SB Nation • 10 min read

Giants-Dbacks Series Preview

The Dodgers spent the weekend painting Oracle Park with the Giants’ entrails, but as the Giants are still just 2 games back of a playoff spot with 13 games remaining, it wasn’t a death blow. The Diamondbacks have the chance to put the Giants out of their misery, though, and vice versa, a situation that existed in their previous matchup, too. The Giants won that series, but the Diamondbacks won 2 out of 3 against the Twins this past weekend meaning they’re both 3-3 since last week.

But you don’t care

about that, right? Bryce Eldridge will be making his major league debut! That’s all that really matters.

There’s a decent chance that the slugger goes 0-for-8 with 7 strikeouts in the series, but maybe he won’t? Maybe he’ll soak up enough attention by Arizona’s starters that the rest of the lineup will have a chance to cook? Hard to predict. The only thing for certain is that The Arizona Series has been a big one in recent Giants history. It was around this time back in 2023 that the Giants were so embarrassed in Arizona for a 2-game series that it was the thing that sealed Gabe Kapler’s fate (allegedly). In 2022 and last season, the Giants did well enough to set them on the path to possibly getting over .500, only to fall apart in the final weekend. That scenario is still very much on the table.

The Giants are still, technically, alive in the playoff hunt, but given that baseball is largely failure, predicting the team will come up short over these final 13 games is the easiest prediction to make. After all, the rotation is gassed, the bullpen is a shambles, and the lineup is… well… look. They need only go 7-6 over this last stretch to end the season over .500, and I think the lineup could do exactly that when 9 of these 13 are against run-allowing teams — even the Dodgers aren’t immune to the occasional blowout.

Before this past weekend, the Giants’ lineup slashed .297/.358/.512 and the team went 12-4 over their previous 16. They’re 1-2 to start off this final 16 set and just because the offense hid away in the face of the big scary Dodgers doesn’t have to mean it went into hibernation for the winter. The team just saw two of the starters for Arizona in this series last week.

In the last series preview I thought about mentioning the pesky Jake McCarthy but I didn’t at the last minute because he was having such a bad season. Turns out, he is very close to being one of those “only good against the Giants” players, a situation that got the Giants into a lot of trouble over the weekend when the haunted cremains of Michael Conforto came to life to eviscerate the team that resuscitated his career. For McCarthy, the Giants are one of the few teams giving him a major league career (he also rocks the Rockies and crushes the Phillies) — but, his magic hitting powers are best at Oracle Park, so his bite might not be quite as severe in this series.

Jake McCarthy at Oracle Park (92 PA): .345/.378/.476
Jake McCarthy vs. the Giants (140 PA): .313/.355/.438

The best hitters for the Giants in September have been Matt Chapman (205 wRC+), Patrick Bailey (176), Jung Hoo Lee (164), and Willy Adames (152). With the exception of Bailey (who does most of his damage at Oracle), they have hit very well in Arizona for their careers and recently:

Chapman: .897 career OPS at Chase (45 PA), .899 OPS last season (28 PA)
JHL: .891 career OPS at Chase (13 PA) in 2025
Adames: .785 career OPS at Chase (75 PA), 1.200 OPS vs. Dbacks combined the past 2 seasons (31 PA)

Rafael Devers is performing fine here in the season’s final month (116 wRC+). He has never homered at Chase, and has only played there once. Casey Schmitt hasn’t been all that great at the plate in September, but he is 9-for-23 with a pair of homers and a pair of doubles in Arizona.

Bob Melvin will have to white knuckle it with this improvised pitching staff, and against Arizona on the road that could get truly messy awfully fast.

The winner of this series will take the season series and will very likely knock the other team out of the playoff race. That doesn’t mean the other team automatically gets that third Wild Card spot, but it does mean that they get to hold out hope for another week. The Diamondbacks have been in the World Series very recently with a lot of this same group, so that kind of hope must feel more palpable. The Giants have been big stinky losers for a long time now and few of the players on the current roster remember what it was like when the team was scary good in 2021, so that hope is a mere abstraction. But if the Giants win 2 out of 3 and somehow gain back a game or something, it’ll be tough to deny that something real is happening. No pressure, Bryce Eldridge!

Series overview

Who: San Francisco Giants at Arizona Diamondbacks
Where: Chase Field | Phoenix, Arizona
When: Monday at 6:40pm PT, Tuesday at 6:40pm PT, Wednesday at 12:40pm PT
National broadcasts: MLB Network simulcast (Wednesday)

Projected starters
Monday: Kai-Wei Teng (RHP 2-4, 7.54 ERA) vs. Zac Gallen (RHP 11-14, 4.84 ERA)
Tuesday: TBD vs. Eduardo Rodriguez (LHP 8-8, 4.98 ERA)
Wednesday: Justin Verlander (RHP 3-10, 3.94 ERA) vs. Brandon Pfaadt (RHP 13-8, 5.31 ERA)