The San Francisco Giants are baseball’s most interesting franchise. Their thrilling walk-off win over the Phillies on Sunday was their thirteenth in the past fifteen contests, and with the mighty Cubs having endured a 1-6 week the Giants displaced Chicago atop the MLB wins leaderboard, not to mention many a Monday morning power ranking lists.
This is a development few saw coming, which is appropriate since the Giants’ mini-dynasty (or is it a dynasty?) over the first half of this decade has been perhaps the most subdued, uncelebrated, and enigmatic era of team success in the long history of professional baseball.
It is precisely the ambiguity surrounding the inconsistent and sometimes elusive nature of their success that makes them such a lightning rod for conversation. It is also what makes them great. While many question whether a franchise which has never won more than 94 games, experienced a sub-.500 season, only twice won in excess of 90, and thrice missed the playoffs during a six year window being heralded by others as dynastic in nature, is worth such praise, there is little doubt that this is the best run franchise in baseball.
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With all due respect to the Cardinals, it is not they, but rather their West Coast brethren, who are most analogous to the NBA’s Spurs and NFL’s Patriots. The common thread between these three league-defining franchises is their capacity to be infinitely malleable, while never losing their elite competitive grip. It is an unmatched adaptability that is born from a blending of a front office–that dispassionately recognizes which previously useful pieces need to be unloaded, and which previously unheralded newcomers will thrive when acquired—and a coaching and leadership core that creates and maintains the winning culture all those auxiliary pieces are required to accept.
Each is led by a curmudgeon of an old man whose outward grumpy indifference to the formalities and pageantry of their stage borders on the annoying, yet somehow proves redeemable by the knowledge that much of it is an act. Bruce Bochy, much like Bellichek and Popovich, may have an old-school sensibility about him, but it comes entangled with a surprisingly overt progressive willingness to change, experiment, and explore; for they all see winning as the one thing which transcends their propensity towards irreverence. The Giants were shifting before it was fashionable, building specialized and oversized bullpens before the rest of the world adjusted, and figured out that pitching had as much to do with catching as anything else long before Buster Posey was old enough to sip championship champaign.
Bruce Bochy has learned to be the coach of a team that leaned more towards position player stardom even though he would have rather played a procession of 2-1 games, just as Popovich learned to embrace more fluid, up-tempo offenses, and Bellichek wisely agreed to latch his defensive mind to the legacy paving coattails of a golden quarterback. Over the course of time and many championships all three have won by coaching teams that excelled in what their leader knew best, what their leader knew least, and in a more balanced manner.
The Giants core group of players is just as flexible as Brian Sabean or Bochy could ever be. No star of theirs has ever seen themselves as being bigger than the franchise and its culture, which is why the names at the top of the marquee have so seamlessly shifted from championship to championship.
To think of how amazing this is, imagine the current Mets winning a World Series a half decade from now without Syndergaard, Harvey, and deGrom and no intermittent rebuild; or the current Cubs raising a World Series trophy in the 2020’s without Rizzo, Arrieta, or Bryant. This is what the Giants did in shifting from a team centered around the likes of Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, and Pablo Sandoval to one that is decidedly not, yet no less effective. Buster Posey is the closest thing they have to a central figure. The comparisons to the likes of Jeter are not unwarranted. It’s a relatively safe bet to assume he’ll go on to mature in a way manner reminiscent of Duncan when father time someday adds Posey’s knees and wrists to its infinitely long list of victims.
The current incarnation of the San Francisco Giants is possibly their best to date. As a team they lead all of baseball in every advanced fielding metric. Their lineup is full of patient, if unspectacular hitters, Posey, Brandon Crawford, and Brandon Belt, with his career year, leading the charge. Their rotation is, for the first time since 2010, prepared to take over a short series. The signings of Jonny Cueto and Jeff Samardzija leave them with a 1-2-3, led by perennial Cy Young hopeful Madison Bumgarner, that rivals any in the game.
Their clubhouse makeup is best embodied by the persona of their emotional leader Hunter Pence, whose absence in the second half of 2015 doomed them as much as anything. Still, it is the unique blend of young and old; rising and falling; wise and eager; loud and quiet, and every other predictable and/or cliché dichotomy imaginable, which makes them such a poised bunch.
Their imbalance balances them, which makes about as much sense as their incomprehensible successes and perplexing failures over the years. Yet, on the whole, they are a fun group to watch, a damn good team, and good for baseball. Whether or not they are really as good as the Cubs or Red Sox lineup; Indians or Mets rotation, they may just be the best team in baseball. If not, at least they can rest assured that they’re the most interesting team alive.