April baseball isn’t the worst because it forces analysts and fans to make sense out of the nonsensical. Baseball always does that. April’s nonsense is just a stronger, funkier brew, but it’s still very much the nonsense we all signed up for.
No, April baseball is the worst because it’s a vacuum of meaningful information. The Giants are 10 games into the season, and they have seven losses. They’ve dinged their chances at the postseason, but not irredeemably so. There are problems, and they might not be temporary, but they also might be. Or some of the problems might be temporary, and some of them might not be.
That’s all we know, and it’s extremely unsatisfying. It will be like a reverse-birthday present to have to wait for more information, only to have it confirm what you already expected (that the Giants stink). And to be very, very clear, the Giants just might stink. They have for the first part of the season, alright, and these losses just might be predictive. Except we’ve all seen seasons that have started this poorly and gone in any number of directions, so you know the responsible thing to do is wait.
Nice job, you responsible dingus. Now the floor is clear for the irresponsible folks. They’re loud in the normal months, but they’re twice as loud in April. This is when everything can be blamed on a new manager or a hitting coach or the roster or the defense or their least favorite player or the ownership or the front office or the schedule or Mercury being in Capricorn or whatever happens to be at the front of their minds. These voices are so, so loud right now.
Here’s how to stay normal in these troubling times.
It’s hard to express just how grateful I am that it’s Matt Chapman who has been the personification of everything that has gone wrong for the 2026 San Francisco Giants. His entire brand has been as a player who does everything right, all the time, everywhere he’s played. He runs well, he catches the ball, he throws the ball well and he hits the ball very, very far. He could stand to hit the ball more often, but that’s more about the modern game (and modern pitchers). Chapman has been the consummate professional everywhere he’s gone. He’s the perfect example for this article.
Why? Because Chapman has made two months’ worth of bad plays in the first week-and-a-half of the season, with errors both in judgment and fielding. He became the story for calling out a teammate on the mound, and while it could be an example of typical dugout dynamics, it’s a scrap of information to fill the meaningful-information vacuum. Before the bizarre caught-stealing on Sunday, there were only a few scraps of information, but a lot of them had to do with Chapman. Then there was the bizarre caught-stealing, which was a pretty big scrap. He’s played horribly to start the season, and he’d probably be the first to tell you that … if he wanted to talk, which he apparently does not.
Chapman is as well-rounded as baseball players come in the modern game, making his early-season struggles and mental mistakes at odds with his long track record. (Robert Edwards / Imagn Images)
The irresponsible part of your brain wants there to be an answer for this. Now. And as someone whose job it is to also have answers, boy, do I get it. It would be so much easier if Chapman realized that his shoelaces were tied a little too tight, and a simple solution could fix everything. To get to the simple solution, you first need a simple reason for the problem.
With a clear-cut answer, you’ll see those simple reasons for his poor play. For example, I’ve read some suggesting that Chapman misses his old manager and friend, Bob Melvin, or that he hates his new manager or maybe it’s a little of both. Toxic clubhouse vibes are to blame, or it’s the Giants’ pull-happy approach, or it’s a dark cloud over the entire franchise. When you’re reducing the problems of a veteran like Chapman down to a single reason or cause, though, you’re describing a thought bubble over a character’s head in a comic book. You are not describing how real people actually live or think.
What’s more likely: Chapman has no idea what’s been going on with his defense or decision making, but he’s pretty sure he’ll figure it out. He doesn’t have a great answer, and it’s gnawing at him like nobody’s business, but he’ll keep doing Matt Chapman things, and they’ll eventually help the team again. That’s a fictional inner monologue, to be clear, but it makes sense to me. I’m not as accomplished as a writer as Chapman is as a baseball player, but I can definitely go into slumps. Deep, dark slumps where the ideas aren’t coming, and my fingers aren’t in the same time signature as my brain, and they rattle. The only way I get out of them is to keep typing and have faith in my ability to create nonsense that people read for some reason.
That’s the likely answer to the Chapman problem, specifically, and you’ll remember his first-week weirdness as vividly as you remember the “torpedo bat” storylines from last season. It’s so much easier to imagine with him, too, because Reliable Matt Chapman has been a Bay Area institution for almost a decade now.
Take note that he’s stunk so far, and pin the scrap of information to a very, very large bulletin board that still has plenty of unused space. Notice that a lot of the scraps so far have Chapman’s name on them, and that stands out when there aren’t a lot of other names up there. Look at all of the hitters below the Mendoza Line (four regulars) and hitters with multiple home runs (there aren’t any). Pin them up there, too. Logan Webb’s slow start. The lack of left-handed bench bats. The hamstring injury to Rafael Devers leading to the defensive malpractice at first base.
New manager Tony Vitello is going to get an outsized portion of the attention for obvious reasons, and while his candor can be amusing, it can also be baffling. Take the unforced error of him admitting he didn’t watch every pitch of the game after he was kicked out of Sunday’s game. That’s a scrap of information to pin somewhere, alright, but even though I’m putting it in the growing “you know there are things you don’t have to say, right?” cluster, it’s a cluster that could get big enough to interfere with the other ones.
Pin all of these scraps of information up there, one by one, and stand back. What do you see?
A small scattering of supremely frustrating developments, with a whole lot of blank space to fill. It’s so impossibly early, still, even if that’s unsatisfying to read. It’s just as unsatisfying to type. And it’s not to say that it’s all going to get better, and everything’s just fine, because the Giants have stunk, and the typically reliable veterans have done a lot of the stinking. There might be some serious, unsalvageable reasons for the stinking. They might keep stinking. The scraps are going to keep coming in, and if they give off the same rancid vibes as the earlier ones, it’s going to be a long season.
We all have to play the waiting game because April baseball is the worst, every season, and it’s five times worse when the team is playing lousy. Waiting for a little more information is the only responsible course of action. Making a disgusted face at the unpalatable baseball that’s already been played is the only logical thing to do.
Doing both at the same time? That’s just being a baseball fan, friend. Sometimes it stinks. Sometimes it stinks just like this, and the only thing you can do is wait for it to be fun again.