Sour cherries 🍒

Rockies 7, Giants 6

Eighty-nine games in, I’m picking cherries.

If I handed you these morsels on March 6, I’d love to know where you think the Giants would be standing on July 6:

• Rafael Devers and Casey Schmitt are both on pace for 30+ home runs.

• Luis Arraez and Logan Webb are All Stars.

• Jung Hoo Lee’s batting .315, and Bryce Eldridge has an .841 OPS.

• The Giants have the sixth best attendance in baseball, up more than 1,000 fans per game from last year.

The story of the season cannot be told through cherry-picked nuggets like these. But jeez, if I handed you these cherries, I think you’d be thinking 52-37—not 37-52.

The cherries are good. The tree is rotten.

Up next: The defending AL champs are coming to San Francisco, and an old friend is taking the hill Monday night. It’ll be Landen Roupp (5-8, 4.55 ERA) against Kevin Gausman (4-7, 4.19 ERA), who represents an interesting What If? for the Giants in this mediocre decade.

Gausman was excellent in 2021 and reportedly wanted to come back. Fresh off 107 wins, the team let him go to Toronto on a five-year deal. Gausman has a 3.57 ERA in that time, which the Giants would, um, take.