Can Giants’ hot streak carry them into the MLB playoffs? What to make of San Francisco’s sudden surge

Sometimes, all it takes is a two-week September hot streak to give a team hope in the postseason race, and no team is hotter than the San Francisco Giants right now. On Wednesday night, the Giants survived a ninth-inning push by the Colorado Rockies in a classic Coors Field chaos game (SF 10, COL 8) and won their fourth straight game. It was their 10th win in the last 11 games.

“It’s better late than never, I guess,” Matt Chapman told reporters, including MLB.com, about the team’s recent hot streak. “It’s been a lot of fun. We obviously hit a rough patch (earlier this year) but I feel like we’re really coming into our own right now and playing good baseball. We’re really just trying to keep it rolling.”

At 71-69, the Giants have jumped the Cincinnati Reds in the standings and are now the first team on the outside of the wild card picture looking in. Here are the NL wild card standings:

1. Chicago Cubs: 80-60 (+5 GB)
2. San Diego Padres: 76-64 (+1 GB)
3. New York Mets: 75-65
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4. San Francisco Giants: 71-69 (4 GB)
5. Cincinnati Reds: 70-70 (5 GB)

The Giants lost the season series to the Mets, so the Mets have the tiebreaker. That four-game deficit is really a five-game deficit. The Giants have to pass the Mets. A tie does them no good. Still, four games is the closest the Giants have been to a postseason spot since Aug. 10. They haven’t been closer than four games since July 27, when they were three games back. 

This is the first time the Giants have won 10 times in an 11-game span since a 10-1 stretch in June 2023. How have the Giants done it? Can they keep doing it and actually reach the postseason? Here’s what’s going on in San Francisco and a look at their road ahead.

The offense is red hot

The Giants haven’t been an offense-first team in a long time. Oracle Park, their pitcher-friendly and homer-hating home ballpark, doesn’t really allow for building a team around bats. There’s a reason they haven’t had a 30-homer guy since 2004. The Giants are averaging 4.32 runs per game, 19th in baseball, and their 150 home runs are 20th in baseball. It’s a mediocre offense at best.

Lately though, the offense has been firing on every cylinder. The Giants have outscored their opponents 86-47 during the 10-1 stretch and four times in the 11 games they scored at least 10 runs. Seven times, they scored at least seven runs. This is the first time the Giants have scored at least 86 runs in an 11-game span since September 2021, the year they won 107 games.

Rafael Devers has 11 home runs in his last 29 games and is in the middle of his best stretch as a Giant, though he’s not the only one tearing the covering off the ball. Look at these numbers in the last 11 games:

Chapman received a one-game suspension for Tuesday’s benches-clearing incident with the Rockies, appealed it, then hit two home runs Wednesday. The Giants as a team have hit .311/.375/.533 with 24 home runs during the 10-1 stretch. They’ve hit a home run in 17 straight games, a team record for the San Francisco era (since 1958). The franchise record is 19 straight games, set in 1947.

The guys the Giants need to be their best players have been their best players. It’s Adames, Chapman, and Devers leading the way offensively, with help from Matos, Ramos, and others. The Giants dug a deep enough hole that there’s no climbing out of it without those guys putting on their Superman capes, and they’ve done just that over the last few weeks. The offense is the single biggest reason the Giants have won 10 of their last 11 and given themselves some hope in the wild card race.

They’ve gotten surprise contributions

Chapman was ejected from Tuesday’s game after the benches-clearing incident. That forced utility infielder Casey Schmitt into the game even though he was held out of the lineup with a sore elbow after being hit by a pitch Monday. Naturally, Schmitt went deep a few innings later. A guy who wasn’t supposed to be in the lineup hit a home run. That’s when you know things are going well.

Rookie outfielder Drew Gilbert, acquired from the Mets in the Tyler Rogers trade at the deadline, was called up last month and is starting to settle in at the big-league level. He is 10 for 19 with three doubles, a triple, two home runs, one walk, and no strikeouts in his last six games. Gilbert has also injected some energy into the dugout with what we’ll call over-the-top home run celebrations.

Light-hitting backup catcher Andrew Knizner is 4 for 8 with a walk during the 10-1 stretch. Righty reliever Joel Peguero, who spent nine years in the minors before making his MLB debut on Aug. 21, has thrown nine scoreless innings for the Giants and assumed a high-leverage role. Up/down spot starter Kai-Wei Teng allowed two runs in 5 ⅓ innings Monday. At Coors Field, no less.

Then there’s future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander, who, at age 42, spent much of the season looking like he was near the end of the line. He missed a month with a pectoral strain earlier this year and was sitting on a 4.99 ERA as recently as July 18. In eight starts since, Verlander has allowed two or fewer runs six times. That includes a 10-strikeout, 121-pitch (!) effort this past Sunday.

“You just turn the page after each single pitch,” Verlander told reporters (via MLB.com), after that Sunday start against the Baltimore Orioles. “Absorb as much information as you can from it and move onto the next pitch. Rinse and repeat.”

The Giants have won 10 times in 11 games because Adames, Chapman, Devers, and ace Logan Webb are driving the bus. They’ve also done it because Verlander has turned back the clock, Schmitt hit a home run in a game he wasn’t supposed to play, Teng gave them a great spot start, and others have stepped up unexpectedly. That’s what it takes to win 10 times in 11 games in this league. Your best players have to perform and others have to chip in too.

The road ahead

The Giants have 22 games remaining and, right now, the Mets are on pace for 87 wins. Figure that’s what it’ll take to get the third wild card spot. The Giants must go 16-6 in their final 22 games to get to 87 wins, and sure, that’s doable, but it won’t be easy. Case in point: San Francisco is 12-10 in their last 22 games even with this 10-1 hot streak.

Here is their remaining schedule:

• Sept. 5-7 at St. Louis Cardinals (3 games)
• Sept. 8-10 vs. Arizona Diamondbacks (3 games)
• Sept. 12-14 vs. Los Angeles Dodgers (3 games)
• Sept. 15-17 at Arizona Diamondbacks (3 games)
• Sept. 18-21 at Los Angeles Dodgers (4 games)
• Sept. 22-24 vs. St. Louis Cardinals (3 games)
• Sept. 26-28 vs. Colorado Rockies (3 games)

That is a lot of games (15 of 22, to be precise) against non-contenders playing out the string. The Dodgers aren’t playing especially well either (1-4 in last five games and 22-29 in last 51 games), though those Dodgers/Giants games are always a grind. Plus it’s not like the Dodgers have the NL West locked up. The Padres are only 2 ½ games back. The Dodgers need wins too.

Despite those 15 games against non-contenders, San Francisco’s remaining schedule is the toughest among the top four teams in the NL wild card race, per FanGraphs. It is significantly tougher than the Mets’ remaining schedule, the team the Giants have to run down. No head-to-head games with the Mets (or Padres) really hurts the Giants. They don’t control their own destiny. They need other teams to beat the Mets (and Padres) to get in.

Can they actually reach the postseason?

Can they? I mean, sure, of course they can. Stranger things have happened in this game. This 10-1 heater does feel too little, too late though. If the Giants manage to go 16-6 in their final 22 games to get to 87 wins, the Mets only need to go 11-11 in their final 22 games to beat them out for a wild card spot. The Padres, who also hold the tiebreaker over the Giants, need to go 10-22 in their final 22 games to reach 87 wins. The Giants have very little margin of error.

FanGraphs puts San Francisco’s postseason odds at 4.4%. SportsLine is more generous at 10.3%, while Caesars puts them at +900 to make the playoffs. The Giants can’t get caught up in that though. It’s cliche, but they just need to win tonight’s game (well, tomorrow night’s game since Thursday is an off-day). Control what you can control. Win your games, handle your business, and hope you get help against whoever is playing the Mets (and Padres) on any given night. Reaching the postseason is a long shot, for sure. Their odds aren’t zero though.