Sadly, it’s time to revisit The House That Steroids Built miniseries for the 2023 season at the All-Star Game break. The San Francisco Giants are a surprising 49-41 right now, after a disastrous offseason which saw them lose a lot of talent and sign very little of it in return. So, naturally (or unnaturally, as it were), the Giants are playing way above their heads and positioned today for the final National League playoff spot.

Of course, the team is a combined 11-2 against Colorado and St. Louis, two clubs that are a joint 37 games under .500 right now, and a random W10 in June catapulted the Giants into contention. Will it last? We shall see. In the meantime, here are the prime suspects in our ongoing analysis of fishy performances in the City by the Bay for the team that couldn’t win honestly here for four decades before resorting to fraud.

Exhibit A: Lamonte Wade, Jr.

We discussed this guy at the end of 2021, when he improbably came out of nowhere to help the Giants win the NL West Division. Well, he regressed predictably in 2022, probably as a result of physical breakdown from the 2021 “surprise” performance. That happens a lot (see Barry Bonds, 1999). Well, what do guys do when they get hurt? They take funny stuff to recover (see Buster Posey, 2012). Wade is a textbook case.

Maybe at age 29 he’s just peaking, but the pattern is fishy. He did nothing with the Minnesota Twins (.684 OPS), and then he has a good season (.808 OPS) with the Giants in 2021. Then Wade regresses in 2022, struggling again (.665 OPS). And now he’s back better than ever with an .842 OPS. The biggest difference is his walk rate, and guess what helps improve eyesight, as we learned with Bonds two decades ago? HGH.

Exhibit B: J.D. Davis

This one hurts, as we genuinely liked Davis during his time with the New York Mets, but at age 30 now, it’s a little suspect how he’s suddenly staying healthy for the first time in his career, really. Davis last played a full season at age 26 back in 2019, and after missing a combined 156 games in 2021 and 2022, he’s managed to get into 84 games so far this year out of a possible 90 chances. That doesn’t happen at his age with his past.

Last year, it was odd how he posted a .683 OPS in 66 games with the Mets, but he came to S.F. in a trade, and since then, he’s posted an .819 OPS in 133 games with the Giants—at an advanced age, all while staying healthy for the first time in forever. We’ve seen this pattern too often before in The House That Steroids Built, so of course it’s going to set off our internal alarms that recognize suspect Giants performances.

Exhibit C: Austin Slater

This is another guy we have mentioned before, especially after his anomalous 2020 season: Slater is now posting an OPS mark almost 150 points higher than his career mark, also at age 30, despite pretty much grinding for the last 254 games of his career prior to this year. How does that happen? We don’t know, although perhaps the sample sizes from his weird 2020 and this odd 2023 seasons don’t tell us enough.

But in 7 years over almost 500 games, these are Slater’s OPS marks: .740, .640, .750, .914, .744, .774, and .903 now. What sticks out like sore thumbs in that lineup? The 66 games combined from 2020 and 2023 where his OPS mark was way over .900 put together. His career mark (.757) is only that high due to those 66 games, of course, so even that’s artificially inflated. How is he doing it this year? We don’t know, but we can guess.

Exhibit D: Alex Cobb

Our THTSB poster boy from 2022 is back once again, and he’s somehow better than ever at age 35. This reeks of Verlander, in truth. With a 2.91 ERA so far this year, Cobb is pitching like he did 10 seasons ago in Tampa Bay. Of course, he hasn’t qualified for the ERA title since the 2017 season, and there’s a lot of baseball left in 2023, but he’s managed 89 2/3 quality IP so far this year, without breaking down. So something is amiss.

As recently as 2018-2020 with the Baltimore Orioles, now one of the best-run organizations in baseball, Cobb posted just a 7-22 record with a 5.10 ERA. So, how do the mediocre Giants coaches coax this kind of performance out of him at age 35? Good question, one the local media certainly doesn’t ask. It all just gets rolled into the myth making in San Francisco, truthfully. But there is no way this return to form is natural.

Exhibit E: Scott Alexander

A newbie to our PED radar, this relief pitcher is 34 years old and continuing an odd career improvement. Consider that from 2018-2021 with the Los Angeles Dodgers—a team that went to the postseason all four of those years—Alexander posted a 3.49 ERA in 132 games and 111 IP. But he wasn’t even good enough to be on the postseason roster for the 2020 World Series champions. We find that telling, of course. It gets worse.

The Dodgers left him off their 2019 and 2021 postseason rosters, too, after his brief 2018 postseason efforts amounted to a 7.71 ERA. But now, with the Giants in 2022 and 2023 over 45 games, Alexander—at his oldest—has a 2.41 ERA. It’s not the S.F. coaching, folks, because the Dodgers have a staff that has put together a 10-year playoff streak and is once again in first place right now in the NL West. So, is it the water, dude?!

Conclusion: More of the same, as no one seems to care or even question the oddities

Remember, we have pointed out that the Giants organization is not that great, even with its fraudulent patterns of deceit. After all, it has made the playoffs just once since 2016, so the coaching staff isn’t very good—nor is the front office. It’s the strange “devil magic” that keeps this team afloat when it is bereft of real talent. And of course, the high payroll doesn’t hurt, either, even if most of the money is misspent.

We fully expect this team to crash in the second half of this season, but who knows? With just one postseason appearance (the fluke 2021) in the last six seasons, why would we expect the Giants to reach October? They always have players performing in suspect ways, but the team is so poorly managed and put together that it usually doesn’t even matter. The fans barely notice, either, living off past glories, happily.

We will check back in early October, of course, to see where this season ended up … and which players make the final list of PED suspects. But again, all these guys above fit established patterns of oddity for a franchise that only made the MLB playoffs five times in 40 seasons before Bonds starting hanging out at BALCO. Since then, the team has eight postseason appearances this century. It’s not a coincidence.