Every year, my job is to come up with
the worst-case, likeliest and best-case scenarios for the Giants for the upcoming season. It’s one of my favorite articles to write because I can get lost in the best-case scenario. The season hasn’t started and the possibilities are endless, so for a couple of hours, nothing goes wrong at all in
Giants Land. They’re the best possible version of themselves.
The best-case scenario in that linked article holds up. But you won’t read the words “NL West champions” or “division winners.” That’s because even during a thought exercise in which everything went right for the Giants, there was still no way they were going to win the division. Simply no way. It would have been possible to construct a nightmare season for the Dodgers or the Padres and assuming that everything went wrong for them, but not both. A 1 percent chance that one of them would screw up would have been plausible. That’s one in a 100 chance. But a 1 percent chance multiplied by a 1 percent chance becomes a 1-in-10,000 chance. There was no way the Giants were going to leapfrog both teams.
They did. It happened. The Giants are the 2021 National League West champions. They tore open the fabric of space-time to stretch the definition of what a best-case scenario could be. There are 99th-percentile outcomes, and then there’s whatever in the heck this was.
The best way to explain the surprise of a NL West title is to reminisce about a Tommy La Stella home run. But not one that made Giants fans happy.
On Aug.
