The Giants Opened the Season By Making Some Ugly History

On Saturday, in the third inning of their game against the Yankees at Oracle Park, the Giants scored a run. Normally, this wouldn’t rate as particularly noteworthy, but that was one more run than they’d scored in the previous 20 innings while dropping their first two games of the 2026 season. As far as their season-opening series went, it was a one-shot deal, as they didn’t score again.

Indeed, the Giants were utterly stifled by the Yankees over those three games. On Wednesday night, when the two teams had the stage to themselves for a nationally televised game on Netflix (don’t get me started about that production), Max Fried and three relievers held the Giants to three hits, all singles, in a 7-0 loss; the Giants reached base just four other times in that one via two walks, a hit-by-pitch, and an error by shortstop Jose Caballero. On Friday afternoon, following a day off, Cam Schlittler and four relievers limited the Giants to one hit in a 3-0 defeat, a second-inning double by Heliot Ramos; in that one, the Giants additionally reached base only twice, on walks in the seventh and ninth innings.

With that, the Giants and Yankees made some history. Those double zeroes marked the first time in the Giants’ 144-year history that they were shut out in their first two games of the season. It had happened just once to any other team within the past decade, the 2023 Royals (at the hands of the Twins). For the Yankees, it was the first time since their 1903 inception that they shut out opponents over their first two games. What’s more, according to the Associated Press it was the first time that any team was shut out and held to a combined total of five hits or fewer over a season’s first two games.

By those standards, Saturday’s game constituted an absolute onslaught by the Giants. They collected nine hits against starter Will Warren and four relievers, and drew three walks as well, but the only time they were able to put a run on the board was in the third inning, when Jung Hoo Lee led off with a double and then scored two pitches later on Matt Chapman’s dribbler up the middle. The Giants had been 0-for-7 with runners in scoring position to that point:

The Giants actually collected another hit with runners in scoring position in the sixth inning, when Ramos hit a seeing-eye single to left field following Rafael Devers’ leadoff double. Devers, already limited to DH duty while playing through left hamstring tightness, had no chance to score. He ended up stranded on third base following a strikeout and a double play ball, one of four the Giants hit into for the day:

All told, the Giants became the ninth team since 1901 to score just one run in their first three games. One other team, the 2016 Padres, is the only club not to score at all over those three games:

That isn’t a fun group to be in. Three of those teams lost at least 100 games, led by the 1988 Orioles, who started the season 0-21. Two others lost at least 94 games, and only three teams finished above .500 — the two 1930s Braves squads and the 2015 Twins.

While the Giants may yet climb above .500, this is not how anyone envisioned the Tony Vitello era starting off in San Francisco. Even before Saturday’s one-run effort, the new manager — the first to jump directly from the college ranks to a major league managerial position since Dick Howser in 1980 — took the blame for the Giants being shut out in their first two games. From The Athletic’s Andrew Baggarly:

“I’d kind of put it on me a little bit,” Vitello said. “I got all fire and brimstone a few days ago and I think some good words were shared, but I also think as of right now it’s a little emotional in there and there are a lot of try-hards… Maybe it stems from that conversation prior to the season or maybe it stems from all the Opening Day fanfare, being the home team, but regardless, everybody wants it to change.”

…“But there’s also a pressing need in there for some feel-good and also to want to perform for the fans,” Vitello said. “I saw it on our guys’ faces and also in their hands when they’re squeezing the bat. So to be honest with you, I’d blame myself. Maybe it’s time to do what I can to maybe ease any tension in there so guys can be free and go out there and play. Because everybody on the field or in the stands know those guys can play that were in that lineup.”

…“If anything, they’ve been in fifth gear and riding hot, maybe too much,” Vitello said. “Whether that weight falls on me or it’s more of a group effort, I think a relaxed version of this group probably makes the score and the outcome more competitive.

Leaving aside whether Vitello’s approach will translate from the University of Tennessee to the majors, there’s reason to be at least somewhat concerned about the Giants’ offense. The unit ranked 17th in the majors last year in both scoring (4.35 runs per game) and wRC+ (97). A full season of Devers — who was acquired last June 15 — and the additions of Luis Arraez and Harrison Bader should help, raising the bar considerably at the offense’s dead spots. With Devers playing just 28 games at first base last year as he learned the position on the fly, the 77 wRC+ the Giants received from the position ranked a godawful 29th in the majors; meanwhile, they were 27th at second base (73), and 28th in right field (78). The team signed Arraez with the promise that he’d return to second base, and the addition of Bader bumped Lee from center to right, upgrading the defense as well. But despite those upgrades, our Projected Standings forecast the Giants to score just 4.28 runs per game, the majors’ fourth-lowest mark ahead of only the Marlins, Nationals, and White Sox. Right now that sounds like a Murderer’s Row-caliber output compared to their one measly run.

Checking out their Statcast numbers, you won’t be surprised to find that the Giants have underperformed relative to how hard they hit the ball, but they still haven’t hit the ball well enough to do much damage. Their 89.8 mph average exit velocity ranks 13th in the majors though Sunday, but their 8.4 degree launch angle and 1.6% barrel rate both rank 28th, and their 34.4% hard-hit rate 26th. Their 54.7% groundball rate is the majors’ highest, and from among their 22 hard-hit balls thus far, 10 have had launch angles of zero degrees or less, turning them into grounders. Taken together, the Giants’ hard-hit balls — that is, those with exit velocities of 95 mph or higher, regardless of launch angle — have been less productive than those of just about any other team:

I’ve included the major league averages for last year and this one, so you can get an idea of the baselines; even though they include some low launch-angle balls, hard-hit balls as a group produce slugging percentages well above .900 and wOBAs approaching .600. The current Giants aren’t even close to those numbers, ranking last in the majors in all of those categories save for their average exit velo on hard-hit balls (18th), because when they’ve hit the ball hard, too often they’ve beaten it into the ground, as noted above.

Just four of their batted balls have been hit at least 100 mph and traveled at least 300 feet on the fly, and all they have to show for it is Devers’ double. Devers has five hard-hit balls, two of which became hits, but even so, his overall expected slugging percentage is just .360. Lee (.374), Arraez (.310) and Patrick Bailey (.305) — the last of whom is the owner of the team’s lone barrel, a 376-foot warning-track fly ball to center field in the eighth inning on Wednesday — are the only Giants with an xSLG above .300. If you want some comparatively good news, the Giants aren’t uniformly dead last in the majors when it comes to their expected stats:

We are of course in small-sample theater, and will be for the next several weeks. The Giants had the misfortune of catching a couple of excellent pitchers at the wrong time in Fried and Schlittler, but they had their chances against Warren and company and just didn’t get the job done. On the other side of the ball, they surrendered 13 runs to the Yankees, which wasn’t terrible, and the only three homers they surrendered were to the pair of sluggers who have combined for over 800 in their career, Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton. Judge hit a two-run shot off Robbie Ray in the sixth inning of Friday’s game, which had been scoreless to that point, and added a solo shot off reliever Ryan Borucki in the fifth inning on Saturday, turning a 2-1 Yankee lead into a 3-1 one. Stanton clubbed a solo homer off reliever José Buttó after he replaced Ray. Those homers accounted for four of the six Yankee runs on those two days.

The Giants’ only real dud of a start was Logan Webb’s five-inning, seven-run (six earned) outing on Wednesday night, and even that wasn’t entirely his fault. He struck out seven, walked one, and kept the ball in the park, but was BABIP’d to death at a .529 clip. Eight of the nine hits he surrendered were singles; four of them, plus Trent Grisham’s two-run triple, occurred within a six-batter span in the second inning, exacerbated by a hit-by-pitch and some sloppy throws by the Giants’ outfielders. On KNBR’s broadcast, analyst Mike Krukow suggested that the 29-year-old righty was tipping his pitches, but didn’t explain how.

In the end, one start is just one start, and one series just one series, however much history is made and regardless of when in the season it occurs. Still, both the Giants’ 2026 season and the Tony Vitello era are off to an unsettling beginning.