In front of the Bay Area, country and world, the San Francisco Giants played their first baseball game of the 2026 MLB season. It did not go well. The Giants slipped on a banana peel and fell down the stairs with an old-timey bicycle horn in their back pocket, and they made honking sounds as they landed on each step on the way down. Other than that, there were some positives. We’ll look at them.

With 161 games to go, there’s no use worrying about things like “Will the hits allowed by Logan Webb always come in the same inning?” or “Will Luis Arraez’s defense always be this easy to notice?” “Probably not” and “Maybe” are the respective answers, but there will be plenty of games in which those won’t be your first questions. I’m not going to research which teams lost on Opening Day last year and went on to have excellent seasons, and you don’t want me to. Baseball: The seasons are so damned long™. These guys know a little something about that:

If you’re going to survive a long, long season, you have to pace yourself. Even in a stinker like Wednesday’s game, especially early in the season, there are going to be notes and takeaways that don’t make you feel like you chose the wrong hobby. These are things to point at and things to notice as the marathon begins. Opening Night had plenty of them, even though it contained some of the most unwatchable baseball this season might offer.

Harrison Bader passed his first test

It used to be that defensive statistics were incredibly untrustworthy. Now they’re only slightly untrustworthy. They’re getting pretty good at this stuff. Case in point: We have answers as to why Jung Hoo Lee rated so poorly in center field last year. Part of it was the ballpark, which drags down every outfielder, and that’s out of his control. But part of Lee’s problem was on balls hit in front of him, which is a skill they now track. Here’s the breakdown of his Outs Above Average (OAA):

Back: 0 OAA

To his left: -1

To his right: -1

In front: -4

He’s being compared to some of the best fielders in the game with these, so don’t think of those left-right numbers as being too problematic. Lee is roughly average in lateral range. He’s not Pete Crow-Armstrong out there, but few people are.

On balls hit in front of him, though, Lee was profoundly below average. Awful, even. There aren’t easy answers to why, only theories. Could be positioning. Could be an expectation that every major leaguer is going to hit a ball 400 feet, so his mind is primed for that possibility. Whatever the reason, it was a problem to address.

In Harrison Bader’s first game as a Giant, he addressed it, loudly and clearly.

The Giants will continue to have defensive problems at various positions, but here’s a change that gave positive feedback right away.

Now, about the team’s three hits …

The Giants’ bullpen is on pace to set a major-league ERA record, and it looks like there’s a new toy down there

You’re tired of reading Keaton Winn hype, so I’ll take a break and focus on another semi-surprising addition to the active roster, Caleb Kilian. Here he is throwing a 99-mph fastball at the top of the zone:

And here he is finishing the batter off with a nasty curve:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth at least a hundred thousand, but you need just a few: The fastball is fast, and the curveball curves. It’s the profile of a pitcher who can have lasting success in a bullpen.

That doesn’t mean Kilian will have that kind of success, but this is the type of arm the Giants needed in the bullpen. They should have plenty of nondescript arms with a chance to be effective enough for the middle innings, but the final nine outs of the game are very much in question. They’d love for some folks to emerge from the bullpen mists and become high-leverage arms, as they do for other teams every season. Heck, it happened for them and Randy Rodríguez last year, even if it didn’t end on the happiest note.

I’d restate Kilian’s apparent qualifications, but my fingers are tired. Just watch the videos again. You can understand why he was one of the main pieces of the Kris Bryant trade, and now he’s giving the Giants a chance to have their cake and eat it too. It’s not the Jason Schmidt-Ryan Vogelsong circle of life yet, but it’s getting there.

The Giants have a chaos theory manager now (positive)

It was a passing comment in an unremarkable postgame press conference from a manager who had just lost a game, but it caught my ear. After the game, manager Tony Vitello was asked about Willy Adames’ strikeout in the first inning, when the Giants had runners at the corners and one out. A 30-hop dribbler down the line would have gotten the Giants on the scoreboard for the first time in 2026, and the momentum would have shifted. The crowd would have been into it. Everything could have changed, man.

Vitello acknowledged this and agreed with it, but he also said, “We don’t have a time machine to know how the rest of the game would have played out,” which is one of the core tenets of my personal baseball philosophy. You can inspect the past for ways to make the future better, but you can’t live back there. There’s nothing for a manager back there.

For a writer, oh, it’s a gold mine. The woulda coulda shouldas are gonna put my kids through college, and I’m not even going to feel guilty about it. But it does no good for a manager to think about this stuff. That’s my job. I come in with the screenshots of Simpsons episodes and make more (or less) sense of it all.

Take a historical example, such as the Giants signing Barry Zito, who gave them 2.4 WAR for seven years and $126 million, which would be a miserable $/WAR even using today’s dollar value. Bad contract, right? In theory, yes, but I’m not undoing it. If Zito is on the Dodgers, maybe they’re the ones teeing off on Justin Verlander in the 2012 World Series. Or maybe Zito writes a song that’s so catchy, it functions as something of a mantra, allowing Clayton Kershaw to clear his mind successfully before each of his (now-excellent) postseason starts.

Or maybe the pitcher the Giants sign instead of Zito has a 3.00 ERA in the regular season but a 12.00 ERA in the postseason. Or maybe Zito is on another team and mentions something to a teammate like “the crabgrass in my backyard is driving me nuts, dude,” and six days later, the thought of “crabgrass” suddenly reappears in the hitter’s mind, pushing out what would have been a fear that Tim Lincecum was going to throw a slider. The hitter sits on a fastball and lines a ball up the middle, off Lincecum’s knee in April 2008. We’ll never know what Timmy could have meant to the Giants.

Or, or, or. Chaos theory will break your brain if you dwell too much on it, and it will definitely break a manager’s brain. He needs the past to improve the future, not to improve the past. Focusing on single in-game decisions or mistakes is rarely in a manager’s best interests after the game. The manager needs to look for patterns, but until then, he needs to look at baseball like a stone dropped in a pond. You can study the ripples and waves crashing into each other until the end of time without solving hydrodynamics, and it’s still not going to help you much when the next stone is dropped in. It’s best to focus on the stones you’re using and how you’re throwing them.

It’s also best to remember that baseball can be a hideous, dumb sport, but the good news is there’s a game every day, which will allow you and the Giants to forget all of this nonsense and get right back on that horse. There’s no time to dwell on a single loss when there’s a game every day now.

Well, there’s a game almost every day.

Let me check the schedule, and …

Dang it.