Giants drop game and series to Padres, end April on a confusing note

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It was tempting to make too much of the Giants’ first matchup against an NL West rival. Now that the series is over, with the Padres winning both games, it’s even more tempting. I know I’m tempted. Some of you rascals will even give in to that temptation in the comments, and I’m a little jealous.

The series had extra importance built into it because it was the first chance the Giants had to show off against a division rival. Their hot start was built against all sorts of teams, including the Phillies, Yankees and four-fifths of the AL West, but they couldn’t test themselves against the other flourishing teams in their own division. There wasn’t any head-to-head evidence to scrutinize.

Now the early returns are in, and we can make too much of it. So without further ado, here are the “Five Things We Definitively Learned from this April Series against the Padres”. Number one …

Sorry, sorry, almost gave in.

Dismissing the series out of hand also doesn’t seem like a great idea, though. There are still a cool 50 games left against the NL West, but the Giants’ season has been surprising enough to make you wary. You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, the sign that this team is no better than the one you were expecting a month ago. Being on the wrong end of a dull, mostly discouraging two-game sweep gets you part of the way there. The Giants didn’t have a win probability over 50 percent for a single pitch of the Padres series, and it felt like it. It would almost make you more comfortable if you could blame at least one of the games on a single error or relief appearance. Instead, it was a collective effort in the wrong kind of way.

The “easy to make too much of it” label also applies to the entire month, too. The Giants finished April with a 19-12 record (we are lumping March in with April like Baseball Reference does), which was their best monthly record since June 2023. But seeing June 2023 as a historical example gives you good idea of how much a month can mean in isolation. Not much. The Giants also had a better record in April and September of 2022, and it was undone by all of the bad baseball in between. Two-game series can be outliers, but so can entire months.

(If you’re looking for additional reasons to be impressed by the 2021 team, note that they had just one month that was worse than this one, and it was a month with a .600 winning percentage. That team is ancient history by now, but they’ll never stop being remarkable.)

This is the gift and the curse of April baseball. If two games don’t prove anything, then you have to reckon with the idea that an entire month doesn’t have to prove anything, either. If an entire month can force you to adjust your prior beliefs, it’s not that much more of a stretch to re-adjust them after a disappointing series against another team at the top of the division.

The best way to resolve this conundrum is to take a little from each idea. The Giants’ impressive April means plenty in the sense that they don’t have to give those wins back, even if they start to struggle. Just one hot month can buoy a team for a huge chunk of the season, and it can help them overcome middling or good-not-great stretches later on.

The Giants’ unimpressive series against the Padres means plenty in the sense that it was a great reminder of what was supposed to be their biggest problem entering the season: If they were going to be surprise contenders, they were going to have to hit more than expected.

They’re still going to have to hit more than expected.

The Giants weren’t able to get out of San Diego with a win in their first NL West series of the season. (Denis Poroy / Imagn Images)

When Wilmer Flores was on pace for 65 home runs and the rest of the team was hitting .400 with two outs and runners in scoring position, it wasn’t as if anyone thought those two specific details would hold up, but it was easy to view the roster through that lens. They weren’t going to score 1,000 runs and slug their way to the postseason, but they had the look of a team that could score enough to win and win often. They had several struggling hitters, so it wasn’t as if the entire roster was unsustainably hot at the same time, and they were stringing together enough comebacks to look like a team that was never really out of a game. When it was working, they had just enough offensive firepower, alright.

Then they went into San Diego to face a team with some of the best run prevention in baseball, and their runs were most definitely prevented. The Giants didn’t look hopeless, and they turned some 0.00-something and 1.00-something ERAs in the Padres bullpen into 1.00-something and 2.00-something ERAs, so it wasn’t as if they were utterly dominated. But they struggled to score runs, which reminds you that that was supposed to be the book on the 2025 Giants. They were always going to have fallow offensive stretches, especially against elite pitching staffs. The hot April might have made folks forget that, but it didn’t change that.

In the eighth inning of Wednesday’s game, Matt Chapman represented the tying run with two outs. He should have represented the go-ahead run after a Jung Hoo Lee walk, but Phil Cuzzi remains one of the few umpires that most baseball fans can name (not a good thing), but that’s not the point. The inning started with a three-run deficit, but Mike Yastrzemski’s homer got them a run closer, and another comeback felt possible. It might have even felt likely. This was the 2025 Giants, after all.

Chapman swung through a letter-high fastball to end the inning, and his batting average dropped to under .200 for the season. It was a microcosm of everything we don’t know yet. Chapman struck out in six of his eight at-bats in the series (bad), but he also leads the league in walks (good) and is also second on the team in home runs (good) with five (bad, if you’d prefer that kind of total to be third or fourth). The overall package has been a lot better than what most players have given their teams this season as Chapman’s a top-20 player by WAR, according to Baseball-Reference. But it leaves you wondering exactly what to expect for the next five months.

It was the at-bat that best described the game, and it might have been the at-bat that best described the series, and the overall season from Chapman is one that might best describe the entire team so far. Probably good. Still very much a mystery. If you attempt to make too much of it, an additional week’s worth of evidence might change your mind completely.

Yep, that’s April baseball, alright. The Giants spent most of it beating the bejeepers out of their opponents, but they ended it on a confusing note. It’s easy to make too much and too little of the first series against one of the other NL West contenders. All we know is that we don’t know much yet. Well, except for the series being a total dud. We know that much for certain, at least.

(Top photo of Willy Adames in a rundown: Denis Poroy / Imagn Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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