The count drags on. Basic numbers revealing basic problems.
6 — Six wins against the Colorado Rockies. That number should be read with added emphasis: just six. Italics needed. The Giants had double-digit win totals against Colorado in 2025 and 2024, but in 13 confrontations in 2026 against the bottom dwellers of the division, of the Majors, the Giants were 6-7. It was San Francisco’s first losing record against Colorado since 2020.
While the years wandering east of 2021’s Eden have been disappointing,
there’s a significant difference between 80 and 65. That difference can be explained by looking at the head-to-head record against Colorado. The 2024 and 2025 Giants certainly weren’t the Rockies. The 2026 Giants…well, if you lose more often than you win against a bad team, you probably are one as well.
7 — Seven ejections for first-time manager, Tony Vitello. TV bagged that league-leading lucky number in the 3rd inning of game 162.
Home plate umpire Ryan Blakney took exception to Vitello taking exception to not getting a strike call on a Mookie Betts check-swing. Upon review, Vitello was pretty animated. Upon review, he was justified. Betts should’ve been ruled out, he wasn’t. The Giants manager made his frustrations known on the matter, and his offseason started early for it.
Ejections are all about messaging. Managers argue because they want to show their players that they have their back. When they spew expletives at umpires, they’re really holding each player to their chest and whispering: Listen to my heart, it beats for you.
For Vitello, the “losing control” was one of the only things he could control. Six of his seven ejections came after July 1st. The Giants season was half-way done and fully lost — but obviously there were still relationships to foster and maintain with many of the players that will be returning in 2027. No matter how bad the team is, how meaningless the outcome, it’s the manager’s job to try and win that game. While we’re still iffy on the in-game decisions, Vitello seemed at ease with the performative bluster of spitting into an umpire’s mouth. So he huffed and he puffed, making himself an easy target for those boys in blue.
8 — Eight players that started the 2026 season at the Double-A level or lower. By September, a more accurate name would’ve been the San Francisco Giant Flying Squirrels.
Jonah Cox initially made the leap on May 31st, flying over Sacramento entirely to reach San Francisco from Richmond. Yunior Marte similarly hurdled the River Cats with the Giants selecting his contract in late-August. Three months prior he was playing A-ball in Eugene.
Pretty much everyone else climbed the developmental ladder one rung at a time. Drew Cavanaugh got called up to Sacramento on May 12th and a month and a half later, he was in San Francisco to fill in as a back-up backstop. Matt “Tugboat” Wilkinson, started the year in the Guardian’s AA-affiliate Akron and then moved to Richmond in the Patrick Bailey trade. He was in San Francisco for good by the end of August. Turner Hill, Cesar Perdomo, Scott Bandura, and Bo Davidson all debuted in the final month, month-a-half of the season.
Jumping two farm levels from A to Triple-A in a single year isn’t all that crazy, but it’s definitely less common to hurdle from the middle Minors to the Majors. To have eight players start their year as Flying Squirrels (or an Emerald if you’re Marte) and end the year as Giants is quite the transformation. While we should applaud the grit of some, who not only floated but even swam after being thrown in the deep end, the fact that the top-tier of the organization had to reach so deep into their pockets to fill out a roster says a lot about how the year went.
This also complicates things in the near future. With the Collective Bargaining Agreement set to expire December 1st, and a potential lock-out looming, adding some of these players to the 40-man meant they’ll be directly affected by the fall-out. They’ll be unable to play for the minor league affiliates, locked-out of team facilities, and barred from communicating with coaches, trainers, and other team officials.
9 — Nine innings in a baseball game. Nine Giants positioned on a baseball field. Nine games played before San Francisco emerged victorious against the Diamondbacks, which brings me to…
10 — Ten total losses to the Arizona Diamondbacks. The Giants were 3-10 against them. Good for a dismal .231 win-percentage — San Francisco’s lowest win-% in a season against Arizona since their formation in 1998.
2026 was the Giants’ fifth straight season with a losing records against AZ, but this one easily takes the cake in terms of embarrassment. The D-Backs swept them twice. They lost eight in a row before winning their first. Ketel Marte single-handedly beat them on multiple occasions. Arizona body-slammed them into the dust early on, and the Giants decided it was best to just lie there, bedded in the desert, baking in the impossible Phoenix heat.
While inter-division performance isn’t as weighted as it once was on this newish schedule. When the two-divisions were introduced to each league in 1969, the Giants played 90 games against the five other teams in the west — still nearly a third of their games are against the Dodgers, Padres, Rockies and D-Backs. 13 games each, and the Giants had a losing record against every one of them. A 17-35 spread over. Their 32.7 win-% good for another low, San Francisco’s worst in the Divisional era.
11 — eleven times swept in a series. Compare that to their one (1) sweep mentioned in a previous post. They were held winless in five different series against NL West teams (2 ARI, 2 LA, 1 SDP, and lost two of three twice to Rockies).
12 — a dozen different relievers with a blown save. That’s tied for the most in franchise history in a single season. This probably doesn’t shock you considering the merry-go-round that was the Giants bullpen. 2025 trade deadline sales and offseason roster construction pretty much ensured that San Francisco’s back-end would be a wishy-washy closer-by-committee / who’s-rested/ who’s hot/ who drew the short-straw. Unsurprisingly, this arrangement didn’t work out.
The trials and tribulations of the 2026 Giants bullpen have been well-documented. They will live on in infamy. As a team, the Giants recorded 27 blown saves in total, logging a low 52.6 Save%, which was the fourth lowest in Majors.
12 is also the number of pitchers who recorded a save for the Giants, which was the third most of any team this year, and the most in their franchise history (dating back to 1969 when Save stat became official).
To be clear, these are not the same 12. Eight of the relievers who recorded a save also blew one, which means there were four arms who recorded a save and didn’t screw one up, and four arms who screwed one up and never made a save. That’s 16 different pitchers tasked with seeing a lead through to the final out. Employing the throw it at the wall and see what sticks methodology is less than ideal when it comes to bullpen managing — but can you blame Tony Vitello for employing it?
I vaguely remember him announcing Caleb Kilian would be the closer in mid-June, but the opportunities to actually save a game were few and far between. Kilian secured the save in his first opportunity. The next game he surrendered four in the 9th to the Athletics. He then bagged a couple more saves…then got lit up for three in the 9th against the Rockies…then he couldn’t maintain a tie in the 9th against Kansas City… Ten days later he was playing for the Phillies.
Vitello tried it all. He played the crappy hand he was dealt.
13 — Thirteen times the Giants were shutout by an opponent. To be fair, that’s not a particularly egregious amount. Seven other teams were held scoreless in more games this past season. In terms of California-era club history, 13 other (hey, another 13!) Giants teams were shutout in more games, the most being 18 in 1992.
I guess this number stands out more when you consider the hopes we had for the Giants offense. The 2019 Giants were shutout 19 times. The 2010 team, 16; and 2014, 15. On paper, this 2026 line-up was supposed to have more punch. They did, and they didn’t. They were as tempermental as a motel shower’s temperature control — red hot one day and ice cold the next. It took them forever to get going. They were 21 innings deep into the season before they scored their first run. By the first day in May, they had already been shutout six times.
14 — Fourteen players logged at least one defensive inning in left field.
Now, the number 14 isn’t particularly relevant or important. Is that a lot? Probably, but I just want to talk about what happened in left field; or, the real reason this Giants season was doomed from the jump.
This has nothing to do with roster construction, or below-average performance, or injuries — this goes back to one little decision made at the start of the year: the decision to start Heliot Ramos in left field. Perhaps an innocent, even obvious, decision for rookie manager Tony Vitello then, but a fatally myopic one in hindsight. When Ramos trotted out to position himself in the left corner of the diamond he became the first Giants player since Barry Bonds’s departure after 2007 to start consecutive Opening Days in left field. I was salty (in a cheeky way) about it at the time. I’m good-naturedly ticked-off now. It’s clear that the “curse” is bona-fide — a curse without quotation marks added. Respect wasn’t given where respect was due. Bonds required an offering. For just one day, one inning even, a player should have been sent out as an oblation.
Instead Ramos defiled sacred ground…and where is he now?
15 — Fifteen different lead-off batters. 15 different names penciled in at the top of the lineup to start a game. The tip of the Giants spear. Some teams had Pete Crow-Armstrong, or James Wood, or Shohei Ohtani — clear-cut lead-off leaders, no-brainers for the manager. Wake-up, and before even their first cup of coffee, write their name, in Sharpie, thick-tip and all-caps, it’s never going to change.
But Tony Vitello and the Giants, it wasn’t who’s on first, but who’s batting first? As the season progressed, it became another task completed by a committee based on a variety of variables. Overall, there wasn’t a ton of production from the spot. Their 96 wRC+ from their lead-off hitter ranked 25th in the league. The .296 on-base percentage — one of the more important metrics for a player averaging the most plate appearances in a game — ranked last.
Willy Adames and Luis Arraez both logged 31 games hitting first, tied for most on the team. Drew Gilbert, who fell into the role later in the season and served surprisingly well out of the top-spot, logged twenty starts exclusively against right-handed starters. Gilbert matured a lot over the year as he rose to the top spot. He hit .286 with a .557 slugging percentage and .378 OBP (82 PA). Arraez, Ramos, Adames, Lee — nobody was anywhere close to those numbers.
16 — Sixteen players on the 60-day injured list by season’s end. That’s just…crazy. It’s also created quite a headache for the front office now that those 16 names have been put back on the 40-roster. As of writing this, there are 56 names on a 40-man list — those numbers aren’t mathin’.
17 — Seventeenbig league debuts, Seventeen debut patches. Seventeen sets of family and friends clustered in the stands, hanging on every pitch thrown as their son or brother or nephew or partner realizes their life-long dream. The Giants led the Majors in those moments. That’s kind-a cool. Also kind-a connected to the health issues that tore the roster to shreds.
71 — Seventy-one is seventeen but backwards, so it fits. Seventy-one is also the amount of players to represent the Giants in a baseball game during the 2026 season, tying a record set by the 2025 Atlanta Braves. The Giants reached this height in the second to last game of the season, with a familiar face in Camilo Doval.
Doval pitching in the 9th inning of a tie game against the Dodgers was not on my Giants’ season bingo card. Nor was a guy named Tugboat striking out Shohei Ohtani. But much like the 17 debuts, or 8 Double-A call-ups — the 71 different jerseys is a dubious honor, and an illustrative one. Teams don’t reach this kind of number if things are going according to plan. It wasn’t the plan to know the names Shay Whitcomb or Ryan Borucki or Jason Foley. I wasn’t dying to watch Andrew Knizner play baseball again. But by year’s end, what were we left with? What choice did we have? The roster churn generated some serious white water, and while the rapids were rough, they carried the rickety Giants raft down river.
