The Giants are playing extremely lackluster baseball right now

the San Francisco Giants came to the plate 34 times Friday night. In each of those home plate appearances, they either had the tie or the go-ahead at home plate. In theory, it’s the best kind of baseball. Every pitch counted. Every plate appearance, every ball, every strike, every complete count, every ball in play. The game was in balance with each of them.

In practice, the game should have come with a warning about using heavy machinery. At no point did it really feel like every pitch mattered. The Giants lost against White socks, 1-0, due to an error, a fly ball that touched third base and a two-out hit. Any of these events would have been one of the biggest thrills of the night if they had happened. pour the Giants instead of at them, but they most certainly happened to the Giants. They led in the only race of the night. Who was scored by the other team. And it’s hard not to come to an inescapable conclusion.

The 2022 Giants are boring.

There have been boring stretches in Oracle Park before. Seasons worthy of them. There were teams that couldn’t throw, teams that couldn’t hit, and teams that couldn’t either. There have been hopeless teams, and there have been teams that were already mathematically eliminated the following season. This year’s team is not one of them. Any comparison to some of these ultra-dull giant teams comes with an air of entitlement and selective amnesia.

But it shows, especially at home. It’s been months since Duane Kuiper yelled, “RUF IS ON THE MOVE,” and there’s been a little archipelago of shining moments since then. There was the the all-time madness of the Mets gamethe scan of the Dodgers and a march against rockiesbut there is a warm baseball ocean around these islands.

It’s not just anecdotal evidence either. Here are all the high leverage plate spawns of the season, according to Baseball-Reference. Scroll down and find out what the Giants have done in these late and close situations in their last three series at home, against the royals, networks et tigers. These are times when the crowd is waiting to burst, waiting to have fun, waiting to feel good about their decision to come to the stadium. Random sampling looks like this: pop fly, pop fly, walk, strikeout swinging, walk, single that didn’t score second runner, pop foul, grounder, double play.

My favorite analogy for baseball’s languorous pace is that it’s a progressive jackpot, a Las Vegas quarters slot machine with a large display of rolling numbers. Somebody’s gonna put a quarter in that sucker and win it all, and guess what, maybe it’s you. Except unlike a slot machine, it’s a guarantee progressive pot. You will be rewarded for investing so much time in baseball. There will be a time, a game, a week, a month, a season, a playoff where it’s all worth it, and you’re glad you spent hours putting quarters into it.

Until then, you feel like a goober putting so many quarters into it. And it takes a lot of neighborhoods to park in San Francisco.

The Giants are capable of scoring points. You know that. They know that. They’ve had double-digit totals in seven games this season, which is more than the 2012 or 2014 team in a full season. Giants likely won’t stay top of the points standings if they don’t improvebut they were never below par or below average, even with all sorts of injuries.

Giants 2022 temporarily boring? It may be safer to say so. For the moment.

There is no excito-meter that can tell you how excited you would have been if Nick Castellanos (.689 OPS) or Trevor’s Story (.720 OPS) were in the lineup Friday, but it’s hard to argue that the current slog is an offseason issue. The Giants ended up with one of the best free agent hitters – Joc PedersenAll-Star runner-up — and he couldn’t offer any pizzazz, either.

Well, maybe he could have. At the end of the eighth inning, austin slater started with a walk, and Pederson’s place was due. But left handed Tanner Banks was on the mound, so manager Gabe Kapler executed a line change and sent There reputation until pinch hit. He quickly embarked on a double play to call off the rally.

Let’s be very clear about this: it was the right decision. You can sniff around and say it was the right decision “on paper” with quotes, but ever since Pederson entered the league, he was one of baseball’s worst hitters against left-handed pitchers. Ruf has been a monster against southpaws, and he’s keep hitting them good This year.

But let’s also be very clear about something else: the giants pinch hitting has been abominable this season. Just months after setting a major league record for pinch home runs in a season, the Giants can’t find a speck of that same magic. They have exactly zero homers this season, even though they’ve fielded a pinched hitter as many as 102 times, 25 more than the team that has fielded the second-most. For every pinched hitter braves felt good this season, the Giants felt six, yet the Braves have two doubles in 16 PA this year; the Giants have one in 102.

Sending a pinched hitter with the peloton advantage to a crucial spot is smart. When it works, the smart team is rewarded. When it doesn’t work, over and over and over again, it’s boring. Temporarily boring, maybe, but definitely boring right now.

(The Giants do one thing well as pinch hitters: they walk. They have a .195 batting average and .208 slugging percentage, but they have a .343 on-base percentage. The Giants take a lot of pitches and work count as well as any baseball team. But if you had to rank the most annoying skills you would want the batters on your team to have…)

Part of the solution is to get previously productive players back on track. Brandon Belt is in a gnarly funk right now, and his eighth inning at bat with a runner on first base was one of the most exciting moments of the last innings. He hit looking on borderline pitch because that’s what he does when he’s into those funks. He should retire any day now.

Part of the solution is to make the list healthier. The last offside was made by Jason Vosslerand even if he would have reached it, he would have been followed by austin wynn et Donovan Walton. This trio has sold a total of zero shirseys in their major league career, and that kind of ninth-inning last-ditch hope brings us back to the adjective of the day. Don’t be too hard on them – it’s LaMonte Wade Jr. bobblehead on Saturday, so things can change quickly for the lesser-known Giants – but as a way to end a 1-0 loss that has never felt so close, it looks remarkable.

There were positives on the night, like Alex Cobb finally gets the defense behind him which prevented racing instead of allowing it. He earned about six more nights like this. Giants fans, however, earned about six more nights not like that. They will probably have them. Assuming the Giants are better than their average record since late April, they’ll likely get them soon.

It’s a big guess, though. Especially on a night when they were so… well, you know.

(Top photo of Donovan Walton making a catch near Chicago’s Jose Abreu in the sixth inning on Friday: Kelley L Cox/USA Today)