The ball left Jorge Alfaro’s bat at 75.1 mph and landed softly in Wilmer Flores’ glove at first base. A quick trot to the bag by the Willie Mac Award winner ended it, representing the last out until April.
Wednesday’s 8-1 win over the Padres closed the book on the Giants’ 2022 season. The table of contents reveal a promising April in which the club shrugged off lofty expectations, an encouraging September full of young development, and a whole lot of sludge in between.
A season defined by regression, an athletically challenged roster compromised by injuries, and lackluster defense behind mostly outstanding starting pitching, ends at 81-81. Three homers, including rookie David Villar’s second multi-homer game, led to victory No. 81.
In a mathematically improbable quirk, it’s the first time in 140 years of Giants baseball that the franchise finished exactly .500.
The Giants were officially eliminated from the postseason on Oct. 1, but their playoff odds read 0% for weeks prior to that formality.
Under president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi, the Giants have put together one winning season out of four. Whether last year’s historic 107-victory campaign is an ineffable fluke or a proof of concept is a matter of one’s confirmation bias.
This season, while middling, was not without entertainment. Almost every Logan Webb and Carlos Rodón start was electric. Joc Pederson mashed three home runs after a pregame chat with Barry Bonds. Mike Yastrzemski hit SF’s first walk-off grand slam since Bobby Bonds in 1973.
There were also strange quirks that warranted intrigue. Tommy Pham slapped Pederson over a fantasy football dispute. In the opening week, the Giants declared they were through with the unwritten rules and promised to run up the score, a philosophy that quickly became irrelevant as the team spiraled. Rodón kicked a bat at Thairo Estrada in the dugout, a situation quickly diffused by Wilmer Flores and a veteran clubhouse.
The Giants used a franchise-record 66 players, a sign of both aggressive at-the-margins front office-ing and internal farm system weakness. Mainstays Brandon Crawford and Wilmer Flores factored into the finale, but so did Ford Proctor, Andrew Vasquez, Alex Young, and Luis Ortiz.
Villar, one of the darling stories of the second half, parked his eighth homer with the Giants to give San Francisco an early 3-1 lead.
Then in the eighth, Villar turned on another one, which karomed off Jurickson Profar’s glove and over the fence. The infielder has a knack for getting under the ball, and sometimes they carry just enough.
The rookie’s 36 combined homers between San Francisco and Sacramento are the most in the Giants organization since Barry Bonds’ 45 in 2004.
LaMonte Wade Jr., whose nagging injuries prevented him from finding the groove he developed in 2021, slapped three hits to finish over the Mendoza Line for the year.
Yastrzemski, whose bat sunk to a new low in 2022, drove in two with a third-inning single and added a ninth-inning double. His outfield counterpart, Austin Slater slammed his seventh homer of the year — off a righty, no less.
Going out with a win amounts to a consolation prize. Between May and August, the Giants were a sub-.500 baseball club. They had two separate losing streaks of seven. The front office hedged at the deadline, optimistic that two hot weeks could pull them back into contention, but that run — 10 of 11 in September — came much too late.
Even with the win in San Diego, the Giants went a combined 10-28 against division rivals Padres and Dodgers.
With a reworked schedule starting next year, San Francisco gets the reprieve of playing those teams less frequently. But they’re still the clubs the Giants are chasing, and the gap remains wide.
So wide, only a monumental offseason could close it.