San Francisco Giants: Is it naive to believe in this team?

The San Francisco Giants are now above .500 and two games removed from a wild-card spot. It is naive to believe in this team?

The San Francisco Giants won a game last night that it looked like they were going to lose for a vast majority of the time.

Why is that significant?

After the Chicago Cubs took a 3-0 lead, I started to chastise myself for getting excited about the team’s recent form. It was all too easy to start thinking that they had just gotten hot or lucky, or to look at the fact that they haven’t exactly been playing playoff-caliber teams of late.

All of that could still be true.

However, last night’s game truly made me believe that it might not be.

Back-to-back clutch hits with two outs turned the game on its head in the eighth inning. Austin Slater‘s double out to Triples Alley tied things up and Joe Panik‘s double down the left field line gave the Giants the lead.

It also made me jump off the couch and fist pump in my living room, all by myself. The last time I can remember doing that was back in 2014.

Don’t get me wrong, I know it was only one game. I know the Giants could easily get crushed the next two and we could be back to talking about the returns they might get for Will Smith or Madison Bumgarner by the weekend.

But last night just felt, for lack of a better word, magical.

Taking down the team that sent them packing in the 2016 playoffs felt so good, even if it was only one game. Knowing that it’s manager Bruce Bochy’s last season, we’d all love it if the Giants were somehow able to do something improbable one more time this decade.

All the rationale, pragmatism, and hard-headedness in the world should still lead one to believe that this is just a fluke. That it is in the best interest of the team to sell and to sell hard. That a playoff berth and a deep run into October is still improbable at best.

Then again, San Francisco Giants fans know all too well what has been achieved under improbable circumstances before.

To paraphrase Mike Krukow after the Giants won the 2012 World Series: “They did what the entire baseball world said they couldn’t do, and they did it in four games.”

The reason I’m starting to believe in this team is that I’ve seen them prove everyone wrong before. And if last night is any indication, there’s a chance they can do it again.