The curse continues
⚾Baseball is back!: A giant silenced; Webb was hacked; Max Fried dominant; the Netflix experiment and more.
🤩Welcome back to baseball! And yes, now our great pastime has truly begun! There’s a number that greatly surprised me when I started digging into the history between the San Francisco Giants and the New York Yankees in MLB: they have played more games in the postseason than in the regular season. The difference in the inverse numbers: 24 games in the regular season and 42 in the postseason.
The Yankees lead 16-8 and 23-19, respectively. The regular-season history began on June 7, 2002, at Yankee Stadium II, with a 2-1 Yankees victory, Mike Mussina getting the win, Mariano Rivera the save, and the loss going to Cuba’s Liván Hernández. The Giants hadn’t won a home game against the Yankees since June 24, 2007. That means the Yankees started this season with a 6-0 streak when visiting the Giants.
So, what did we see? Well, what Giants vs. Yankees games in the Bay Area have typically looked like: the Yankees scoring at least six runs—they’ve scored 7 in five of their last six games against the Giants at Oracle Park—with starting pitchers going six or more innings and a devastating rally in the game. The Giants’ offense and defense struggling. A Yankee giant completely silenced on offense in San Francisco, and an ace mercilessly shelled.
🔥So, here you have it: baseball is back, and so is our column! I hope you enjoy it.
San Francisco woke up Wednesday certain that Logan Webb was one of the five best pitchers in baseball. Doubts about his bullpen, the short-term irreplaceable replacements for injured players, and the excessive hopes placed on the team’s offensive expectations didn’t matter.
By nightfall, the Yankees had scored five runs off him in a single inning, and Max Fried was strolling around Oracle Park as if the bay belonged to him. That’s how baseball works: in two and a half hours, everything you thought you knew can become irrelevant.
Max Fried walked the first batter he faced in 2026. Four straight pitches out of the zone. It wasn’t the start he had envisioned for his first Opening Day as the Yankees’ ace. Forty-five minutes later, the Giants hadn’t touched second base again, and Fried was smiling in the dugout with a five-run lead. Baseball has these things: sometimes the worst beginning turns out to be the best omen.
Oracle Park has 25 years of history, and fans experienced a magical night straight out of the Barry Bonds era: 40,000 fans, kayaks in the bay, the debut of a Netflix broadcast, and in the middle of the spectacle, a New York team reminding the locals who’s in charge when baseball starts anew. The final score was 7-0. It could have been more.
Now, the Yankees have a record of 7-0 since June 24, 2007, at Oracle Park against the San Francisco Giants, who continue to search for answers. In baseball, we often call this a curse. And for the Giants, at least for one more day, the curse continues.
On one hand, we had a game decided in half an hour. The second inning was a whirlwind: five runs by the Yankees against Logan Webb, the Giants’ ace, the guy who led the National League in innings pitched and strikeouts last season. In 2025, Webb allowed five or more runs in only four of his 34 starts. He hadn’t allowed at least five runs in a start since July 10, 2024, against the Blue Jays. Last night, he did it in the second inning. Baseball is this cruel and this unpredictable, and that’s why we love it.
And, as usual, we had a Netflix broadcast that made 162 games suddenly seem like too few for the platform to learn how to do this right.
But let’s break it down.
Max Fried, the ace who needed no introduction
When Gerrit Cole injured his elbow in 2025 and missed the entire season, the Yankees did what the Yankees always do when they’re missing something: they went after the best available on the market. Max Fried arrived with a $218 million contract and the pressure of being the man in a rotation that had lost its leader.
The pressure, at least last night, he had under control like the ace he usually is.
Fried had a tough first inning. He walked Luis Arráez—who last year was the 10th batter with the fewest walks in the Major Leagues—and allowed a single up the middle to Rafael Devers, putting runners on the corners. But there, when the game could have taken a different turn, he regrouped. He struck out Willy Adames, got a grounder from Jung Hoo Lee, and shut the door.
From there on, it was his game. Or rather, he silenced the Giants’ inconsistent offense. Fried had two streaks of at least seven consecutive batters retired. He mixed his seven-pitch arsenal, relying more on his four-seam fastball, cutter, sinker, and devastating curveball. The Giants went 2-for-21. After Arráez in the first inning, no batter who started an inning reached base.
