If you look closely at the spreadsheet — past the columns of projected WAR and the luxury tax tables that suggest the Giants are operating less like a major-market behemoth and more like a coupon-clipping Rust Belt team — you will see the number 81 staring back at you.

Eighty-one wins. The median. The dead center. The participation trophy of professional sports. The twilight zone of hope.

In a vacuum, an 81-win projection is the kiss of death for fan interest. It promises nothing but five months of meaningful-ish baseball followed by a September filled with “magic number” graphics.

It is the baseball equivalent of a bran muffin: uninspired and entirely devoid of flavor.

And here I thought we lived in America’s culinary capital.

The good news is that there is a difference between the median and the mean.

And that difference should be evident every night under the team’s new leader in the clubhouse, manager Tony Vitello.

The “median” Giants are boring. They are built to exist, not to conquer. Every night, the same average thing. Opponents can win a game against them, they can lose against them, but the result is entirely up to them — the Giants will just keep going at their own, steady, boring pace.

This is the baseball we have been subjected to in most of the last five seasons.    

But the “mean” Giants? That’s up, down, left, right, and sideways. It contains outliers — big ones up and down.

That’s what we should get from Vitello’s Giants. There will be no more slow Tuesdays in Phoenix, Denver or San Francisco — this is going to be absolute, unadulterated chaos night after night.

And while it’ll all likely even out in the end, I doubt that at any point you’ll be able to say it wasn’t interesting.

You don’t hire Vitello — the man who turned Tennessee collegiate baseball into a mosh pit with cleats — to manage a calm, orderly, mediocre team.

You hire him because you want the team to play with the kind of desperate, caffeine and testosterone (natural, of course)-fueled energy that’s usually reserved for fraternity pledge week.

This roster isn’t going to beat the Dodgers over the course of 162 games.

But while the Dodgers are executing a corporate merger of talent and efficiency, Vitello’s Giants are going to be starting bar fights.

In an era of Major League Baseball defined by “load management,” “de-escalation,” and players treating 90 feet like a casual stroll, Vitello brings a collegiate spunk that will be startling to the professional ranks.

There is a version of 81 wins that feels like a slow suffocation. That was the last few years: an Excel table come to life.

The Vitello version of 81 wins should look different — different like turning a routine single into a hustle double and getting thrown out by 10 feet, then clearing the benches because the second baseman had the audacity to hold the tag.

Like stealing home when down by four runs just to prove a point.

Like winning a game 11-10 on a Tuesday and losing 12-0 on a Wednesday, because the starting pitcher was too amped up to locate his fastball.

It is flawed. It is often stupid. But it is not boring.

Would it be preferable if the Giants — the last remaining team in arguably the richest market in baseball — stopped approaching their offseasons like a senior on a fixed income? Absolutely. Seeing the front office hunt for bargains in the clearance aisle while charging how much? for garlic fries is a special kind of Bay Area torture.

Nothing says San Francisco quite like a mediocre product at the highest possible price.

But Vitello might be the one guy crazy enough to make more with less. Or, at the very least, make less look like it’s trying really, really hard.

Maybe that collegiate energy creates a few wins out of thin air. Maybe the thick air around McCovey Cove does the opposite.

Either way, you’re going to want to watch.   

And frankly, you have to watch. Because, friends, the storm clouds are gathering. Baseball’s Collective Bargaining Agreement expires in December, and if you think the owners and the Players Association — two groups who seemingly hate the sport of baseball almost as much as they hate each other — are going to hold hands and sing Kumbaya, I have a bridge in Oakland to sell you (slightly used, no longer connects to a baseball team).

We are staring down the barrel of a long, cold winter that could stretch well into, or entirely consume, the 2027 season.

So this season — this weird, chaotic 2026 season — might be the last baseball we get for a long time.

So, don’t look at the projection. Don’t obsess over the median. Embrace the madness of the mean.

Watch Harrison Bader sprint into a wall for a ball that was already 10 rows into the stands. Watch Logan Webb throw 120 pitches because Vitello “liked the look in his eye.” Watch a team that knows it probably won’t win the war, but is absolutely determined to make every single battle as annoying as humanly possible for the opposition.

The Giants are going to be average again.

But for the first time in a long time, being average might actually be fun.

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