The best-case scenario for the 2025 San Francisco Giants

New York Times

27-03-2025

Some seasons require a lot of imagination to come up with a best-case scenario. Some seasons take more imagination than is humanly possible, and you catch yourself saying things like, 'First, let's assume that Air Bud is real and wants to join the Giants. Second, assume that Commissioner Manfred allows a dog to play in the majors. Third …'
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This is not one of those seasons.
You can talk yourself into a best-case scenario for the 2025 Giants just by sticking with reasonable potential outcomes. You don't have to dig deep and imagine ridiculous scenarios, like a 2024 draftee skipping the upper minors to win the MVP. It's not all going to depend on a 42-year-old pitcher setting a new career high in innings. It's about smaller individual victories, like Player X staying healthy, Player Y repeating his production and Player Z taking a little step forward. By stacking reasonable positive outcomes together, you don't just get a team that reaches the postseason. You get a team that convinces you they belong.
The odds can turn quickly against an imperfect team. Imagine someone flipping a coin and getting three heads and four tails, in that order. You might have even done it once yourself without even noticing. That exact permutation has less than a 1-percent chance of happening, though. The odds are 50-50 for each event, but once you start stacking up the if-then scenarios, you get lost in the weeds of probability quickly. That's why success and parades and team reunions for the 2025 Giants every 10 years isn't their likeliest scenario. It'll take some high-percentile outcomes from at least a couple players on the roster just to make the postseason at all, and when you start multiplying the odds of several of the better outcomes together, it quickly moves from possible to unlikely.
Just know that at least the 2025 Giants are flipping coins, metaphorically speaking, and that's not the worst place to be. They're not playing keno or rolling handfuls of 20-sided dice, with probabilities that don't take much to get into one-in-a-million territory. Pick any player from the Opening Day roster and look at them through a reasonably optimistic lens, and it starts making sense. Here are a couple players I picked at random, but you can play along with anyone you want:
It's unreasonable to expect Casey Schmitt to have a .350 OBP and super-utility his way to 400 at-bats. It's entirely reasonable, however, to hope he can be a helpful player, someone worth a win or so over a full season.
It's unreasonable to expect Christian Koss to be a latter-day Andres Torres, emerging from the transactional mists to become one of the biggest surprises in baseball. It's also entirely reasonable to hope he can be a useful utility player, someone who helps the team win.
Those are just the players on the edges of the roster, though. When you do the exercise for the expected regulars, starting pitchers and high-leverage relievers, a reasonable best-case scenario comes into focus. It's unreasonable to expect LaMonte Wade Jr. to be one of the five-best first basemen in baseball, but it's entirely reasonable to hope he does what he did last year, just with more at-bats and better health. It's unreasonable to expect Robbie Ray to win his second Cy Young, but it's entirely reasonable to think he'll be a better starting pitcher than a lot of the ones the Giants will face.
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This is not the same as asking yourself 'What if all of the bad and mediocre players are really good now?' If you want to do that for a team that's down and out, go for it. You have examples from just last season. The Tigers were so far removed from the postseason picture that they traded their second-best pitcher at the trade deadline, and then they played amazing baseball for the final two months. The Royals went from a 56-106 season in 2023 to the postseason in 2024, and they did it with a) one of the greatest single seasons from a shortstop in baseball history and b) four starting pitchers throwing at a high level and staying healthy all season. If someone wrote a best-case scenario for them before the 2024 season and suggested Michael Wacha and Seth Lugo would combined for 373 innings, 62 starts and a 3.14 ERA, they'd get roasted in the comments. And they would have deserved to. It was ludicrous until it actually happened.
That's not what I'm asking you to do here. Which is good, because the Giants don't play in the 2024 AL Central, but the larger point stands. It's possible for the Giants to make the postseason — comfortably, even — without daydreaming about Justin Verlander throwing 200 innings or Willy Adames having a 40/40 season. Just stack up the potentially solid and productive seasons from players who are entirely capable of them. These kinds of parlays happen to teams every season.
It's not enough to have success stories on the roster. The Giants will need to avoid the disappointments, too. It would have been unreasonable to expect Heliot Ramos and Tyler Fitzgerald to do what they did last season, but they did it, and if a time traveler had tipped you off, you would have taken out a second mortgage to bet on the Giants making the postseason. Except Thairo Estrada completely lost the strike zone, and Wilmer Flores was physically compromised and couldn't hit a lick. It took Jorge Soler and Blake Snell months to get going. There were plenty of other disappointments, and those seasons were the mirror images of what this exercise is calling for. It would take some unexpectedly positive outcomes for the 2025 Giants to play up to their best-case scenario, but it would also take a dearth of unexpectedly negative outcomes. Baseball isn't always that accommodating.
Still, teams can go far with a quantity-of-quality approach. Giants fans don't need anyone to explain that to them. They've seen it. They remember teams like that fondly. It's true that the Giants don't have a Murderer's Row of classic sluggers, but they also don't have a lineup filled with players who shouldn't be in the majors. You won't find José Canseco in his prime, but you also won't find Ozzie Canseco in decline.
Back in 2012, the Giants lost the first two games of the NLDS at home, which meant they had to win three straight in Cincinnati to avoid elimination. While the feelings were still raw, I tried to be optimistic and realistic at the same time.
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I like to use the New York Times Yardstick of Perspective. That is, what would appear on the front page of the New York Times sports section? Maybe there's an 11-percent chance the Giants can win three straight games in Cincinnati, but it wouldn't make the front page of the New York Times. 'Good Team Beats Good Team Three Straight Times' isn't a catchy headline.
The Giants beat the Reds three straight times and didn't stop there. Now, over a decade later, I can still use that same rubric, except things have changed. I actually work for the New York Times company now. I can call an editor in the middle of the night and say, 'Listen, the 2025 Giants made the postseason. You have to put it on The Athletic's home page and send out push notifications. This is important. Trust me. This is front page news. Above the fold.'
The people in charge would ignore me. More than usual, even. It just wouldn't be a big enough story. Stuff like that happens every season. It wouldn't be a man-bites-dog story, and it wouldn't even be a dog-bites-man story. It would be a dog-licks-man-and-looks-sweetly-stupid-while-doing-it story. The best-case scenario for the 2025 Giants is that they make the postseason and get frisky once they're in there. It's not impossible!
It's not the likeliest scenario, but it's not impossible. And on Opening Day, you're allowed to treat yourself to some optimism. Don't ever take Opening Day for granted. It's like 'The Purge,' but for happy thoughts. For one day, all happy thoughts are legal. The Giants don't have the best roster in baseball, and they might not even have the third-best roster in their division, but they have enough quality players on the roster to dream a bit when the mood strikes. Have fun with it, and keep reality at a distance until you can't anymore.
(Top photo of Matt Chapman: Justin Berl / Getty Images)