I think about the 2021 Giants all the time. I’m sure you do too. Whether it’s Mike Tauchman’s game-saving home run robberies, Mike Yastrzemski’s grand slam down three in the eighth, Kevin Gausman’s walk-off sac fly, Logan Webb’s Game 162 home run, or any of the other countless unforgettable memoires from that improbable season, as a Giants fan, it’s hard not to reminisce on better days as the more recent Giants have struggled to stay at .500.
Speaking of .500, it’s that mediocrity that has compelled me to think of them most recently. As you probably know, the 2021 Giants won 107 games, the most in franchise history and tied for the 14th-most in MLB history. As you also probably know, they finished a game below .500 in 2020 and exactly .500 in 2022. That’s enough to give fans whiplash.
It’s not just win/loss record, either–the way I felt watching the 2020 and 2022 Giants was night-and-day different from how I felt watching the 2021 Giants. I usually discount anything that happened in the 2020 season (and I swear that’s not because the Dodgers won the World Series* that year), but I do remember feeling like the Giants were a hopeless bunch trudging through the weirdest season ever before they got hot in September and suddenly missed the playoffs on a dumb tiebreaker despite being below .500. It’s impossible to say how that season would’ve shaken out if the pandemic never happened. What I do know, however, is that group never really inspired confidence in me. Then, to be honest, my brain blocked out most of the 2021 season the second Gabe Morales signaled that Wilmer Flores swung, but you all know what that season felt like. Lastly, the 2022 Giants started 13-5 but finished at .500 in one of the most bland and boring seasons for which I’ve been a fan. Curse of Mauricio Dubón? Who’s to say.
This article isn’t meant to provide answers to why 2021 provided such a stark contrast to the seasons that came before and after. If that’s what you came for, I bid you a fond farewell. The purpose of this article is to show just how rare a season like the 2021 Giants had is in the context of the seasons that came before and after. Buckle up, I’m about to throw a lot of numbers at you.
The 2021 Giants are 1 of 18 teams in MLB history to win 107 or more games. 14 of those teams won at least 91 games in the seasons before and after they won 107+ games. Other than the 2021 Giants, one exception is the 1909 Pirates, who went 110-42-2 and followed it up by going 86-67-1 in 1910 (although that would be on pace for 91 wins in a 162-game season). Another is the 2018 Red Sox, who went 108-54 and then fell to 84-78 in 2019. The last is the 2019 Astros, who went 107-55 and then 29-31 in 2020. Every other 107+ win season was part of a string of success, surrounded by seasons with 91+ wins. Even the four teams I mentioned had excellent preceding seasons; they just fell off a little bit after their biggest one. That’s not the case for the 2021 Giants, though. When it comes to continuous success, they’re not even in the same galaxy as the other 107+ win teams.
Other teams that surrounded dominant runs with mediocrity include the Cardinals winning 85 games in 2003, then 105 in 2004 and 100 in 2005, before falling to 83 in 2006 (but still somehow winning the World Series that year). Over a century ago, the 1911 Red Sox went 78-75, the 1912 Red Sox went 105-47-2, and the 1913 Red Sox went 79-71-1. But all the teams in this paragraph finished above .500. The 2020 and 2022 Giants finished below .500 and .500 respectively.
If we’re looking at teams that finished .500 or worse, the A’s went 81-81 in 1987 and then 104-58 in 1988 en route to the World Series. However, unlike the 2021 Giants, they had continued success after their big season, winning two more pennants in a row and not dipping back below .500 until 1993. The 1945 Red Sox went 71-83-3, the 1946 Red Sox went 104-50-2, and the 1947 Red Sox were subpar again at 83-71-3. But it should be noted that the Red Sox then won 94 or more games in 1948, 1949, and 1950. We still haven’t found a team that was as lackluster as those Giants before and after a huge season.
As I’ve hinted at, the 2021 Giants have the most wins ever of any team in a season sandwiched by .500-or-worse seasons. I’ve been dilly-dallying long enough, it’s time to reveal the team with the 2nd-most wins in that category…also the Giants.
The 1993 Giants won 103 games and didn’t even make the playoffs, because there was no Wild Card and the Atlanta Braves were in the NL West for some reason and won 104. They surrounded this season with a 72-90 effort in 1992 and 55-60 in 1994. If that last total looks a little low, it’s because the 1994 season ended on August 10 due to a players’ strike. The 1995 season didn’t open until April 26, when the Giants went 67-77, and to dispel any “it was a shortened season!” excuses, they went 68-94 in 1996.
If you want to disqualify the 1993 Giants from this leaderboard because 1994 was cut short, then the real 2nd-most wins ever of any team in a season sandwiched by .500-or-worse seasons belongs to the 2022 Mets, who went 101-61 sandwiched by the 77-85 2021 Mets and the 75-87 2023 Mets.
Mathematically, there’s not a big difference between 107 wins and 101 wins. 6 wins, to be exact. You may be seeing this and wondering why I wasted my time writing this article, and more importantly, why you wasted your time reading it. But think of it this way: there have only been 18 teams to win 107+ games in MLB history. There have been exactly 100 to win 101+ games. That’s a big difference. And I would argue that the 2021 Giants were also more surprising than the 2022 Mets, given that the Giants were powered by castoffs and veterans on the wrong side of 30 and the Mets had committed hundreds of millions to guys like Francisco Lindor and Max Scherzer while also being powered by household names like Pete Alonso, Brandon Nimmo, and batting champ Jeff McNeil. I would also argue that the Mets are just weird.
The 2021 Giants confound me for so many reasons, but lately it’s been not just how many games they won, but how few they won in surrounding seasons. It’s not just 2020 and 2022, either–from 2017 to 2024 (as of this writing), they have finished at or below .500 in every single season…except for 2021, when they won 107 games! The great minds of Twitter love to dismiss 2021 as a fluke. I disagree with that. You can’t fluke into that many wins, especially considering how consistently good they were throughout the entire season. I prefer to characterize it as an outlier.
I can’t even begin to understand, let alone explain, how 2021 happened. How did Gabe Kapler & Co. have the greatest season in the Giants’ 142-year history while being painfully mediocre in every other season they were at the helm for? I often think that someday there should be a documentary about that season, not just about how it happened, but why they couldn’t come anywhere close to replicating it again.
Who knows, maybe Bob Melvin & Co. will be able to replicate it. But I wouldn’t bet on it. People love to talk about how insane that season was, and for good reason. But something that I think gets lost is just how wildly different it was from every other season the Giants played in that time frame. The 2021 Giants season is currently one of the biggest outliers in baseball history, and it’s up to today’s Giants to make it look more like a sign of things to come.
Oracle Outsider 