Giants make unique kind of franchise history with .500 season

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The Giants Postgame Live crew takes a look at the Giants upcoming free agents and who they think will return to San Francisco for the 2023 season, including Carlos Rodon, Brandon Belt and Evan Longoria.

SAN DIEGO -- The Giants started May by losing five consecutive games and then winning six straight. They won seven of nine before the All-Star break, highlighted by the memorable Mike Yastrzemski walk-off grand slam, then opened their second half with a winless seven-game road trip.

Over the final two months of the season, the Giants had three separate five-game winning streaks. They also had losing streaks of seven and five games.

This was one of the streakiest teams in Giants history, so it was only appropriate that with an 8-1 win on Wednesday, the 2022 Giants became the first group in the franchise's 140 years to finish a season exactly at .500.

The Giants peaked on June 18 in Pittsburgh, when they won to improve to 10 games over .500. The next day, they suffered a walk-off loss, and the day after that they got walked off again. They found rock bottom, at least record-wise, on September 18, when the final one of their 15 losses to the Dodgers dropped them eight games under .500.

They finished strong despite using bullpen games seemingly every other day down the stretch -- including Wednesday, when John Brebbia made his 11th start. The four-hitter got them to 81-81 for the first time in their long history. The closest they had come previously was in 1975, when they went 80-81 but didn't play a full 162. In 1885, the New York Giants went 66-65-1. 

This year's record was wildly disappointing and came after the best regular season in franchise history, which put the Giants on a list you don't want to be on. They became just the eighth team in MLB history to win at least 100 games one season and then finish at or below .500 the next one.

A year after a thrilling finish for an NL West title, the Giants played mostly meaningless baseball down the stretch. They fell just about all the way out of the Wild Card race with their seven-game losing streak at the end of August, and then had to hope and pray for the best when they started winning more regularly at the end of September. 

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It was far too little, too late. 

The Giants finished 30 behind the Dodgers in the National League West and eight games behind a Padres team that went all-in with a deadline deal for Juan Soto. They finished six games behind the Phillies, who took the sixth and final NL spot in an expanded postseason. This is the fifth time in the last six years that the Giants will watch October baseball from the couch.

"If we just stopped some of the skids that we had earlier in the year, we wouldn't be in this position," right-hander Alex Cobb said last week. "But I think there's a lot to learn from. You have to learn how to lose, you have to learn how to feel the struggle and not be happy with it and take it into the next season and know that there's going to be a handful of games that decide if we go to the playoffs or not.

"There were plenty of games, plenty of skids that we went on, that we could look at that are going to send us home instead of carrying us into the postseason."

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