the enduring charm of a 162-game season. It creates a stable enough sample to reduce statistical noise. It also necessitates going off script to survive the grind. It is both plannable and yet utterly unpredictable. And even for the most buttoned-up teams, it will open ample opportunities for unlikely heroes.
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The Giants do not win their first World Series in the San Francisco era without franchise players like Tim Lincecum and Buster Posey. They also do not win in 2010 without waiver flotsam like Cody Ross and Pat Burrell. And they certainly don’t win if their general manager, Brian Sabean, looked at his fourth-place team at the All-Star break and decided to start selling off parts. As it happened, a fourth-place team with a puncher’s chance spent the next three months sneaking in blows to the chin.
The Giants have something less than a puncher’s chance now. They are two games under .500 and will not take the field again until Tuesday night against the Oakland A’s, a few hours after the bell sounds at the trade deadline. Whether they sought to deliver a message to management or not over this weekend series against the Colorado Rockies, they had four games distilled into three days to leave a final impression.
They won the first three. But this is a team that has spent a total of four games above .500 all season. They’ve taken steps forward. Then they’ve gone right back to picking daisies. It’s reductive to assume that they needed to win Sunday, that they needed to complete the four-game sweep, to retain any chance of keeping the business part of this team together past the trade deadline. One game and one result, especially against a team as woeful as the Rockies, should not change anyone’s evaluation of this group.
But sometimes, you just have to be there to understand.
The Giants attracted 37,178 paying customers Sunday, and sure, many of them were lured by the prospect of a Jung Hoo Lee bobblehead doll — a giveaway that felt as awkwardly timed as the Fourth of July falling on a Wednesday since Lee sustained a season-ending shoulder dislocation in May — but it was a nearly full house nonetheless. The ballpark came to life when Casey Schmitt hit a solo home run in the first inning and when Derek Hill raced around the bases with an RBI triple in the second inning and when Jorge Soler thudded into the plate, avoided a tag, and scored from second base on Matt Chapman’s two-run single in the sixth.
Hill turns on the jets for a triple 💨 pic.twitter.com/iv3e938jdX
— SF Giants on NBCS (@NBCSGiants) July 28, 2024
No, the Giants did not bank nearly enough victories in April or June. They did not take nearly enough series from downtrodden teams in the first half or put together the kind of 14-out-of-18 streaks that create a cushion in the standings. But in this stretch out of the All-Star break, they finally assembled the swing-and-miss rotation that appeared on those whiteboards in Scottsdale. They won four games against the Rockies in front of engaged and entertained crowds. They have to hope that showing, along with an ownership group that has always been keen to peddle hope, if not quite the promise of alpha dominance, will direct president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi from selling off parts. They hope everyone will take the field Tuesday night with their gloves still laced up and still punching.
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“That’s out of my pay grade,” Chapman said. “But I think that everybody here in this room, we believe in each other. We believe that our best baseball is ahead of us. Our pitching is getting healthier, really hitting their stride. … And then offensively, it seems like we’re starting to put together good at-bats. Soler is starting to get going there. So we’ve got a lot of good things happening. We all believe in each other and we hope to be able to continue to push for that playoff spot.”
But first, they had to see through to the final out of a 5-4 victory Sunday. And after playing a doubleheader Saturday, and using a bullpen game Sunday that included two middle innings from Jordan Hicks, who began his official transition from first-year starter to reliever, Giants manager Bob Melvin needed to rely on virtually everyone.
Including Bivens, who overcame every presumption while working his way through independent ball and a French professional league to arrive on a major-league mound as a 30-year-old rookie. There might be no better avatar for this Giants team, which has been so inconsistent that they’ve convinced even many ardent fans that they should sell. Investing in this team requires heart over head. But what kind of payout is the most fulfilling? Unlikely heroes do not become heroes if someone doesn’t afford them the chance.
So even with a two-run lead in the eighth inning, the Giants might have been down to their last chance. Bivens allowed a one-out double to Rockies leadoff hitter Ezequiel Tovar, who has quietly become one of the National League’s top players. Hunter Goodman reached on a two-out single when Bivens tried to field a dribbler to the right side only to realize that first baseman David Villar was playing well off the bag. Ryan McMahon drew a seven-pitch walk to load the bases.
“I knew the situation,” Bivens said. “I just didn’t overthink it. Just get ahead. Attack with your best stuff. Throw with full intent. I felt I was still pitching well. Just don’t get overwhelmed.”
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Bivens had been close to untouchable at Triple-A Sacramento before and after making his major-league debut on June 16. He’d thrown five innings and held the Dodgers to one run in a spot start on June 30. He kept his composure with nowhere to put Brendan Rodgers, throwing a slider underneath his swing and then locating a sinker inside at the knees to induce the groundball he needed to escape the inning and preserve the lead.
“My composure, I take a lot of pride in that,” Bivens said. “It’s not the hardest thing I’ve had to do to get here. It’s easier to stay composed out there because of how I’ve gotten here, given my route. It’s fun to compete in that situation and I want the ball. I’m enjoying the ride.”
Giants closer Camilo Doval allowed a run in the ninth but got a strikeout and a groundball to strand the tying run at second base and nudge the Giants within 3 1/2 games of the New York Mets for the third and final NL wild-card spot. The Giants would have to climb over four teams to sit in that third spot. They’re within five games of the top wild-card position, too. And they hold tiebreakers against the Mets and Pittsburgh Pirates, with the potential to capture more season series against several other jockeying clubs.
It’s not too different than the trade deadline Zaidi faced in his first season with the Giants in 2019, when the team was one game over .500 and there were four wild-card hopefuls in front of them. The Giants sold at that deadline, moving relievers like Mark Melancon and Sam Dyson while stocking the system with an assortment of prospects. They also held on to their biggest impending free agents, Madison Bumgarner and Will Smith, partially because both pitchers were in line to net them compensatory draft picks and partially because the Giants couldn’t rip it down in Bruce Bochy’s final season as manager.
There is no farewell tour to consider this season. Their impending free agents, or the players who could become one by opting out of their contracts, will not net them draft picks. Zaidi will be duty-bound to listen to offers for Blake Snell, Michael Conforto, Taylor Rogers and others. He might even attempt to replicate 2019 and thread the needle, dealing a veteran or two to open the way for a younger player or to alleviate an impending roster crunch when Alex Cobb is expected to rejoin the rotation later this week.
There aren’t any indications around the team that Zaidi will surprise and add to this roster, but if he does, the Cubs have a center fielder and middle-of-the-order bat in Cody Bellinger who basically has a more expensive version of Chapman’s contract — player opt-outs after this season and the next — and might be available for a reasonable cost in talent.
Or the offers for Snell might be so overwhelming that Zaidi cannot justify holding fast and allowing the left-hander to opt out for nothing after the season.
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Even if the Giants do not add to their roster, not selling will count as a form of buying. This front office will be buying a chance for this existing roster to see this season through. They will buy their fans an opportunity to remain engaged in the fortunes of this current group. They will buy into the irrational hope — what worth hoping for isn’t irrational on some level? — that there will be moments for players like Soler and Chapman, aces like Snell and Robbie Ray and Logan Webb, upstarts like Tyler Fitzgerald and Heliot Ramos, and 30-year-old rookies like Bivens, to step into the light.
They will send Ray to the mound against the A’s on Tuesday, followed by Webb. Their season is starting to resemble everything they scribbled in dry-erase marker, along with a few developments that they didn’t see coming. It’s been plannable and unpredictable. It would take a cold hand to erase it all now.
(Top photo of Spencer Bivens: Brandon Vallance / Getty Images)
Andrew Baggarly is a senior writer for The Athletic and covers the San Francisco Giants. He has covered Major League Baseball for more than two decades, including the Giants since 2004 for the Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News and Comcast SportsNet Bay Area. He is the author of two books that document the most successful era in franchise history: “A Band of Misfits: Tales of the 2010 San Francisco Giants” and “Giant Splash: Bondsian Blasts, World Series Parades and Other Thrilling Moments By the Bay.” Follow Andrew on Twitter @extrabaggs
