About last week...

The Giants just finished playing a week’s worth of baseball games, and they looked like a normal professional baseball team. So here’s the roundup that last year, we did in a different media form. Who knows if that media form will ever be back? I certainly don’t have any information to share with you on that front. For now, let’s just quickly recap last week.

Record: 4-3

A winning week! You didn’t think that they’d have a single winning week all season, did you (the “you” in this question refers to Bryan, for the record)? Well, they showed you (again, Bryan). The Giants dropped two out of three to the Padres, who are currently leading the division, but then took three of four from the Rockies, who are currently tied with the Marlins for the worst record in the majors. Those 1993 kids are having a rough April.

Best win: April 12-13, 3-2 over the Rockies

Look, it wasn’t always the most pleasant game to watch. There were multiple stretches of multiple innings where the Giants didn’t get a runner on base. But if the Giants win a game that you’ll remember in five years — like, no doubt, unequivocally, I know where I was when Erik Kratz hit that grounder, and sure I was in bed, but I still know — then that’s the best game of the week. Plus, as awful as the offense was for most of the game, that bullpen performance was one for the ages. Make any quip about the quality of the opposition that you want, but 13 innings, no runs, and 19 strikeouts is ridiculous. It was an epic game, and not in the Internet sense of the word, but in the sense that some Greek guy is writing a poem about it right now even though he doesn’t even know what baseball or poetry are.

The rest of this season will almost certainly fade, but this game? You’ll remember this game.

Worst loss: April 14, 4-0 to the Rockies

They were an 8th inning grounder away from being no-hit. As unfun as the other contender, the game where Madison Bumgarner and Reyes Moronta blew a 5-0 lead to the Padres, was, watching the Giants’ worst offensive performance so far this year is the clear winner here. They had two baserunners on the afternoon and just one hit. Now I’m no fancypants big city hitting coach, but where I come from, that’s just not good enough.

Also, Nolan Arenado homered, which is great, because we were all hoping that the Giants would get him out of his slump.

MVP: Kevin Pillar

Pillar hit .231/.241/.731 over the last week with four homers and 12 RBIs. The Giants scored 22 runs over that time, and he drove in 12 of them. That’s 54.5% of all the runs the Giants scored, driven in by one guy. This would have been a disastrous week without Pillar, and even with his low average and OBP, he was still easily the most valuable player on the team.

There’s also an argument to be made here for the entire bullpen, but then I’d have to do some sort of ranking to determine which one deserves it the most, like power ranking them by how much I trust each of them. That sounds like a lot of work!

LVP: Yangervis Solarte

Solarte was far from the only hitter on the Giants to underperform last week, but he did underperform the most, which gets him the nod here. Also, some of the other guys who had poor weeks at the plate made up for it in other ways. Erik Kratz caught an 18-inning game and had the game-winning RBI. Evan Longoria broke up the no-hitter yesterday. Steven Duggar and Brandon Crawford played their typically fantastic defense. Solarte didn’t really impress in any way last week, though, going 1-for-18 with a walk, which is (checks) quite bad.

Takeaway

The week was fine! If the Giants were good, then you’d hope for 5 wins out of 7 at home, but since the team isn’t, 4 out of 7 is entirely reasonable. The offense was bad, but good enough to win, and the pitching and defense were both somewhere between solid and excellent. That’s the formula for this team to be worth watching. They did it this week, and here’s to many more like it.