Unbelievable: at All-Star break, Giants have best record in baseball

SAN FRANCISCO — Nobody in baseball would have believed this. Maybe nobody in sports. The San Francisco Giants have the best record in the majors at the All-Star break.

Which is now. Which is crazy wonderful.

Better than the Dodgers. Better than the Padres. Better than the Astros and Mets and Yankees.

Better than anybody in the bigs.

And they’ve done it in part without their All-Star catcher, Buster Posey, and without Evan Longoria and Brandon Belt. They’ve been on the injured list, and while every team has injuries, those three are the infield point men, at catcher, third base and first base.

What the Giants do have is the other Brandon, shortstop Brandon Crawford, who at 34, two seasons after he seemed finished, is batting .284 and on the All-Star team, and a roster full of guys who not only think baseball is fun but make it so by the way they play.

The Giants closed the first half of this enticing 2021 season by beating the once proud Washington Nationals, 3-1, on a Sunday afternoon at Oracle Park, where mid-summer had an autumn feel, a temperature of 60 degrees at first pitch and a cool wind until the last out.

A bit of the Fall Classic? Not so fast. The way the Giants unexpectedly crashed into prominence — not that they’d ever get the attention on ESPN given the Yankees, Dodgers or Padres — is the same way they could come crashing down.

Still, they swept three from the Nats.  

With an exception or three, the bulk of the Giants’ roster was hardly in demand when it came to rebuilding a team. No Trevor Bauers (exhale). No Giancarlo Stantons.

Just a lot of people who showed they could either play the game, like pitcher Kevin Gausman, the starter and winner Sunday (he’s now 9-3 and an All-Star for the game at Denver, his home), or had the potential to play it, such as Darin Ruf.

The big man on Sunday was Gausman. Pitching always counts. Hard to lose when the opponent gets only a single run. Just as in football. Keep the other team from scoring, and you’ve got a great chance.

The big man on offense was Kurt Casali, picked up earlier in the year and, after getting through injuries of his own, the one who picked up the Giants with a three-run home run in the second.

Who knows how long this magic lasts, but team president Farhan Zaidi keeps putting in the right pieces, and his willing compatriot, manager Gabe Kapler, keeps making the right moves.

Last year, Zaidi reminded, the defense was lacking. Not only were there errors of commission, grounders misplayed, fly balls dropped, but errors of omission — not covering a base, failing to throw to the correct infielder.

Those are unacceptable, particularly for a team built around pitching.

Kapler, as every manager, has remained skeptical as needed and enthusiastic as required. He is honest without being pretentious.

“That we’ve been able to do it without our All-Star catcher,” Kapler said of the Giants working their way to a record of 57-32, “is an example of people stepping up to help each other. Players came up from the minor leagues.”

From his days as an executive with the Dodgers, the monster he must now work to surpass, Zaidi has prized both versatility and patience. He likes players who can handle more than one position and who know when to swing the bat.

Kapler reportedly told Casali that the Giants from April until now played one of the better half-seasons he’d ever been associated with as a player or manager.

“I didn’t think much about it,” said Casali, around the game long enough to know how rapidly things can turn, “but it was cool.”

In the season of ’21, so are the Giants.