It doesn’t get easier, but that’s OK

The last time they faced the New York Mets, the San Francisco Giants were cruising. They’d won five consecutive games, and had outscored their opponents 31-7 during that stretch. A few of those games came against the San Diego Padres.

And then the Mets smacked the Giants in the mouth, winning the series 3-1, and taking games in a variety of ways.

Now the Giants are facing the Mets again, and San Francisco is in a rather different position. They’ve lost four straight games. They’ve been outscored 25-12 in that time. Three of those games came against the Padres.

That might sound like the bad news, but it might actually be the good news. If the streaking Giants ran into a wall against the Mets before, maybe the scuffling Giants will run into some magic against the Mets.

That’s how it works, right?

Series details

Who: San Francisco Giants vs. New York Mets
Where: Oracle Park, San Francisco, California
When: Monday (6:45 p.m. PT), Tuesday (6:45 p.m. PT), and Wednesday (12:45 p.m. PT)
National broadcasts: Wednesday (MLB Network, out of market only)

Projected starters:
Monday: Alex Cobb vs. David Peterson
Tuesday: Logan Webb vs. Chris Bassitt
Wednesday: Jakob Junis vs. TBD

Where they stand

Giants

Record: 22-18, 3rd in the NL West
Run differential: +24, 6th in the NL
Postseason standing: 3rd Wild Card, 2.5 games ahead of the runner-up, 5 games out of the division
Momentum: 4-game losing streak, 4-6 in their last 10 games

Mets

Record: 28-15, 1st in the NL East
Run differential: +42, 3rd in the NL
Postseason standing: 2nd seed in the NL, 8-game lead in the division
Momentum: 1-game winning streak, 6-4 in their last 10 games

Season series: Mets lead 3-1

Three Giants to watch

Photo by C. Morgan Engel/Getty Images

Mike Yastrzemski: Don’t look now, but Yaz is quietly putting together a lovely season. He’s tied for the team lead in position player fWAR with Brandon Crawford, despite missing a chunk of time. In 17 games since returning from the COVID List, Yaz is hitting .327/.427/.564, and has nearly as many walks (10) as strikeouts (11). The sample size is incredible small (23 plate appearances), but he’s also hitting lefties really well again, which is great to see.

Joey Bart: On the other side of things, Bart is struggling. He’s getting perilously close to the 50% strikeout rate, with 41 strikeouts in 89 plate appearances. Early in the season he overcame the strikeout issues by hitting the snot out of the ball, and also drawing a ton of walks. It made him a comfortably above-average hitter despite the laughably-low batting average. But that’s changed. He’s now quite a bit below average from a hitting standpoint, both by OPS+ and wRC+. In 13 May games, Bart is hitting just 3-39, and his only extra-base hit came against Albert Pujols. Hopefully it’s a slump and not pitchers adjusting to Bart, because with Curt Casali on the IL, the Giants really need him.

Logan Webb: The Giants are in a slump, and when you’re in a slump it’s a good time to look to your best players and ask them to pull you out of it. This would be a great time for Webb to have a dynamic outing.

Three Mets to watch

Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images

Chris Bassitt: Bassitt is having a good year, with a 2.77 ERA, a 3.80 FIP, and a pretty strikeout to walk ratio. But he was the one pitcher the Giants got to when they were in New York, as they tagged him for five earned runs in six innings. Bassitt is coming off of a very rough start, so the Giants will try and capitalize.

Pete Alonso: Alonso hits a lot of home runs. He has 10 of them this year. He has 116 in his career, despite not making his MLB debut until 2019, and the 2020 season missing 102 games. Home run hitters scare me, because I do not want the Giants to have home runs hit off of them.

Brandon Nimmo: Nimmo has the exact same OPS+ as Alonso (146), but he does it in the opposite way. He’s a lefty, and has just three dingers on the year. But he has 22 walks to just 25 strikeouts, an on-base percentage that’s flirting with the fours, and a remarkable ability to find the gaps (he has three triples this year). The Giants are using three righties in this series, so...watch out, dudes.

I hate to reward pessimism, but in the last series preview 8% of people accurately predicted a Padres sweep.

Don’t vote for that again, Giants fans. And don’t get swept again, Giants.