On Wednesday, the Giants played their sloppiest game of the 2025 regular season. The defense still hasn’t committed an error this season, but there were two plays in the bottom of the fifth inning that could have been described as “error-adjacent.” There were two walks sprinkled around those misplays, and all eight of the balls were easy takes. All of that sloppiness set up a bases-loaded, nobody out situation for one of the best hitters in baseball. For a couple of sloppy cherries on top, the Giants also had two pitch-clock violations in the following inning, one at the plate and one on the mound.
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The Giants won the game 6-3. They swept the Astros and completed a 5-1 road trip, and they’re off to their best start in over a decade. The last time they started the season with a 5-1 record was 2014, which is also the last time they won their first two road series of the season. The 2025 season is a week old, and you can already finish the sentence “Good teams ____” with different clichés that happen to apply to the Giants so far. Here, try them out yourself:
• Good teams win on the road
• Good teams find a way to finish off the sweep
• Good teams play clean baseball
• Good teams find a way to win when they don’t play clean baseball
• Good teams cash in their scoring opportunities
• Good teams hit the ball over the fence
You can keep going. Good teams feel confident regardless of the day’s starting pitcher. Good teams have confidence in every reliever they use. Good teams have depth. Good teams always seem to be having fun. Good teams have Wilmer Flores and Heliot Ramos hitting a home run or extra-base hit in roughly every other at-bat, although maybe that one is a little specific.
Six games into the season, the Giants are playing like a Tom Emanski-approved Good Team™. They’ve had a full turn through the rotation now, with each of their starting pitchers offering some sort of positive sign. They’ve played small ball to win, and they’ve played large ball to win. They’ve used their relievers to get out of jams, and they’ve used them to prevent jams from existing in the first place.
LaMonte Wade Jr. hit one of three homers for the Giants on Wednesday. (Tim Warner / Getty Images)
The details of Wednesday’s game, for the completionists: Flores hit another home run, a two-run shot in the first inning. Luis Matos hit his first home run of the season, doing it against a left-hander and allowing Jung Hoo Lee to take a day off. The Giants took two walks ahead of a two-run Ramos double, with both runners moving as the ball was hit. Starter Landen Roupp looked unhittable for most of his outing, only getting into trouble in the fifth inning, where almost all of the aforementioned sloppiness was concentrated. LaMonte Wade, Jr. hit a solo homer. The Giants used four relievers, and while none of them were the actual closer, three of them featured closer-type stuff. The only one who didn’t feature closer-type stuff was Tyler Rogers, and that’s because he features alien-type stuff. His inning was the cleanest of them all all.
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It was the kind of game that a good team plays. Which leads us to the obvious question: So are the 2025 Giants a good team?
Maybe, maybe not. There are still 156 games left, and they’ll be packed with all sorts of answers, riddles, misdirection and lies. All we know so far is that the Giants are playing well, and it’s the kind of play that’s really hard for a lousy team to fake, even for a week.
Start with the Giants winning their first two series on the road. That might not seem remarkable, except it’s now happened in just 12 out of the 67 seasons since they moved to San Francisco. The other seasons were 1958, 1961, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1986, 1997, 1998, 2003, 2013 and 2014, and only two of those teams weren’t competitive late into their respective seasons (1972, 2013). The Giants typically win their second road series of a season toward the end of April or middle of May, and it takes them an average of five road series to get there. There were some seasons where they didn’t win a second road series until June or July. In the truncated 2020 season, they didn’t win a series on the road at all.
Remember that first bullet point up there: Good teams win on the road. Dig through the best road teams in San Francisco Giants history, and a common thread is that almost all of them were memorable teams. Three of them won the World Series. Several of them won their division, and a few of them won 100 games or more. Only one pennant winner wasn’t above .500 on the road (1989), and they were just three games under. Good teams, it turns out, actually do win on the road.
This isn’t a Giants-specific truism, so the early returns can be meaningful, even in a small sample. Over the last five full seasons, there have been 27 teams that won their first two series on the road. More than half of them made the postseason, and only 10 of them finished under .500. It’s possible for an awful team to accomplish the feat — the 2019 Orioles won their first two series on the road, but finished the season 54-108 — but it’s uncommon. You can’t answer if the Giants are a good team yet, but there’s already evidence to suggest they’re not a bad one.
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Now consider the idea of a sweep on the road. The Giants had just one of those last year, and it came on Sept. 22, 156 games into the season. There have even been some full seasons without a single road sweep all year, with 2017 being the most recent one.
It’s also possible to be impressed with this first week of Giants baseball even if you ignore that the Giants were on the road. A 5-1 start, home or road, puts them in some moderately exclusive company, to the extent that some seasons didn’t have a single 5-1 team at all after six games. In the last two decades, 64 teams won at least five of their first six games, and 50 of them went on to finish over .500. Again, none of this guarantees that the 2025 Giants are a good team, but they sure aren’t keeping company with a lot of bad teams through six games.
The Giants are on pace to win 135 games, which would be a record, but they’re also a third-place team in the on-pace standings, 27 games behind the undefeated Dodgers and Padres (as of this writing). There’s still work to do. There’s also still time for the season to be frustrating and painful in all the wrong ways. Plenty of time.
A good team? Check back in September or, at the very least, wait until May. In the first week of the season, though, the Giants have hit the ball and caught the ball. They’ve prevented runs, and they’ve held leads. They’ve won two straight series on the road, and they swept a likely contender in their ballpark. The hiccups have been minimal, but the convincing moments have not been.
It’s possible for a team to have a great start to a dreadful season, but it’s far more common for a team to turn a great start into a great season. A week into the season, I’m not sure if there’s anything else the Giants or their fans can ask for.
(Top photo: Tim Warner / Getty Images)
This news was originally published on this post .
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