There’s a particular writer at the Athletic who isn’t a believer in the 2024 San Francisco 49ers.

After naming the 49ers an offseason loser because they lost Arik Armstead and Javon Kinlaw, and hired a new defensive coordinator, Mike Jones of the Athletic listed San Francisco among the overrated teams heading into this NFL season.

Again, Jones focuses heavily on the losses on the defensive line:

Kyle Shanahan always gives them a chance, and Brock Purdy again has a talented supporting cast, although Brandon Aiyuk faces an uncertain future. Questions loom over the defense, however, with first-year coordinator Nick Sorensen directing a unit that lost Arik Armstead and Javon Kinlaw to free agency and must deal with the extended absence of Dre Greenlaw, who is recovering from Achilles surgery. The 49ers hope to put another heartbreaking Super Bowl defeat in the past and make another run at a ring, but doing so could prove more challenging than many expect.

It’s worth noting the 49ers replaced Armstead and Kinlaw with Maliek Collins and Jordan Elliott. The fixation on Kinlaw is interesting given the defensive tackle’s general lack of effectiveness last season, but it wouldn’t be Earth-shattering if Elliott was a better rotational DT option for San Francisco this season. Whether Collins and others can replace Armstead in the aggregate remains to be seen and is certainly a sizable question mark for the 49ers to answer this year.

The Greenlaw absence is also a pretty significant blow. San Francisco signed former All-Pro De’Vondre Campbell to replace him. Second-year LBs Dee Winters and Jalen Graham could also be in the mix to start at Will LB, but none of those three are liable to be as effective as Greenlaw is.

Alas, calling the 49ers ‘overrated’ when they were a couple plays from winning the Super Bowl last year seems like a stretch based on the reasoning listed. After all, both Pro Football Focus and ESPN agree San Francisco has the best roster in the NFL.

A better argument would focus more heavily on the 49ers’ offensive line which they made only marginal moves to improve this offseason. There’s a case to be made they could conceivably be worse on the offensive front which would certainly have an impact on Purdy. Last year in his first full season as a starter Purdy had pretty good turnover luck which could wind up coming back to bite him and the 49ers this season.

There are also some questions in the secondary with uncertainty about who will start in nickel packages with cornerbacks Deommodore Lenoir and Charvarius Ward. Strong safety Talanoa Hufanga is coming back from an ACL tear which leaves a question mark about whether he’ll return to All-Pro form, and second-year safety Ji’Ayir Brown is an unproven commodity who figures to start alongside Hufanga.

Those are a lot of hurdles for Sorensen to clear in his first season as a defensive coordinator, which are much bigger reasons to have concerns than just the losses of Armstead and Kinlaw.

Injury luck was also, for the most part, on the 49ers’ side last season. They had the injuries to Hufanga in Week 11 and to Greenlaw during the Super Bowl, but outside of that they avoided major injuries and were relatively healthy going into the final game of the season. It wouldn’t be irrational if a person wanted to bet against injury luck for them again in 2024.

For now though on paper the 49ers figure to field one of the best teams in the NFL. Whether they can be just the second team since the turn of the century to return to the Super Bowl after losing it remains to be seen, but saying they’re ‘overrated’ for the reasons listed in the Athletic feels a tad off base.

The San Francisco Giants are in desperate need of pitching help.

They have been completely decimated by injuries, forcing them to use a plethora of different starting options and overwork their bullpen, something manager Bob Melvin has stated his concerns about.

Knowing they needed another option in their relief unit, they called up a top performer from their Triple-A affiliate to come in and give their current arms some much needed help.

The Giants are also hoping their injured starters can make their returns soon.

Robbie Ray sounds like he is progressing well after putting together a good outing in his rehab stint. Blake Snell also was able to make an outing in the minors, although that didn’t go quite as expected when he was charged with two earned runs on three hits and three walks during 1.1 innings of work.

San Francisco brought in the reigning NL Cy Young winner to become the ace of their staff alongside Logan Webb. The idea was these two would be able to stabilize their rotation in front of some exciting backend starters before their players on the IL were ready to return.

That has not been the case.

The Giants desperately need Snell back and performing to an elite level.

But as the left-hander works his way back from his groin strain, it sounds like he’s not too pleased with how fast he is being pushed to getting back onto the Major League mound.

“I haven’t felt like myself yet. It’s just, ‘We need you. We need you. We need you.’ It’s not like, ‘Let’s get him right,’ and I have to deal with it,” he said according to Shayna Rubin of The San Francisco Chronicle.

That is quite the explosive quote.

Snell had previously voiced his frustration about going on the injured list for the second time this season, but to seemingly take a shot at the organization for wanting back on the field is certainly eye-opening.

“I want to be healthy and 100% and I haven’t been. I’ve just been fighting to rush back. So that’s my take. I’m frustrated with that. And you don’t get the product of what I should be and it’s just frustrating. I want to go out there and dominate and pitch the way that I pitch but it’s more important that I’m out there,” he added.

When the veteran star has been on the field, it hasn’t quite gone smoothly.

In six starts, he has posted an 0-3 record and 9.51 ERA.

At the beginning, his struggles were understood as he signed so late in the process that he wasn’t able to get a full ramp up period in Spring Training. Then, he got injured and started the cycle of trying to get back to health.

It’s understandable why Snell would be so frustrated. He was brought in to be a difference maker for his new team and he’s been anything but that.

These comments certainly won’t help anything, though.

It will be interesting to see what develops following this statement.

Gray whales have been veering off their normal routes along the West Coast and swimming under the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco Bay in unprecedented numbers.

Using thousands of photographs of distinctive markings on the whales’ backs to identify them, marine scientists have confirmed that at least 71 different gray whales—and possibly 84 or more—swam into the bay between 2018 and 2023, with some staying for more than two months, raising their risk of being hit by cargo ships, oil tankers or other large vessels.

From 2010 to 2017, only about one or two of the giant marine mammals came into the bay every year. Last year, however, there were at least 16, and in 2019 there were at least 21.

“We think it has a lot to do with the fact that the whales haven’t been getting enough food,” said Bill Keener, a biologist with The Marine Mammal Center, a non-profit group in Sausalito. “They may be weak and resting for a while, or they looking for an alternative food source.”

Some are malnourished, he said.

From 2019 to 2023, 22 gray whales were found dead in or near San Francisco Bay, according to data from The Marine Mammal Center, the California Academy of Sciences and public agencies. Of those, 14 died from unknown causes. Researchers performed studies, called necropsies, on nine of the whales. Six died from malnourishment. Three died from a collision with a ship.

Over the past four years, dead gray whales have been found inside San Francisco Bay off Angel Island, and near Richmond, Rodeo, Hercules, San Leandro, Mountain View, the Port of Oakland, Tiburon, the Berkeley Marina and Martinez.

“They aren’t just near the Golden Gate,” said Keener, who said a slower speed limit for big ships in the bay may be needed. “They are way into the bay, past Angel Island, down to Treasure Island. There’s a lot of ship traffic there.”

Wayward whales have inspired public interest for years.

One lost humpback, nicknamed Humphrey, gained national attention in 1985 and became the subject of children’s books, songs and a movie—drawing crowds of onlookers with binoculars—when he swam into the bay. Humphrey meandered up the Delta to sloughs 25 miles south of Sacramento, staying 26 days before finally returning to the Pacific Ocean as researchers played whale songs from speakers off boats to lure him west.

In 2007, a mother humpback and her calf, nicknamed “Delta and Dawn,” swam into the bay and ventured as far up the Delta as Rio Vista before scientists in boats coaxed them back into the open ocean 10 days later.

There was also a jump in the number of humpback whales that swam under the Golden Gate Bridge pursuing anchovies in from 2016 to 2018. They stayed only a few days each.

But the latest trend with gray whales seems different, researchers say. It could be a sign of stress in the wider population.

The pattern comes amid a big drop in the gray whale numbers off the Pacific Coast in recent years.

Once hunted by whaling ships in the 1800s for their oil until there were only about 1,000 or 2,000 individuals left, gray whales were protected in 1972 when President Nixon signed the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The last whaling company in the United States, the Del Monte Fishing Company, operated at Point Molate in Richmond. It made Kal-Kan dog food out of whales that its crews shot with mechanized harpoon cannons. The company closed in December 1971 as the law was about to take effect.

After whaling was banned in the U.S., numbers of gray whales increased. By 1994, after they reached a healthy population, the Clinton administration removed them from the Endangered Species Act list in what is still considered one of the nation’s major wildlife success stories.

Their population jumped to 27,000 by 2016, according to estimates from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But then it fell by at least one third by 2022. Hundreds of malnourished whales began to wash up on beaches in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California and Mexico. Nobody knew why.

Researchers said the die-off from 2018 to 2023, which NOAA called an “unusual mortality event,” was likely due to a shortage of food in the Arctic linked to changes in the amount of sea ice, wind patterns and other factors. Whales eat 3,000 pounds or more of food a day, preferring small, shrimp-like crustaceans known as amphipods, along with worms and other tiny creatures that they scoop from the sea floor.

Last year, gray whale numbers began to rebound to as many as 21,000. NOAA declared an end to the “unusual mortality event” in November. Scientists are watching carefully to see if the change is temporary or permanent.

The roller coaster population—and weird detours into San Francisco Bay—could be related to climate change, or it could be part of the gray whale’s natural population fluctuations, said John Calambokidis, a research biologist with Cascadia Research, in Olympia, Washington.

“What is a natural cycle?” he said. “Is this normal? Or something unusual? The ecosystem in the Arctic has changed very rapidly. That’s one reason this has scientists’ attention.”

One thing is clear: The gray whales coming into San Francisco Bay are heading north as part of their annual migration from Baja, Mexico where they mate and breed, and turning right under the Golden Gate Bridge instead of continuing north to Alaska where they stock up on food during the summer months.

A lot is known about the latest trend because one researcher, Josephine Slaathaug, of the Marine Mammal Center, painstakingly sorted through more than 11,000 photographs of gray whales in San Francisco Bay last year. She built a database, identifying individual whales from photos taken on whale watching boats, the shoreline, and the center’s boats. She showed the animals are most common in March and April, and stayed in the bay between 13 and 75 days.

Slaathaug, a masters student at Sonoma State University, won a prestigious fellowship in April from the National Science Foundation as she expands the study in the coming years. One key question: Will the number of gray whales in the bay go down if their food in the Arctic recovers, and the West Coast population increases?

“We don’t understand all the drivers,” she said. “We have preliminary data. But we do know that with all the ships, the bay is not a very safe place for the whales.”

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