This was baseball’s best first-half story: Two proud veterans and savvy franchise leadership pushed a lightly regarded team into the playoff chase.
But we’re not taking about Yadier Molina, Adam Wainwright and the Cardinals. No, the best story has been Buster Posey, Brandon Crawford and the surprising San Francisco Giants.
Experts pegged them to be distant also-rans in the National League West, but they have hung with the mighty Los Angeles Dodgers for three-plus months.
And the Cardinals can learn from their unlikely success.
While the Cardinals made a blockbuster offseason trade for Nolan Arenado, the Giants improved incrementally with smaller moves.
While the Cardinals have let talent slip through the cracks, the Giants have worked the margins to fill team needs.
While the Cardinals went into the season with a weak bench and poor Triple-A support, the Giants found strength in numbers.
While the Cardinals stood pat with an undermanned roster for weeks, the Giants, led by president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi, kept scouring the marketplace for help.
They never stopped searching — rotating through 23 position players and 25 pitchers thus far.
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Posey, who is dealing with a thumb contusion, and Crawford have led the way with their twilight-year resurgence.
“Thinking back earlier in my career, if I would have been told that I would be starting an All-Star Game at age 34, I would be pretty happy about that,” Posey said.
Their supporting cast features low-key acquisitions like Sammy Long, Zack Littell, Jimmie Sherfy, LaMonte Wade Jr., Alex Dickerson and Thairo Estrada. The bullpen includes Cardinals castoffs Dominic Leone and John Brebbia.
The Giants soldiered on despite infielders Evan Longoria, Brandon Belt and Tommy La Stella being shelved by long-term injuries.
“It’s always nice to prove people wrong,” Crawford told USA Today. “I thought we were going to surprise teams, but I don’t know if I had us winning the most games in baseball.”
The Giants have adjusted, improved and outperformed the projection models.
“I just don’t get caught up in trying to compete against a projection,” Giants manager Gabe Kapler said on video call with reporters. “We have players on the other side and teams on the other side that are trying to beat us every night. I think it makes much more sense to try to plan for that and create opportunities for our players to beat the other team and not to get caught up in expectations.”
He is a preparation freak who stays after his players to keep them on point. The Giants field staff is squeezing more from this group than most anybody anticipated.
“The staff deserves a lot of credit,” Posey recently observed. “They’re extremely prepared every day. And our hitting coaches, it’s not a one-size-fits-all program, but they’re able to mesh that philosophy with the overall approach to each game.”
That’s certainly not the vibe the Cardinals projected in recent weeks as their collective offensive slump worsened.
Kapler’s success in San Francisco must be puzzling to Philadelphia Phillies fans, given his rocky two-year term as manager there. While his management style did not work with that big-budget roster — and that’s putting it politely — it has clicked with the Giants’ mish-mash roster.
‘A long way to go’
“In spring training there was a lot of conversations amongst our players,” Kapler said. “They really do set the tone with expectation setting. We’re here to support their mission, and our players said that their goal was to win the National League West.
“So what we did that point is we work on processes to help our club be in a position to have a chance to do that when we get near the finish line. Right now we’re halfway there. We’ve got a long way to go. But obviously, we feel good about the position that we’re in and we feel like we have a chance to accomplish that.”
This turnaround seemed to come out of nowhere. The Giants suffered four straight losing seasons since their last postseason appearance.
The franchise fell into a holding pattern after winning three making four postseason trips and winning three World Series in seven years.
The Giants weren’t great at drafting and development. They refused to travel the tank-and-rebuild route, given their excellent fan support in their spectacular ballpark.
So the baseball operation was just sort of meandering until Zaidi hired on from the Los Angeles Dodgers and began utilizing the skills he honed with the low-budget, barrel-scraping Oakland Athletics.
The Giants are proving that a front office can retool a roster on the fly and find valuable depth in baseball’s crevices. They proved that aggressive mindsets at the plate, on the mound and in the field can elevate an unheralded group.
They proved that veterans can be revived, injuries can be overcome and negative expectations can be defied.
The Giants may not sustain this winning pace with their tougher second-half schedule, but a wild-card berth seems within reach.
Meanwhile, the Cardinals, who are battling just to get back to .500, should take notes this week on all of this.
