The thought of a season-ending, must-win series at home against the Colorado Rockies should have frightened you. There’s still a cosmic imbalance from 2021, when the Giants needed a sweep at Coors Field and actually got it. The karmic interest is compounding on that sucker. It almost might have been better to get it out of the way.

Instead, here’s yet another meaningless final series of the season for the Giants, who haven’t had anything to play for in a Game 162 since that 2021 season. The eyes of the baseball world won’t be on the Giants and Rockies this weekend. The eyes of people directly related to players on the Giants and Rockies won’t be on them this weekend. Everyone sort of agrees that these games don’t have to happen, but they’re all too scared to speak up.

Hold on, there! In two short months, you’ll be in the fetal position, begging to watch Ryan Walker with the bases loaded and nobody out in a one-run game. You’ll miss baseball so much. These aren’t three games between two teams playing out the string. These are three precious gifts. And you can definitely watch them as if they mean something. All you have to do is stretch the definition of “important” to find something Giants fans should care about over the final weekend.

The race to .500

This team could wear an 80-82 season very well. The 2025 Giants page on Baseball-Reference wouldn’t look out of place with a big ol’ 78-84 hanging out at the top, either. They’ve played like both kinds of teams for long stretches this season.

Deep in your heart, though, you know this is a .500 team. It’s the weirdest, most manic .500 team you’ve ever followed, but this team doesn’t deserve to lose a single game more than they win, and vice versa. It’s the only satisfying conclusion possible for a season this erratic. Future generations will look at the record and imagine a dull, lifeless team, a team that was just as likely to get the game-winning hit as they were to give it up. They’ll have no idea. This team was not normal, and they do not deserve to be described as such.

And, yes, the idea of finishing .500 should matter to everyone involved. For as long as people care about baseball, they’ll take a peek at the 2025 Giants’ record and immediately classify them as either a bad team or a mediocre team. The difference between 80-82 and 81-81 is the baseball version of being 5-foot-11. It doesn’t really matter, except it absolutely does, and the Giants know what they’d like to put on their driver’s license.

Willy Adames and the Curse of Barry Bonds (the One About Home Runs)

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the season that Adames has had. It didn’t always have this trajectory. I’m not sure when his statistical nadir was, but there was a point where stats like WAR were screaming “this guy stinks” at the same time your brain was whispering it. Adames wasn’t fielding like an average defensive shortstop, much less the above-average one that was promised. And he was hitting under .200 with an OPS in the .500s deep into June. An entire season of that would have led to extremely tedious Adames discourse during the offseason.

Adames didn’t begin the season looking like he’d come close to a 30-homer season. (Jeff Dean / Getty Images)

On June 10, Adames had just five home runs, and there wasn’t anybody thinking about him hitting 25 more over the final three months of the season. Everyone just wanted a player they could look forward to next season. A batting average over the Mendoza Line, maybe 10 more homers and a WAR that wasn’t embarrassing, something that allowed you to wave off the down season as “just one of those seasons.”

He’s already accomplished that much, but he can do even more. Since June 11, Adames has hit 23 homers in 91 games, leaving him just two homers away from 30. As you might have heard or read, the Giants haven’t had a 30-homer hitter since Barry Bonds in 2004. If Adames could hit just two measly home runs, just two pokes over the wall, our long regional nightmare would be over. Keep Heliot Ramos healthy throughout spring training, and you’ll break the other curse of Bonds, the one about Opening Day left fielders. When these two curses break, there’s a chance that Shohei Ohtani might wink out of existence without anyone remembering him, something about the cosmos correcting its own math. It’s worth a shot.

More importantly, I’m just tired of the bit. When some national announcers came into town a couple weeks ago to do a game for WebTV or Sporcle or whatever, they were talking about the 30-homer drought as if it were in the past tense, as if Adames had already broken it. You can’t blame them. He was at 28 homers back then, too, and they couldn’t have known about the “Final Destination 2”-like persistence of this curse. Brandon Belt got to 29 homers and they broke his hand. Don’t ask who “they” are. You’ll find out soon enough.

Actually, wait, no, I have it right here. It was a Rockies pitcher who broke Belt’s hand. Yep, Rockies pitchers will do that sort of thing. Because they’re typically not so good at pitching.

But I’m sure if Adames hits his 29th homer early in the series, there’s nothing to worry about. Right?

Bryce Eldridge hitting his first career home run

It’s going to be fascinating to see what the organization has planned for Eldridge next season, if he’s in the mix for everyday at-bats as soon as Opening Day, or if it’s going to be another season of easing him into the major-league hot tub, so to speak. It could go either way, and we might be asking the same questions on the last day of the Cactus League.

Either way, let him get this one out of the way. Eldridge will hit somewhere between one and 50 baseballs into McCovey Cove over his career, so he’s free to check that box off his list, too. Or maybe he can do something even more dramatic, like hitting a ball so hard that it makes the foul pole explode like the lights in “The Natural.”

The Giants disappointed you yet again. But at least you get to watch an extremely large 20-year-old get your hopes up. Cherish those rare opportunities.

The Rockies losing 117 games

That’s three more losses than the 114 they have now, and each additional loss gets exponentially funnier. This might not be the polite way to look at the Rockies’ season, but I’m still mad at them for going 0-13 against the Braves in 1993. I’m still mad about Neifi Perez’s home run in 1998, and I’m still mad about Neifi Perez. Remember Nolan Arenado, people. Remember who introduced him into your lives.

They’ve earned this. Maybe not Rockies fans as a group, per se, but definitely some people in the organization. Dinger, specifically. Making him sad is by far the least important goal of the series, yet its an eternally important goal in its own right. Every loss between here and 117 can only make him sadder.

But it’s obviously the least important reason to watch this weekend. Heck, I’ll take a Rockies sweep if it means Adames can hit two lousy home runs. I don’t care if they bounce off an outfielder’s head. Just hit them. Go the distance. Ease our pain.

(Top photo: Justin Edmonds / Getty Images)