A .500 team isn’t supposed to make you so mad. They’re supposed to be like in-flight magazines: boring, harmless, occasionally OK. You’ll rarely seek one out. You’ll never resent their existence. They just are. They’ve helped you pass the seconds and minutes in the past, and now you’re here.

Then there are the 2025 San Francisco Giants, who are simultaneously .500 and the worst team in baseball history.

The Giants played their worst game of the season on Sunday. There are dozens of other contenders, of course, but the nominations are closed, possibly for the rest of the season. They were obliterated, 8-0, by a Nationals team that had gone 15-36 in its last 51 games. They were outhit, 17-3. MacKenzie Gore might have been the coldest pitcher in MLB — he’d given up at least six runs in three of his previous four starts — yet he still folded the Giants into a paper airplane and tossed them into the water. The Giants lost the game and the series, their fourth consecutive series loss at home. They’re now 1-10 in their last 11 home games.

That’s a list of unacceptable baseball outcomes that are too ghastly to ignore. And they come courtesy of a perfectly average team, mathematically speaking. A harmless team, one that isn’t supposed to live underneath the floorboards of your brain and wake you up at night. The scratching sounds they start making around 3 a.m. are truly unsettling. Shhrrrrcck shhrrrrcck shhrrrcck.

There are reasons for this, of course. The first one is that even though the Giants have a .500 record, they haven’t been a .500 team for a while now. Since tying the Dodgers for a share of first place in the NL West on June 13, they’ve gone 18-30. They haven’t had a winning record in a calendar month since April.

The Giants are a particularly frustrating .500 team. (Darren Yamashita / Imagn Images)

Another reason they’re as maddening as any team in recent memory is how they’re sprinkling these wins and losses around. They have losing records against the Angels, White Sox, Marlins, Twins and Pirates this season, but they have winning records against the Red Sox, Cubs, Astros, Brewers, Yankees, Phillies, Mariners and Rangers. They aren’t a .500 team because they alternate between being just good enough to lose and just good enough to win. They’re a .500 team because they’ve pummeled some of the best teams in baseball. They’re a .500 team because they’ve rocked the outhouse over while playing some of the worst teams in baseball.

Now the Padres are coming into town for an important series. It shouldn’t be an important series. The very idea of anyone calling it an important series is enough to make you angry. The Giants can’t win at home. They’re losing seemingly every series they touch. They should have run out of important series months ago.

Yet here they are, playing another game that might actually matter. They’re almost certainly not going to catch the Padres, even if they’ve come back from similar August deficits against them before, but the Mets are somehow even more screwed up than the Giants right now. Their seven-game losing streak has left everyone’s window just a little bit open. (Tyler Rogers got the loss for the Mets the other night, and you’ll never believe the three hits that led to the runs against him.)

The good news is that the Giants finally have a Rubicon in front of them. All they have to do is cross it. Right now, they’re just a team that’s half-stuck in an airplane toilet. But if they take that final step, they can get sucked all the way into the septic tank. “Hey, look, an in-flight magazine,” they might say when they’re down there. The season will be over, completely shot.

The bad news is that there’s also incredible potential to string everyone along even more.

Here are all of the possible outcomes of the upcoming Giants-Padres series:

Giants lose all three

Season over, without question. If you’re the type of eternal optimist who says things like, “They faced stiffer odds in ’51, by gum!”, I both envy and pity you. If the Giants lose their fifth consecutive series at home, it’s actually over, and every decision until the end of the season should be made with 2026 in mind. Veterans should get extra rest. New pitches should be experimented with. If a player secretly thinks he could steal 25 bases before Sept. 30, he should get the green light.

Kai-Wei Teng should get extended looks, ideally in the rotation, because he has the kind of stuff that causes major-league hitters to make this face:

But it’s almost worth thinking about him like a knuckleballer, in that it could absolutely take him years to have enough command of his stuff to be effective. He might never find it at all. He might find it tomorrow and become a No. 2 starter. No time like the present to find out … if they get swept, that is.

Giants lose two

Everything from the above section should apply to the Giants if they lose two out of three, but even a single win would keep them annoyingly relevant. They’d be a game under .500 with 41 games left to play, which … OK, that’s actually more time than it feels like. They’d also get a chance to get the Padres back at Petco next week. A sweep there, and you know what …

This is what makes losing two out of three the worst outcome of all. It’s more of the same. You do not want more of the same.

Giants win two

Less annoying than the previous outcome, obviously. Still plenty annoying, though, especially if the single loss comes in the final game of the series. But if the Giants win the series, you’ll begrudgingly go along with the idea that they aren’t completely out of it. It would be possible for them to get into postseason position with another two hot weeks. Then you’d look at the roster and reluctantly admit that it’s talented enough to go on that kind of run.

They wouldn’t have their hooks all the way back into you. But you’d care, much to your disgust.

Giants sweep

Jump right back on that bandwagon. Go for it. You won’t be judged.

Even if a sweep doesn’t help them gain much ground in the wild-card standings over the three days, just the proof of concept would be enough. When the Giants play cohesive baseball over an extended stretch, it looks like the most natural thing in the world. Yeah, that’s how they should play. It makes sense that they look like a functional team when they have more than one hitter hot at the same time. You just forgot because the last time that happened was for six minutes in July. They were in the field at the time.

If the Giants sweep, they’ll look like the best version of themselves. They’ve looked like that a couple times this season, and it was easy to believe in them.

On the other hand, did you see that game on Sunday? Woof. What are we even talking about, here? This team has to be cooked.

Mostly, though, I just wanted to share that picture of Nathaniel Lowe making a “I didn’t know he threw that pitch” face against Kai-Wei Teng.

Here’s another one:

Be careful out there, Nathaniel Lowe.

(Top photo: Kelley L Cox / Imagn Images)