For a team that’s so obsessed with public relations, it’s ironic. But the Giants have a marketing issue.
“Nothing Like It,” the team’s slogan for the last four years — seriously — has become an easy punchline.
This team needs a new slogan.
And I think I have it.
Because while this roster has proven fundamentally incapable of doing anything worthwhile this year, they possess one point of shocking, hyper-specific competency.
Put this team 15 games under .500, and they suddenly transform into the ’27 Yankees.
Since the start of June, the Giants have tumbled to that point a staggering seven times.
That’s an achievement in incompetence. It takes sustained effort to consistently hover at the exact same depth of misery.
Yet, every single time the abyss of 16-under stares them in the face, they fend it off.
They will go no further.
Yes, they have, seven times, clawed their way back to the functionally identical, wholly unimpressive 14-under.
And in that, a new slogan is born:
Never 16!
It’s a battle cry for the terminally mediocre.
Put it on a T-shirt. Print it on a rally towel. Slap it the left-field wall.
Management keeps selling irrational hope. The fans keep buying garlic fries to mask the scent of decay.
Perhaps leaning into a bit could cut some of this tension, this sadness.
The absurdity started on June 2. The Giants sat at a miserable 23-38.
But against the first-place Brewers, the Giants mustered a 1-0 win. Crisis temporarily averted.
Then came June 13. A 28-43 record. The Cubs were the subsequent, unsuspecting victims of a 5-1 ambush.
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On June 21, the cross-bay Athletics fell 3-1. Survival of the fittest? Let’s just go with survival.
June 26’s 15-under game saw the Braves get inexplicably blanked 5-0.
Then on June 30 against the Diamondbacks? A 6-4 triumph.
July 3 against the Rockies? Another 6-4 win to keep the grim reaper at bay.
And finally, Monday. Sitting at a perfectly putrid 37-52, the Giants played what might have been their best game of the year, boat-racing the Blue Jays 10-1.
Yes, seven times they approached the ledge. Seven times they decided that there was, in fact, an indignity too low.
Who says this team doesn’t have heart, passion, or a clutch gene?
Imagine what this team could do if they could channel their 15-under energy into something other than the worst-possible application of stubborn self-preservation.
And if we can’t laugh about this, what’s the point of sports?
Otherwise, what do we have? A team that’s already more than 20 games behind the NL West lead before the All-Star break?
That would be an exercise in masochism.
This, on the other hand, is art.
Can they fend off the dreaded 16-under mark for the rest of the year?
Probably not. Gravity always wins in the end.
Eventually, the bullpen will combust in a critical moment. The bats will go silent when they desperately need a run.
This team is a submarine with a screen door. They can always find new, creative ways to take on water.
But in the meantime, let’s take time to embrace the joke of it all.
Sure, it’s a pathetic, invisible line in the dirt, but it’s their line.
They might be bad. They might be completely unwatchable at times. They’re totally untrustworthy 100 percent of the time.
But by God, they aren’t 16 games under .500. Not now. And, if form continues, not ever.
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I guess there really is nothing like it.
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