Giants still making a Splash as Mike Yastrzemski provides another walk-off win

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SAN FRANCISCO — In the bottom of the fourth inning of Wednesday’s series finale against the Reds, the Giants were down 5-0 and hadn’t scored a run in 20 innings. They were in danger of getting swept at Oracle Park, which is the sort of thing that typically happens only once a season, if it happens at all. Every hard-hit ball seemed to find a glove, but there weren’t nearly enough hard-hit balls in the first place. It looked bleak enough to question the entire season to that point. Nobody really believed in the fast start, did they?

The Giants came back to win 8-6 in 10 innings, and it’s still safe to believe if you’re so inclined. After being five runs down and 10 outs away from a long, quiet flight to New York, they clawed their way back with two-out hits and long home runs.

They walked off in three games during the six-game homestand, which is the first time that’s happened in an opening homestand since they moved to San Francisco. (It might be the first time it’s ever happened, but play-by-play data gets unreliable around 1911 or so.)

It’s easy to make too much about the first couple of weeks of the season, but you can still bookmark early games that seem especially meaningful. Wednesday’s game had that feeling for a while, but in the wrong kind of way. Any team can get shut out for a single game, but fewer than half the teams in baseball were shut out in consecutive games at any point last season. Considering the Giants’ ability to score runs was the biggest question heading into the season, another offensive face-plant would have been an ominous development.

In the span of three innings, the needle moved from “ominous development” to “proof this season is going to be different,” where it will stay until the first or second pitch of the next game. After the win, manager Bob Melvin talked about the difference between possibly getting swept to end the homestand and the eventual result.

“It wouldn’t have been a terribly great feeling, especially with an off day,” Melvin said. “You’d have to sit on it for a while. So it went from what could have been a rough period to one that we feel really good about.”

YAZ CALLED GAME 💪 pic.twitter.com/AdolFakTW7

— SF Giants on NBCS (@NBCSGiants) April 9, 2025

It certainly didn’t help that Justin Verlander allowed five runs in the third inning, which was more than the entire pitching staff had allowed in any of the previous four games. The stuff was there, and Verlander said after the game that it was “the best I’ve felt since 2022, for sure. Not even close.” He got 20 swings-and-misses, including 11 on sliders, and the 98 mph fastball he threw in the third inning was the hardest pitch he’s thrown since July 2023. But it wasn’t enough to keep the Reds off the board in a hellish third inning, which featured grounders just under and over gloves. While the stuff was there, the luck was not, and it put pressure on a struggling lineup.

The lineup responded. Jung Hoo Lee picked up another three hits — coming a home run away from a cycle — and he now leads the National League in doubles (seven). Wilmer Flores hit another home run, which gives him more in 12 games (five) than he had in 71 games last season (four). Patrick Bailey had his second multihit game of the season, and his sixth-inning triple into Mirabelli’s Alley might have been the most important hit in an inning filled with them. Mike Yastrzemski hit the fifth walk-off home run of his career, and it was a Splash Hit, which is always good for some good-vibe bonus points. (“Who has the most walk-off Splash Hits in Giants history?” is a great trivia question, if you’re in the market. It’s Yastrzemski with three, followed by Barry Bonds and Brandon Crawford, each with one.)

Before the Giants embark on a long, nasty road trip that spans two coasts, against three teams that currently have winning records, it’s a good time to pull back a bit. The season is a marathon, as the cliché goes, but 7 percent of the season is in the books. That’s the equivalent of being 2 miles into a marathon, and you can learn something after a couple of miles. You might be dehydrated. You might have a rock in your shoe. Maybe you feel like you’re in the best shape of your life and could handle an ultramarathon. Take a spin around the roster and see how you feel.

Flores is on pace for 67.5 home runs, which might be slightly unrealistic, but the Giants’ major free-agent acquisitions, Verlander and Willy Adames, have a 6.92 ERA and a .465 OPS, respectively, which also seems unrealistic. The fast starts for Heliot Ramos and Matt Chapman have turned into mini-slumps, while Yastrzemski’s still enjoying his early season success. Lee is probably a combination of Rod Carew and Willie Wilson, unless he’s about 58 times better than both of them combined. Unless that’s a little too eager and overly optimistic. Still, the lineup has offered reasons to be both bullish and bearish. Half of it is rolling, and half of it is reeling, but it’s been enough to win nine out of the first 12 games.

Go back to the expectations before the season, then. If the Giants were going to contend, there were clear expectations about what it would look like. They were going to need a strong rotation and an exceptional bullpen. If they were going to score enough runs to keep the pitching from going to waste, they were going to need some surprises, breakout seasons, good health or all of the above.

If that’s the framing, it’s OK to be somewhat confident. The bullpen really does look like it might be a legitimate advantage, with Randy Rodríguez and Hayden Birdsong giving the Giants even more weapons to shorten any given game. The rotation looks like it could be comfortably above-average, which is probably an understatement, considering how strong Jordan Hicks and Landen Roupp have looked.

It’s going to come down to the ability to score runs, which means nothing has really changed relative to preseason expectations, other than the 9-3 start. If Lee is really a burgeoning superstar, and if Flores can get back to his career numbers, and if Ramos can recapture his first-half form from last year, and if, if, if. That’s what made the first two games of the Reds series feel uncomfortable, and it’s what made the finale so encouraging. A team can lose 1-0 games all the way into last place, but a team that can come back from five runs down? The 2009 and 2011 Giants could never.

On the other hand, while the three walk-off wins made the crowds happy, they’re also a sign that the Giants aren’t exactly blowing a lot of teams out. Don’t forget that the Giants team with the most walk-offs in a season was the 1985 team, which is still the only team in franchise history to lose 100 games. It’s a fine line between a team that provides late-game heroics and a team that’s unable to build and sustain big leads.

What we know for sure is that the Giants have played 12 games, and all of them have been competitive. There hasn’t been a “Let Pablo Pitch” kind of game, and there haven’t been any meaningless innings. You don’t have to be convinced by the 2025 Giants yet, but you can move from “cautiously optimistic” to “reasonably optimistic” with a couple of more weeks like this. They look like a team with potential if they can hit. On Wednesday, they hit. And now for the remaining 93 percent of the season to figure out what it all means.

(Photo of Mike Yastrzemski being embraced by Jung Hoo Lee after Yastrzemski’s walk-off home run: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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