We don’t have to pretend anymore.
All that wishful thinking and scoreboard-watching can stop right now.
The Giants disqualified themselves from playoff contention on Wednesday.
Not officially disqualified, of course — the team entered Thursday 3.5 games back of the third and final wild card spot in the National League with a month-plus of games to play — but spiritually, and irrevocably.
You cannot lose to the Chicago White Sox and be treated like a serious ball club. Sorry, those are the rules. I don’t make them, but I will enforce them.
The White Sox had the most losses in the history of baseball going into the All-Star Game and since the All-Star Game are 4-26.
Four and Twenty-Six!
And one of those four wins came Wednesday, when Bob Melvin decided to get weird in the top of the ninth inning, lifting Logan Webb (five hits, two runs against in eight innings) after 93 pitches, and rolling out the two back-of-the-bullpen relievers — Erik Miller and then Spencer Bivens — in a 2-2 game.
By the time the Giants came to the plate in the bottom half of the frame, the game was over, with the Sox winning by four.
I’d say this is the equivalent of Cal football losing to the Big Sky’s UC Davis next Saturday, but that’s insulting to the Aggies, who are ranked No. 17 in the FCS preseason poll.
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In a Giants season highlighted by ups and downs, always, aggravatingly, finding a way to even out, Wednesday marked a new nadir for this team. Yes, the manager blew it, but that’s not a game that should need to be managed. The Giants should be able to take care of the White Sox with Melvin and the coaching staff sitting in the back room, pounding brews.
And while there will be highs again, surely — Matt Chapman will get hot, someone else will join him in hitting, and Webb and Blake Snell will win games — they won’t mean anything.
Just like the four-game sweep of the Rockies and the three straight series wins at the beginning of the month didn’t mean anything.
To reach 86 wins — a conservative estimate of what it will take to make the playoffs — the Giants will need to win 22 of their final 33 games.
Needless to say, that kind of winning clip — against a hellacious September schedule, no less — isn’t in the cards, even if the Giants somehow find a way to technically be in the playoff race by the time they play the Cards in the final series of the season.
So spare me the optimism that San Francisco won the series and that they didn’t lose ground in the wild card race after Wednesday’s loss. Those orange-colored glasses need a new prescription if you see this team as anything different than what it has already been.
The Giants told us everything we need to know about them in that series with the White Sox.
Not just in the loss, but in the general inability to kick the behinds of what is perhaps the worst team in big-league history. (As someone who grew up a die-hard White Sox fan and still goes to at least one game in Chicago every year — good times or bad — such statements hurt me in places only an elite therapist can reach.)
These guys are not ready for prime time. Whether this season is an underachievement or not is up for debate, but the quality of this team is not. They’re middling, barely above .500, and not on the level of squads that will play in October.
We know the larger issues at play. I don’t need to re-hash why I think director of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi needs to be shown the door this offseason (or earlier).
But there is a context of this waste of a season that I feel has been overlooked:
The Giants are in fourth place in the National League West, and that status isn’t changing.
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This was a team that, a few years ago, was competing with the Dodgers. A team that somehow, some way won 107 games. It hinted at the possibility that the two largest markets on the West Coast — two of the richest teams in baseball — would take their rivalry to another level.
The Dodgers have lapped them since. Probably twice.
Meanwhile, the Padres, even as underachievers, have achieved far more than the Giants this decade, and the Diamondbacks — the cash-strapped, barn-dwelling Snakes — have been better, too.
That’s what’s unacceptable. That’s why heads need to roll. I don’t care if the division is “stacked” or “loaded” — a fourth-place team deserves no quarter in a playoff conversation, and the Giants have proven themselves to be exactly that this season.
