The San Francisco Giants exit the All-Star break in a whole other country as they take their talents to Canada to face off against the Toronto Blue Jays, a team that was 8 games out of first place in the AL East on May 28th. They’ve gone 28-13 since then, including a 10-game winning streak that came one shy of the club record.
The Blue Jays have been in a similar situation as the Giants of late, stringing together one disappointing season after another when the future had looked so bright just a few
years earlier. Things seem to have turned around this offseason when the club extended Vladimir Guerrero Jr. with a 14-year, $500 million deal, dashing the dreams of weirdos like me about the Giants possibly signing him in free agency.
Instead, the Giants traded for their own AL East-forged slugger in Rafael Devers, who has significant ownage against Toronto. Will that matter? Probably not. The Jays have a 32-16 home record this season and the Giants are just 24-25 on the road (including 9-8 since June 1st). The Jays have also won the season series in each of the last two seasons.
But it’s still baseball, where anything can happen. The Giants have 45.3% playoff odds as of this morning while the first-place Jays are riding 83.7% odds, still lower than the Yankees’ odds (88.6%), remarkably. I know, I know. Never tell you the odds.
This Sportsnet writeup indicates that the Jays have been really good at avoiding strikeouts while making a lot of hard contact during their winning run. Meanwhile, their pitching staff, despite being a top 5 strikeout club, gives up a fair number of home runs thanks to their penchant for flyballs, and the quality of contact makes them one of the lower third staffs. They make up for it by having the best defense in baseball.
Meanwhile, the Giants have a top third pitching staff based on ERA and WAR, and before you go hypothesizing that it’s solely because of Oracle Park, their 3.68 road ERA is 4th-best in the sport. Unfortunately, the offense is stinky poo-poo butt on the road. Their 91 wRC+ is 22nd. If you’re not a fan of scale stats for whatever reason, then just know that their .224 road batting average trails only the Pirates & Rockies (both .208) and the White Sox (.219).
The Giants have just 65 games remaining and, supposedly, the 9th-easiest schedule. But it’s never as simple as compiling the winning percentages of the remaining opponents. After starting the season 19-12, the Giants went 33-33 until this break. You can’t miss the postseason in July, but a team can make a strong statement out of the gate.
Series overview
Who: San Francisco Giants at Toronto Blue Jays
Where: Rogers Centre | Toronto, Ontario, Canada
When: Friday at 4:07pm PT, Saturday at 12:07pm PT, Sunday at 9:05am PT
National broadcasts: MLB.tv Free Game of the Day (Friday), ROKU Channel (Sunday)
Projected starters
Friday: Justin Verlander (RHP 0-7, 4,70 ERA) vs. Chris Bassitt (RHP 9-4, 4.12 ERA)
Saturday: TBA vs. Eric Lauer (LHP 4-2, 2.78 ERA)
Sunday: TBA vs. José Berríos (RHP 5-4, 3.75 ERA)
Where they stand
Giants, 52-45 (3rd in NL West), 399 RS / 382 RA | Last 10: 6-4 | 0.5 GB WC3
Blue Jays, 55-41 (1st in AL East), 440 RS / 423 RA | Last 10: 7-3
Blue Jays to watch
Vladimir Guerrero Jr.: He has a .904 OPS over the last 30 days (105 PA), but on the season he has an interesting split. Against teams with a .500+ winning percentage, his OPS is just .721. Against sub-.500 teams: .926. So, his bat will determine if the Giants are actually a winning team or simply three wins in a trench coat pretending to be good.
Ernie Clement: In the past two season series (6 games), Clement’s featured in all of them, going 6-for-17 with a pair of homers driving 7 RBI against the Giants. He’s got a great glove, but he’s one of those players who only hits when facing our favorite squadron. So, even though Vlad Guerrero Jr. is flanked by fellow All-Star catcher Alejandro Kirk and the likes of Bo Bichette (25 doubles, 12 HR), Addison Barger (.500+ SLG%) and George Springer (.490 SLG%), it’s this dude I think we need to watch out for the most. He seems poised to reap the benefits of a tired Giants pitcher whose managed to navigate the minefield of that lineup without giving up much damage.
Brendon Little: The Blue Jays had no All-Star pitchers, but their best reliever is this hard-throwing lefty who, nevertheless, doesn’t feature his 94 mph sinker. His primary pitch is a knucklecurve. He can strikeout anybody, but he also walks a lot of batters. Sort of like an Erik Miller type. The Giants are 25th in MLB (71 wRC+) against left-handed pitching. So.
Giants to watch
Justin Verlander: He’s still looking for his first win, of course, and while I think that even 1 win looks like a longshot at this point, wagons have been circled, and team media and fans alike think he’s a solid backend starter who has just run into some bad luck. He’s made just 6 career starts at Rogers Centre and has a 2.55 ERA. His last start there was a 14-strikeout no hitter in 2019.
Rafael Devers: He has 437 PA in 105 games against Toronto thanks to playing almost all of his career in the AL East. He has 24 home runs against them for his career to boost an eye-popping line of .307/.368/.569. Half of those home runs have come in Rogers Centre, and in 192 PA (44 games) he’s slashed .323/.401/.605. Still, Devers’ Giants career looks to be comatose at the moment and plausibly for the rest of 2025. On top of a lingering groin issue, he has a disc problem in his lower back. Back injuries and hitting don’t mix, and Devers is pretty much a bat-only player at this point. All of the ingredients are there for him to have a stinker of a series in a place and against a team he has always torched.
The Giants’ defense: The secret is that the Giants don’t actually have a good defense, it’s just that the defensive metrics look decent overall because of Patrick Bailey. Per Statcast, the team’s Outs Above Average (Statcast) is -12, the 8th-worst in the sport. A refresher on Statcast’s definition of OAA:
Outs Above Average (OAA) is the cumulative effect of all individual plays a fielder has been credited or debited with, making it a range-based metric of fielding skill that accounts for the number of plays made and the difficulty of them. For example, a fielder who catches a 25% Out Probability play gets +.75; one who fails to make the play gets -.25.
By comparison, Toronto is +16 (6th in MLB). What saves the Giants (and boosts the Blue Jays to the top) are the catching metrics that build up Statcast’s Fielding Run Value. As they describe it, it’s a conversion of five different defensive categories to a uniform scale:
Outs Above Average (range): 1 out = .9 run (OF) // 1 out = .75 run (IF)
Fielder Throwing Runs: 1 run = 1 run
Catcher Blocking: 1 block saved= .25 run (available 2018-pres).
Catcher Framing: 1 strike saved = .125 run
Catcher Throwing: 1 SB prevented = .65 run
FanGraphs does a similar conversion for their Def (Defensive Runs Above Average) stat. Because Patrick Bailey is such a good catcher, the Giants rank 12th in MLB in defense (+7.0 Def). Matt Chapman missing time certainly doesn’t help matters, but for now, the best assessment is that they have an average defense. The Giants are a pretty decent strikeout-groundball pitching staff, but balls will be put in play, and the team’s ability to field could wind up being the difference in at least one of the games in this series.
Prediction time
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