SAN FRANCISCO — There isn’t a single player on the Giants’ 26-man roster who uses torpedo bats. The bowling pin-like models briefly took over the game last year and most Giants hitters tried them over the summer, but they all decided they preferred traditional models.
Talking about the torpedoes this spring, a few Giants laughed and said the early insanity last season seemed to ultimately just be a case of the New York Yankees having their way with the Milwaukee Brewers for three games.
If you’re looking for a silver lining after the Giants scored just one run over 27 innings at Oracle Park, start with that torpedo series. The Brewers got swept by the Yankees at the start of last season and went on to win 97 games and the NL Central title.
It’s a long, long season, and Giants players did their best to repeat that after the last couple of losses. At the same time, it was an extremely disappointing start to the Tony Vitello Era.
The lineup had the worst start to a season in franchise history. The Giants have the worst run differential in the National League. They’re already three games behind the Los Angeles Dodgers, who swept the Arizona Diamondbacks.
The stories from the past four days covered the offensive ineptitude, but other storylines popped up. Here are three more things that stood out over 27 hard-to-watch innings …
All About ABS
Vitello was doing an interview with Netflix’s sideline reporter when the Yankees asked for the first ABS challenge in MLB history, but the next day, he went back and rewatched the game. There weren’t any Giants challenges to examine, though. They somehow didn’t use any in their first game.
Patrick Bailey challenged twice in Friday’s game, going 1-for-2 behind the plate. On Saturday, the teams combined for seven challenges, all of them successful.
Two came from Heliot Ramos, including one in the ninth that showed why ABS is here in the first place. Ramos took a close 2-2 curveball from David Bednar and immediately said “challenge! challenge!” to home plate umpire Chad Whitson.
A year ago, Ramos would have been walking back to the dugout. Instead, he earned a leadoff walk that briefly got the Giants going.
“I was very confident, and it was a situation where I had to,” Ramos said. “You have to get guys on base and make something happen. I saw the pitch. It was a breaking ball, and I saw it out of the hand and wanted to challenge.”
ABS will change the game in a lot of ways, including the fact that sometimes the storyline will be the lack of its use. The staff felt that Bailey should have tapped his helmet in the opener during an early strikeout; instead of being the second out, he would have earned a 3-2 count with a runner on first.
In the seventh inning Friday, Willy Adames took a long look at the umpire after being called out on a close inside pitch, but didn’t challenge. He was actually right. The gametracker showed that he would have been out by the slimmest of margins, but given the circumstance — one on, Giants trailing by three in the seventh, all their challenges left — that’s probably a pitch they’ll want to take a chance on more often than not.
Vitello said the message in clubhouse conversations before the season was to keep challenging the way they did in the spring, when they were aggressive. “For whatever reason, we just didn’t,” he said of that first game.
By Saturday, they were fully on board.
This Is Who They Are
Vitello shook up the lineup on Saturday, but the nine names were the same. Get used to that, even when the group is struggling.
This is the way the Giants are built, and it’s certainly not a coincidence after a few years of platooning and constant roster moves. Buster Posey wanted more stability, and when he was talking about carrying speedster Jared Oliva as the final position player, he admitted that the makeup of the roster played a part. The fifth outfielder just isn’t going to get many starts, regardless of who it is.
The front office signed Harrison Bader and Luis Arráez to be everyday players, essentially locking up eight spots. You can play around a little — Vitello said Arráez will play some first base at some point, and if bats don’t come around in the outfield, the Giants could certainly mix their backups in a bit more — but for the most part, this is the group. There will be even less flexibility whenever Bryce Eldridge arrives.
Over the course of 162, at least when they’re healthy, this generally should be a good thing. Despite the lack of production during a historically bad opening series, it is a talented group of position players. But when they go a couple of games without scoring, Vitello won’t have a lot of options except to just ride it out.
Over his first 27 innings, he used just one bench player, sending Oliva to run for Adames in the ninth inning Saturday. Jerar Encarnación was on deck to hit for Casey Schmitt after that, but Bailey’s double play kept him from seeing his first action of the season.
A Promising Start
The lack of clarity in the bullpen even made members of the front office nervous in March, and the final decisions were difficult. On Wednesday, Posey said it was particularly difficult to option Spencer Bivens (who spent all of last year in the big leagues) and Tristan Beck.
The staff instead chose Caleb Kilian and Keaton Winn, and the early returns are intriguing. Kilian had a scoreless inning Wednesday, and Vitello singled him out as the best part of that game. Winn has three strikeouts in two hitless innings, and if he can keep throwing strikes with a 98 mph fastball and his splitter, he could be a monster in the late innings.
There’s still no set hierarchy, but the man with the most closing experience — Ryan Walker — has two scoreless appearances, too. Walker’s slider looked like the 2024 version on Saturday, with one veering in on Jazz Chisholm’s Jr.’s hands and sawing his bat in half.
Overall, the bullpen threw 12 2/3 innings over three games and allowed just two runs, both on solo homers. Vitello mixed and matched, using six relievers Saturday and often making changes in the middle of innings.
Over three games where little else went right, he pushed just about all of the right buttons when it came to his bullpen, and the pitchers certainly did their part.
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