SF Giants cap spring with MLB-best 21st win vs. Tigers. Does it matter?
SAN FRANCISCO — Not long into his first spring training as the Giants’ new manager, Bob Melvin was mad. Even though the games didn’t count, his team had played six of them and had yet to enjoy a postgame handshake line. He wanted to win.
“No one’s going to remember it, but we remember it right now, and every game you suit up for, you go out there to win,” Melvin fumed to reporters last February. “So no, (I’m not happy). We need to play better.”
There was no such issue this spring, which the Giants finished off under the Tuesday afternoon sun in the same fashion as most of their previous 30 exhibitions.
Jordan Hicks pitched an efficient five-plus innings, Tyler Fitzgerald smacked a two-run homer and scored a run, and the Giants beat the Tigers, 4-3. In their final tuneup for the regular season, they got to slap hands on the infield grass for the 21st time since they began Cactus League play last month.
“This is the best record I’ve probably ever been a part of with any team in spring training,” Hicks said.
Now, the big question.
Does it matter?
“It’s new territory, but I feel like it’s more about the energy, how everybody’s playing, getting better,” Hicks said. “I feel like we’re making a lot of good progress and moving in the right direction. I feel like the energy is there. There’s something to be excited about in here. We’ve got playoff energy.”
“It certainly lends to a better mood in camp,” Melvin said this week. “It’s never a bad thing to win some games going forward. Especially (because) we have some new guys here, we have a little different style we’re trying to play, we have a new front office. So I think it just lends to a better feeling when you have a good spring.”
There’s typically little correlation between spring success and an awesome autumn, however.
Of the 20 teams to win the American or National League pennant over the past decade, 15 finished the exhibition schedule with a record of .500 or better. Three World Series champions over that time also took home spring training titles, including last year’s Dodgers. The runner-up in last year’s Cactus League, though? The Colorado Rockies, who parlayed that 17-12 record into a last-place finish in the NL West.
And when it comes to the fortunes of the spring training champions, it’s even more random. Take the Cardinals, who won the Grapefruit League in 2022 and went on to win the NL Central; they repeated as spring champs in 2023 but cratered into a last-place finish. Or the Angels; they haven’t made the playoffs since 2014 but have won the Cactus League three times in that span.
Sometimes it is a true sign of things to come, though, such as in 2010, the last time the Giants claimed the Cactus League crown.
Nobody considered them true contenders going into the season but posted a 23-12 record that spring and went on to win the first of three World Series titles in five years.
The 2012 team finished spring 18-15; in 2014, they went 17-10. Maybe you’re thinking there just might be something to this. Introducing the 2017 Giants, who also won 20 games in Cactus League play before limping to a 64-98 record in the regular season, the last time they finished in fifth place.
So, what will it take for these Giants turn it on when it counts?
“Just clean baseball,” Melvin said after their win in the spring finale. “There was an emphasis on the little things, the marginal things. Strike throwing. Situational at-bats. Understanding what that particular at-bat, that particular pitch, that particular time of game — what the scoreboard is telling you.
“But as far as the pitchers go, you look at the numbers across the board. Fewest walks. Getting ahead. It went throughout camp, and the coaches stayed on it. They stayed on the position players about these situational at-bats in close games. You get a lot of close games in this ballpark. If you don’t beat yourself and you’re clean defensively and you do the little things right, you’re going to win a lot of games like that.
“So look, it’s still just spring training. But a lot of the things we did add up to winning baseball games, and we saw it this spring.”
With the exception of Hicks, Melvin penciled in a lineup Tuesday that should resemble the one he hands to the home plate umpire Thursday in Cincinnati.
LaMonte Wade Jr. ripped a double out of the leadoff spot. Willy Adames upped his spring average to .333 with a 1-for-3 performance out of the two-hole. Batting third, Jung Hoo Lee went hitless but proved he was good to go health-wise. Matt Chapman looked like a cleanup hitter, finishing the spring tied for the Cactus League lead in home runs with a .400 batting average.
After leading off with a home run against a lefty on Monday, Heliot Ramos slid down to fifth, followed by catcher Patrick Bailey, Wilmer Flores as the designated hitter and Mike Yastrzemski in right field. And Fitzgerald provided the bulk of their offense from the nine-hole, ripping a two-run home run to left-center in the third inning and scoring the go-ahead run in the seventh on Grant McCray’s single up the middle.
The next time Hicks toes the rubber will be in Houston, his hometown, where he has never pitched before.
He needed only 63 pitches to complete five-plus innings against the Tigers, pitching to contact while his fastball sat in the upper 90s. He struck out three, walked one and surrendered three hits — but one found the seats, a hanging slider that Justyn-Henry Malloy deposited for a solo home run in the second inning.
Hicks finished spring with a 5.19 ERA overall but allowed only three runs on six hits with one walk over his final two starts, a 2.53 mark.
“At the end it was really good,” Melvin said. “I think he knows that if he throws it over the plate with his sinker and he gets ground balls early in the game, he’s going to have a lot of success.”