Why, the Boston Red Sox and San Francisco Giants weren’t so different, once upon a timeThere’s a wide gulf between them right now, of course. The Giants were swept out of Fenway Park, and they deserved each loss, with every game offering something uniquely distasteful. There was a painful Logan Webb meltdown. There was a one-run loss where the Giants were 0-for-8 with runners in scoring position. And, of course, there was a painful blown save, where you briefly expected them to win. You fool.The series ended with Willy Adames injuring his left elbow sliding into home plate in the first inning and Victor Bericoto twisting his knee in the fifth. Both players seem to believe they avoided a major injury, but two players leaving the starting lineup for the MRI machine added some “But how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” energy to the series sweep. The play was discouraging, Mrs. Lincoln. It was rather discouraging. It wasn’t a good series of baseball, and it’s not like you expected anything different, but then they added injury to insult.However, look at where the Red Sox used to be. On June 24, they lost a game and a series to the Colorado Rockies to drop to 32-46. The Red Sox were a half-game worse than the Giants at the time. There’s always been a weird symmetry between the two franchises, who each had a classic case of Little Brother Syndrome when comparing themselves to their blood rivals, who spent decades collecting championship after championship. And it looked like this season would be another data point, except the Red Sox simply … got better.How? Several of the players who were supposed to be better actually started playing better. The weird pitfalls and lousy luck they were experiencing didn’t just go away; they were replaced with unexpected buffs, power-ups and good luck. Boston had its own fateful offseason acquisitions, like Caleb Durbin, who somehow made the Red Sox feel even worse than the Giants for trading Kyle Harrison, and then, without warning, it was opposite day for a couple months.The Giants didn’t play good baseball in Boston. ( Winslow Townson / Getty Images)The lesson for the Giants: Do that. Which is to say that there isn’t a lesson. It’s just amazing to watch from the other side, where a team was buried up to the straw dangling out of their lips, only to recover. For generations, Red Sox fans will remember the 2026 season with fondness, if not outright elation. Two months ago, they were worse than the Giants. So if the Giants can win 15 games in a row, they’ll get right back in the race and primed for a deep November run.No, the lesson is that there isn’t a lesson. Some teams get unstuck while other teams sink deeper into the tar pit. This season has been a cursed one for the Giants, possibly as cursed as any season before it. And for all of the surface-level similarities between them and the Red Sox, one team started playing up to their BaseRuns and Pythagorean record, and the other most certainly did not. The only thing the Giants can do is unplug the whole thing and plug it back in again.Don’t rule out that deep November run, though. It’s still just about as likely as what the Red Sox did. Why, they weren’t so different from the Giants, once upon a time.Logan Webb and the 200-start clubMy youngest dog has a stuffed caterpillar that she carries around in her mouth. Every other toy in this house has been disemboweled, de-squeaked and left for the rest of the house to see, like a warning from Vlad the Impaler. Not the caterpillar, though. Even the other dog knows to keep it intact.