Ah, the 2021 Giants. One of the biggest baseball outliers in recent memory. Tied for the 14th-most wins in MLB history with teams like the 2019 Astros, 1932 Yankees, and 1931 A’s. All three of those teams surrounded their 107-win campaigns with consistent winning in seasons before and after, but not the Giants. From 2017 to 2023, their win totals are as follows: 64, 73, 77, 29*, 107, 81, 79.
The 2021 Giants are the subject of many “how did this happen (skull emoji)” tweets and a handful of YouTube video essays, so I won’t harp on what has already been said any longer. This article is about finding answers. Through painstaking data analysis and analytical thinking, I’ve developed a few theories about why I think the Giants ran the table that year and weren’t able to come close in surrounding seasons.
Black helmets with City Connect uniforms
2021 was the year that the Giants, among other early adopters, debuted their City Connect jerseys. Their first game in those beautiful threads was on Friday, July 9, a 5-3 win over the Washington Nationals on O.J. Simpson’s 74th birthday. They wore them that whole weekend and from then on only wore them in Tuesday home games. In 2022, they opted to use special orange helmets on City Connect Tuesdays to better match the orange and white “creamsicle” jerseys, as they came to be known. Obviously, the Giants didn’t do so hot in 2022, and they kept the orange helmets for 2023, when they also didn’t do so hot.
This theory sounds good in, well, theory, but then you realize that before July 9, the Giants were already 54-32, i.e. on pace for 102 wins. The black helmet and City Connect combo might have helped, but it certainly wasn’t a main reason.
Mike Tauchman was on the team
It makes sense, doesn’t it? Mike Tauchman was only on the Giants in 2021, the only year they’ve been good since the Obama administration. He directly caused three wins with his two home run robberies and grand slam in Texas. Tauchman was on the Giants for one season, that season was 2021, and they were really good in 2021. Tauchman made the Giants good! However, similarly to the City Connect theory, this one falls apart when you realize that he only played 64 games as a Giant, and they were 48-29 (.623) with him and 59-26 (.694) without him. If anything, he hurt the Giants’ quest for 110. And out of all the other one-year Giants of 2021 (Kris Bryant, Skye Bolt, Aaron Sanchez, Jay Jackson, Matt Wisler, Scott Kazmir, James Sherfy, Jose Quintana, Nick Tropeano, and Tyler Chatwood, if you must know), he played the most games with the Giants, so he would have the biggest impact. Safe to say it isn’t Tauchman, nor is it any one-year Giant.
Combo of the old NBC scorebug + names on home jerseys
The City Connects weren’t the only uniform change the Giants made in 2021. They added names to the back of their home jerseys, which seemed to piss everybody off only for them to forget about it before one of those names even read “BRYANT.”
2021 was also the last year of this scorebug:
The Giants kept it around for 2022 Spring Training, but on Opening Day, it looked like this:
Hi, Jorge Soler!
In the two full seasons that the Giants have used the latter scorebug, they’ve been a combined 160-164. Pretty much the definition of mid. But we can’t say that the old scorebug was the defining factor of 2021. No, no, no. That scorebug had been in use since 2016, meaning it was there for the Dark Ages (2017-2019). So we have to pair it with something that makes it exclusive to 2021: names on home jerseys.
Unfortunately, like the other two, this theory falls apart because it doesn’t cover the whole season. Obviously, the Giants only wore their home jerseys for half the year, and they had an almost perfectly split home/road record: 54-27 at home and 53-28 on the road. Hard to see this one going anywhere, either.
The 415 Club had been built, but wasn’t open to fans
Prior to the 2020 season, the Giants moved the bullpens from in-play foul territory to behind the center-field wall at Oracle Park. This necessitated that they move the fences in. Left-center field changed from 404 feet to 399, center field from 399 to 391, and perhaps most notably, right-center field from 421 to 415.
Right-center field at Oracle Park had been notorious for killing potential home run balls, and the new dimensions didn’t really change that. However, the new distance from home plate to the wall, 415, is also the San Francisco area code. This provided a perfect marketing opportunity to open the 415 Club in the space next to the new visitors’ bullpen. It was built prior to the 2020 season, but obviously couldn’t be used then, and finally opened after the All-Star Break in 2021, and–no, damn it, that’s the same problem we keep running into. It doesn’t cover the whole season. We need a theory about something that was in place all season long.
Buster Posey managed by Gabe Kapler
This is it. This is the one. Buster Posey and Gabe Kapler were both there all year, and this is the only year they played together. Kapler’s first year was 2020, which Posey opted out of, and then retired after 2021. This was the recipe for success.
It wasn’t just Posey–he, too, was around for the Dark Ages (2017-2019), and it wasn’t just Kapler–outside of 2021, his record as Giants manager was 189-195. Again, pretty much the definition of mid. But when they came together, they created the greatest team in Giants history.
In case you haven’t noticed, this is kind of a joke article. But I do think there’s a little bit of truth to this one. One of my biggest pet peeves regarding baseball discourse is when people act like they’re in the clubhouse and know exactly what’s going on in there at all times. I’ll try to stay away from that, but from what was revealed about Kapler’s managerial style in his final years in San Francisco, and what was said about Posey’s leadership in 2021, I do honestly think that Kapler’s laid-back, you-come-to-me attitude combined with Posey’s reputation and smarts could have made for a good clubhouse environment that was only able to happen in 2021. This is the most convincing theory.
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Jokes aside, the stark contrast between 2021 and the surrounding seasons is something I think about all the time. The Giants’ reliance on (I’m gonna say the p-word) platoons worked to great advantage in 2021 but faltered and may have led to frustration among players in 2022 and 2023. Why is that? Why did every single pitcher (sans Webb, Doval, and Rogers) that carried over to 2022 suddenly completely suck? Was there some specific event that caused all this? Is the Curse of Mauricio Dubón real?
Maybe someday there will be a documentary and all these questions will be answered. Maybe Firstname Bunchofnumbers is right and Kapler lost the clubhouse by being too woke. Until that day, I’ll keep wondering how it all went so right and then suddenly so wrong and comically conflating correlation with causation.
Wait, what if it was the VAX UP! spray-painted along the first-base line?
Oracle Outsider 