WHAT is going on with the Giants?!–Anyone? Anyone?

Jun 6, 2026 | Latest Post, Out of Left Field

by DrLefty

If you weren’t watching the Giants-Cubs game yesterday, you might have missed that it was “Ferris Bueller Day” at Wrigley Field, an annual commemoration of the day (June 5, 1985) on which Matthew Broderick and his co-stars allegedly attended an actual Cubs game. Fans dress up like Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane (see featured image above), they play music from the movie soundtrack between innings, and fans yell “Hey batta batta batta hey batta batta batta SWING batta!” as “Cameron” did 41 years ago yesterday.

The Cubs lost on June 5, 1985. They also lost on June 5, 2026. And the Giants took the “SWING batta” advice to heart because they swung and they swung and they swung some more.

There’s a scene in the movie where the villain, Dean of Students Ed Rooney, who is hunting down Ferris, goes into a pizza parlor where the Cubs game is showing. He asks the guy behind the counter “Who’s winning?” and the guy replies, “The Bears.” As this exchange happens, Ferris catches a foul ball in the stands and is shown on the video screen, but Rooney misses it.

 

 

At one point yesterday, the Giants led 16-0. The Oracle Park Seagull Twitter account had this to say.

The game between the Braves and the Cubs on June 5, 1985, was tense and went 11 innings, with the Braves winning 4-2 on a Rafael Ramirez homer off Hall of Fame closer Lee Smith. However, there was a second “Ferris Bueller Day” later that season, on September 24, when the actors actually were in the stands at Wrigley Field. The game footage was from June 5, but they were in the park on September 24. The Cubs lost that game to the Montreal Expos 17-15, which resembled yesterday’s game quite a bit more.

OK, enough about Ferris Bueller. (For those of you who don’t know me in real life, our last name is Ferris, so we’ve always had a strong attachment to the movie. Before our first child was born, a couple of years after the movie came out, we referred to her as “Bueller” [Bueller Ferris, get it?]. We went to Chicago several years ago to see the Giants play at Wrigley (didn’t go well), and at the Art Institute, we struck the pose that Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane took by the Auguste Rodin Balzac sculpture.)

DrLefty & MrLefty re-create the Ferris Bueller scene

 

The Game

As I mentioned, it was a football score–Carson Seymour gave up a “field goal” in his three innings out of the bullpen, but the final score was 18-3. The Giants hit seven (7) homers, including two apiece by Willy Adames, Matt Chapman, and Casey Schmitt. The seventh was hit by Jonah Cox, who entered the game in the sixth inning. It was his first major league homer, and it was off a position player (catcher Carson Kelly), which gives Cox the statistical oddity of having his first major league hit off a position player (Rockies catcher Brett Sullivan, on Sunday at Coors Field) and now his first major league homer. And yes, Cox can get hits off actual pitchers, too–indeed, he got two in the same inning yesterday.  In all, the Giants scored 18 runs on 19 hits, which was a little disappointing because they just fell short of getting 20+ hits for the third time this week–they had 25 hits in that game at Coors and 20 in Thursday’s finale in Milwaukee.

In addition to the seven homers, seven different Giants had at least two hits yesterday–the aforementioned trio with two homers each (Schmitt had four hits, and Chapman had 8 RBIs, a career high), as well as Luis Arraez, Bryce Eldridge, and Cox (who had three hits). Jung Hoo Lee had an “off” day with only one hit, but he extended his hitting streak to 13 games, the current longest in the majors. Arraez and Lee are currently third and fourth in the majors in batting average. Arraez already has won three batting titles, and it’s not hard to imagine Lee winning one, either.

There were so many highlights that it’s hard to pick just a few, but I’ll go with Adames’s first homer, which got the Giants on the board first and went really far, and Chapman’s grand slam, which gave the Giants all the runs they would need.

In case you’ve lost count, the Giants have now hit six (6) grand slams in less than three weeks, and yes, they lead the majors in that category. This run began on May 17 (hit by Harrison Bader), and has featured two different times in which they hit grand slams in consecutive games. Bader hit another one on May 23, Rafael Devers hit one on May 24, and then Eric Haase hit a grand slam in Milwaukee on Thursday before Chapman’s slam on Friday. At this rate, the “Slam Francisco Giants” will be inking a sponsorship deal with Denny’s (is that Grand Slam breakfast still a thing?).

Kudos to Robbie Ray for gritting through five scoreless innings to get a win even though he had more walks (5) than strikeouts (4). His mechanics and command are still not where they should be, but Ray was the first Giants pitcher not named Logan Webb to complete five innings in…quite a while. As for Seymour, we’ll give him a pass on giving up three runs considering that he was scratched from his Thursday night start in Sacramento and instead took a redeye to Chicago. He ate three innings in a blowout, and the Giants desperately needed those innings.

 

Reflections on a Strange Week

Last week I had to practically force myself to write Out of Left Field after a gut-punch loss in Colorado on Friday night. The Giants went 4-3 this week, which for them is an improvement–they lost a series in Colorado (bad) but rallied to split a four-game series against the Brewers, who as usual are a first-place team (good). In three of their four wins, they scored a total of 49 runs (19-12-18) with 64 hits (25-20-19). The other one was a 1-0 Webb gem, with the only run coming by means of Victor Bericoto’s first major league homer. So…50 runs in four wins, which is an average of…checks math…12.5 runs a game.

OK, but now let’s talk about the three losses, Saturday in Colorado and Monday and Tuesday in Milwaukee. They gave up 32 runs in those three losses (8-16-8). In the finale in Milwaukee, the Giants had a 12-3 lead going to the bottom of the seventh. The game ended with the tying run at the plate, and he hit a fly ball to deep center that for a second looked like…nah, it’s in the park. In that game, Adrian Houser couldn’t make it out of the fifth despite being staked to a 6-1 lead, and the bullpen gave up six runs in the final three innings. (Wilkin Ramos was so bad that he got sent right back to Sacramento after the game. Pretty rough way to make a long-awaited major league debut.)

The story of the Giants’ season through March/April was that they were not doing anything right on offense, with the notable exceptions of Arraez and Schmitt, a guy who was supposed to be a bench player this year but instead has been so good that they can’t take him out of the lineup and he’s now played six different “positions” (if you count DH). Oh, and the brain trust decided he should bat leadoff this week. Casey seems like an easygoing guy, and that’s a good thing because I can’t recall ever seeing one player have so much thrown at him in such a short period of time. As someone mentioned the other day, Casey was a pretty good closer in his San Diego State days. The Giants sure could use one. Do you think…nah, probably not.

The team started picking it up at the plate in May. They were sixth in OPS, fourth in batting average, third in SLG, ninth in homers and runs scored, first in doubles, and tied for first in triples. In particular, Adames and Devers started coming around: Devers had a .945 OPS in May, which led the team, and Adames was .829 with five homers. Chapman had a dreadful May (.534 OPS with no homers), but in the first five days of June has a 1.341 OPS with three homers. Adames, Lee, Arraez, and Schmitt have remained hot, while Devers has not (.435 OPS through five games in June), but in addition to those four, Eldridge (1.055 OPS in June) and the two catchers (Haase and Daniel Susac) have contributed at the plate. They’ve even gotten big hits from a recent River Cat (Bericoto) and Flying Squirrel (Cox).

So now the offense is putting things together. They’re up to 8th in the majors in OPS and second in batting average. There are still the major holes (not drawing walks, not stealing bases), but even the walks have ticked up lately, most likely because the hitters are hitting, so pitchers aren’t quite as fearless about challenging them in the strike zone. As for stolen bases, when you’re up 9-0 in the sixth inning and Cox gets a leadoff single, you probably don’t give him the steal sign.

But there’s still the pitching. It’s not good, folks. Their team ERA of 4.56 is 23rd in the majors. The rotation (4.76) is 26th. The bullpen is 19th, but the eye test says it’s worse than that. This has been an odd season in which the Giants have either been losing (a lot) or winning by large-ish margins. They are near the bottom of the majors in save opportunities with just 19 so far. When games are close, the Giants usually don’t win them. The 1-0 win in Milwaukee was a notable exception, thanks to Webb and a masterful ninth inning by Keaton Winn. 

Scoring lots of runs covers up a multitude of pitching sins. It’s fun when it happens, but it’s not sustainable in terms of putting a long winning streak together or, say, a 20-win month that brings them back close to .500. Unless the pitchers, you know, start pitching better or the personnel somehow changes, well–it is what it is, to quote myself from a couple of weeks ago.

 

That said, early this week I was planning to write my column about whom the Giants should trade (lots of people) and whom they should keep and build around (a handful of people), and yes, the “trade Webb” scenario was going to be discussed. But after these last two games (three if you count Webb’s masterpiece on Wednesday), I read the room and decided it wasn’t the time for that discussion.

Oh, welcome to new 3B coach, Gary Pettis! The Giants made things easy on him yesterday.

 

 

Today’s Game

Giants at Cubs, 11:20 a.m. at Wrigley Field

Landen Roupp, 4-5, 4.22 ERA vs Ben Brown (2-2, 1.92 ERA)

Note that tomorrow’s game is a national game (NBC/Peacock) and will be at 5:30 p.m our time.

As Ferris Bueller said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Lefty out.