The San Francisco Giants have been the most pleasant surprise in baseball in the first few weeks of the 2025 MLB season.

Not much was expected out of the team, which was once again projected to be right around the .500 mark. Painfully mediocre was a good way to describe the team since Buster Posey announced his retirement following the 2021 season.

Now that he is back with the franchise in an official capacity as the president of baseball operations, however, things have already taken off.

The Giants are 15-8, doing everything in their power to keep pace with the San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League West. They are both 16-7 and San Francisco is holding off the Arizona Diamondbacks, who are 13-9.

Easily the best division in baseball, those NL West teams are going to test each other throughout the year. Their great starts are putting a ton of pressure on other NL contenders, such as the Atlanta Braves, who started slow and are now in a huge hole.

For the Giants, the improvement they have made in just one calendar year is truly remarkable.

At this point last season, they were already in the bottom third of the MLB power rankings shared by The Athletic (subscription required). They had a few solid stretches during the season but were never real threats for a playoff spot, ending the year at 80-82.

This year, they are cementing themselves as one of the better teams in baseball. The MLB writers who handled rankings, going with a year in review theme, have them as most improved team in the league.

Last year at this point, San Francisco was No. 21 in the rankings. This time around, they are No. 5; only the Dodgers, Padres, New York Mets and New York Yankees are ahead of them.

“The Giants are one of the biggest movers in this exercise, and their ability to look competent in the face of expected doom is yet another reason why,” wrote Grant Brisbee.

Coming into the year, the biggest question mark about the team was their ability to score runs. Thus far they have succeeded in that area, averaging 5.05 per game, which is the sixth-most in MLB entering play on Tuesday.

Barely league average in most offensive statistics, the offense is being carried right now by breakout star Jung Hoo Lee, who owns a .329/.383/.600 slash line with an MLB-leading 10 doubles.

Third baseman Matt Chapman leads the MLB with 22 walks drawn, while designated hitter Wilmer Flores has seven home runs and 24 RBI.

Veteran outfielder Mike Yastrzemski has an OPS+ of 170, which is second behind Lee’s 182 through 22 games. Tyler Fitzgerald and Chapman are the only other players with an above-average OPS+, while outfielder Heliot Ramos is right on the average at 100.

The most encouraging thing about the offensive performance is that this isn’t close to their peak, with star shortstop Willy Adames yet to get going and first baseman LaMonte Wade Jr. producing a .103/.232/.241 slash line.

When they find their groove, this offense can be taken to another level, which will help them keep pace with the other NL contenders in support of what has been a great pitching staff.

The first Latin American leader of the Roman Catholic Church died on Monday after suffering a stroke and cardiac arrest. News of Pope Francis’ death came as a shock after he made an Easter Sunday appearance in St. Peter’s Square to greet the crowds gathered there to celebrate the holiday.

The juvenile minke whale had been spotted swimming around San Francisco Bay for nearly a week by the time she beached herself off the coast of Emeryville on April 8. Scientists had thought she seemed healthy, but after an examination, they determined she was acting abnormally and had to be euthanized due to illness.

It was the fourth whale death in the San Francisco Bay in a week and a half. The other three were gray whales, the first of which—a 36-foot-long female—washed up at Black Sands Beach in the Marin Headlands on March 30. Its cause of death remains unknown.

On April 2, a deceased adult male gray whale was found floating east of Angel Island; its cause of death is also not known, according to the Marine Mammal Center. Then, a subadult male gray whale washed ashore at Fort Point Rock Beach near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco on April 4, and scientists determined that it likely died due to a vessel strike, according to the mammal center.

Taken together, the deaths have raised the specter of past “unusual mortality events” that caused whales to die in higher-than-normal numbers.

“This is unusual,” said Kathi George, director of Cetacean Conservation Biology at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito. “It takes me back to several years ago when we did have a large number of strandings happen at the same time.”

While the unusually high number of whales beaching in such a short span is abnormal, the number of whales who have died around the bay for the year has remained in line with typical levels, scientists say.

“This is the normal time of year when gray whales are doing their northward migration from Mexico up to Alaska, so it’s not uncommon for us to have gray whales in and around San Francisco Bay in April and May each year,” said Moe Flannery, who leads the marine mammal necropsy team at the California Academy of Sciences.

“Although they seem high because they’re concentrated into a short period of time, the numbers of dead and stranded are not any different than the recent previous years.”

Whales can die for “a number of reasons”—from diseases to malnutrition to vessel strikes, George said.

“It’s coincidental that everything happened in a week and a half, but there are a lot of whales out there right now, and some of their physical condition that they’re in when they arrive in the bay may make them more susceptible to human impacts if they’re not as healthy,” she said.

Scientists began observing whales entering the San Francisco Bay around 2016 as they completed their annual migration between Mexico and the sub-Arctic, George said. The whales do not feed while they are in their breeding grounds in Mexico, and expend a lot of energy mating, nursing babies and giving birth before facing a long journey back north to their feeding grounds, she added.

Because of this energy expenditure, scientists have seen the gray whales attempt to feed in new locations—including San Francisco Bay, George said. Their increased appearance in the bay could also potentially be explained as whales seeking a place to rest before continuing the migration, or a reaction to climate change, warming ocean temperatures and prey availability.

The Marine Mammal Center has tracked at least 18 individual whales swimming in the bay this year, and sightings of gray whales have been reported almost every day since mid-March, George said. The majority of the whale sightings have been reported east of Angel Island, said Giancarlo Rulli, the associate director of public relations for the Marine Mammal Center.

Between 2019 and 2023, gray whales were dying in much higher numbers due to an unusual mortality event, which was declared by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries. Gray whales lost more than 40% of their population in four years, Rulli said. During this time, there were 347 gray whale strandings in the United States, according to NOAA.

“These whales basically left the Arctic with a half tank,” Rulli said. “The food sources that they were normally accustomed to eating that were highly nutritious for this massive, 10,000–12,000-mile journey, had moved farther away due to climate change, and as a result, these whales were left to forage on food matter that was much less nutritious.”

Between January and April 2019, which was the first year of the unusual mortality event, 34 dead gray whales washed up on California’s coast, Flannery said. Seven have so far this year.

George said that whether the recent deaths could be the start of an unusual mortality event is “still under discussion and review,” adding that the data collected from these strandings will help scientists understand “the bigger picture of what’s happening.”

“We’re not there yet,” she said, adding that scientists have to look at their migratory range holistically.

Whales will continue to appear in the bay through mid-May as they continue their migration north, George said.

Flannery added that anyone using the water “needs to be more aware of the animals that are sharing that environment.”

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