Hypothetical recap: Giants avoid the sweep on Mother’s Day

With the MLB season suspended due to the coronavirus outbreak, there are no baseball games and limited baseball news. So I’m creating a hypothetical season — complete with news and recaps — until baseball resumes. All news and recaps will have the hypothetical tag, so you can at least know when you’re suspending reality. And you can click “hypothetical season” above the headline to see everything that has happened in this “season.”

The San Francisco Giants avoided the sweep. After taking the first two games in a three-game set against the Chicago White Sox, they dropped the third and final game.

Do you care? Probably not. Or at least probably not much. I certainly don’t.

It’s hard to be too invested in a game on Mother’s Day. It’s fun to watch: you see all the moms in the stands, taking in baseball games with their kids; you see the countless camera pans to mothers and partners of the players ; you hear snippets of players talking about their mothers; you think of your mother, or perhaps watch the game with them.

Baseball on Mother’s Day is nice. I think you could even say baseball on Mother’s Day is important.

But the outcome? Not so much. Part of that because it’s a 162-game season and it’s still in the early goings. It’s easy to not be too invested in the outcome. And part of it is because a day like Mother’s Day tends to put things in perspective.

So I’m not going to say much about the game, because there’s not much to say about the game. It was a baseball game (good!) on Mother’s day (good!), which the Giants lost (whatever).

Here are some notes:

• Reynaldo López was decent enough. Not great. But comfortably better than Jeff Samardzija, and that’s kind of the name of the game, isn’t it? The Giants looked comfortable and timed up to López’s pitches, but he still minimized the damage. The White Sox looked comfortable and timed up to Samardzija’s pitches, but he did not minimize the damage.
• Hunter Pence home run. That is all.
• The one upside of Samardzija’s poor performance was that there were a lot of baserunners for Buster Posey to throw out. He threw out two! Which probably makes the 5 earned runs by Shark a bit uglier, huh. Hmmm.....
• I wanted the Giants to sign Jose Abreu. He hasn’t been as good as I anticipated, but he has been good, and he proved that his swing can play well at Oracle Park.
• But Brandon Belt had two hits and a walk so don’t feel bad.
• Sidenote: Abreu was not an All-Star in 2017, when he was worth 5.0 rWAR. He was an All-Star in both 2018 and 2019, when he was worth a combined 3.5 rWAR. Baseball seems to do this a lot.
• The Giants lost 7-4. They’re now 18-22. Happy Mother’s Day.