The Giants obliterated the Brewers on Wednesday afternoon, 16-3. It was the kind of performance that made them appear as if they are a secretly good baseball team. This requires something of a disclaimer before we move on.The Giants are not a secretly good baseball team. They are an objectively bad team with an objectively bad record. Assuming there are future generations, they will study this team like an abstract painting. Was there meaning to the 2026 Giants? Were they trying to make a statement? Scholars will disagree.They are, however, a fascinating team. Fascinating and possibly cursed. According to the Giants’ expected run differential, they should be 55-53 right now. That doesn’t mean they’re unlucky, necessarily; you’ve seen the bad sends, the silly decisions and other errors that have led to Giants losses. They deserved a lot of what they got. And how.Still, the Giants shouldn’t be threatening to be “dozens of games under .500” bad. They’re 16th in raw OPS but they’re 26th in runs scored per game, which isn’t a combination that’s supposed to exist. It’s as if they’re hitting the ball like a normal team in a normal ballpark, but still getting the classic Oracle Park results. You won’t be surprised to learn that the situation is reversed for the Giants’ pitchers, where they’re allowing a league-average OPS, but still allowing more runs than the average team.“Secretly good baseball team” is too strong, then, but you can make it work with “probably pretty OK, if a little unbalanced.” They can hit, but they can’t pitch, just like they were projected to do, and there’s been a little extra je ne sais curse with the whole affair, too. There have been scooter accidents and fireworks mishaps and mascot collisions throughout the organization … and that was just the last couple weeks. It’s all been rather distressing.And I’m here, straight out of Aesop’s Fables, to tell you that it’s a good thing that the Giants are having a cursed season. Maybe the best of things. Just look at how miserable it would have been for the Giants to be a couple games over .500 and buying at this deadline. It’s exactly what they wouldn’t have needed.Take a second to imagine a Giants team that’s playing up to their 55-53 Base Runs record. It’s probably good for your blood pressure to imagine a less lousy Giants season, for one, but it’s also good context for the sour grapes fable we’re recreating. The original fable wasn’t about the fox getting mad that the grapes were too high; it was about him pretending that the grapes wouldn’t have tasted good. With the Giants, you can pretend that a normal, winning season would have been secretly bad for them. It’s surprisingly easy.The Giants wouldn’t have needed to trade for position players. Before Casey Schmitt’s injury, they were having enough of a problem getting everyone on the field at the same time when they were all healthy. They had six regulars with an adjusted OPS that was better than the league average before Schmitt’s injury — five of them have been at least 17 percent better. The players who aren’t hitting have a long track record of producing more in previous seasons. It would have been a pitching-centric deadline for a contending Giants team.A lot of teams will be pointing to Robbie Ray as a potential upgrade for their rotations. (Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)Is it a good trade deadline to be interested in pitching? It never is, but this time it’s a bad market for pitching because the talent just isn’t there. Too many teams are contending. Assuming the Giants weren’t going to pay up for Tarik Skubal in our scenario, the rest of the targets would have been either overvalued because of team control (Reid Detmers, José Soriano) or impending free agents who couldn’t possibly fix a rotation on their own (Freddy Peralta, Foster Griffin). The Giants likely would have acquired someone unexciting but effective — in essence, what another team is about to do with Tyler Mahle — and given up a prospect you kinda sorta liked to do it.