The Giants cannot lose 100 games. Their floor is one game better than 1985.

San Francisco is 63-89. Ten games are left. Lose all ten and the season ends at 63-99, which is ninety-nine losses, which is not one hundred losses, and that is the whole achievement.

It was settled Tuesday night at Busch Stadium, in a 10-3 win over the Cardinals that gave San Francisco nothing else.

Congratulations to everybody involved.

One hundred losses is not something that happens to a baseball team. It is something that gets written about a baseball team. The 1985 Giants lost a hundred, and four decades later that is the first fact anybody can produce about the 1985 Giants. The 1984 Giants lost ninety-six and nobody has thought about them since, which is four losses of difference doing an enormous amount of work.

The only one#

Go through the year-by-year record the league keeps for this franchise and you will find 144 seasons, starting in 1883, and exactly one with a hundred losses in it. That is 1985, at 62-100.

San Francisco's floor this year is 63-99. Put the two records side by side and the distance between them is one game. One win, one loss. The smallest unit the standings sell.

Measure it any other way and the wall disappears. A 63-99 team plays .389 baseball, and four seasons out of the 144 are worse than that: 1902 at 48-90, 1943 at 55-98, 1901 at 52-85, and 1985. Three of those four were played in New York. One hundred is a threshold because people have ten fingers (count in base twelve and there is no hundred there to avoid), and San Francisco has spent the last fortnight playing for the friendly side of it.

Since they came west#

Sixty-nine seasons, counting this one, since the move to San Francisco. Rank them by winning percentage, because that is the only unit that survives a schedule change.

The full range of what is still available: win none of the last ten and 2026 finishes 63-99, second-worst of the sixty-nine, behind 1985 and nothing else. Win all ten, which is three more than this club has managed in any ten-game span all season, and it finishes 73-89, which is eleventh-worst of the sixty-nine. That is the ceiling. There is no outcome inside that range that anybody will call a step.

The likely landing sits near the bottom of it. Six of the ten games are against a Dodgers club that is 92-59 (three of those in Los Angeles, where the Giants get to be somebody else's tune-up for October), three are at home against Minnesota, and San Francisco has won 41 percent of everything it has played. Three wins out of ten finishes the year at 66-96, which is the 1984 Giants' record to the digit. Two seasons in San Francisco history would be worse, 1985 and 2017. A third, 1984, would not be worse. It would be the same.

Anyway.

Who did it#

The nine men who started Tuesday: Jonah Cox at second, Bryce Eldridge at first, Drew Gilbert in center, Jung Hoo Lee at designated hitter, Osleivis Basabe at third, Turner Hill in left, Drew Cavanaugh catching, Grant McCray in right, Christian Koss at short.

Eldridge homered in the first with Gilbert aboard, his seventeenth, and doubled Brett Harris home in the eighth, his twenty-third double. Koss had three hits, two of the runs coming home on his single in the third. Turner Hill drove in three runs on a single, a groundout and a home run, and the home run, in the ninth, was the first of his major league life. Hill is twenty-seven years old, debuted on the fifteenth of August, and has eighty career at-bats. That is a number nobody should conclude anything from, and it will stay that way for another year.

Blade Tidwell got twenty outs and gave up two earned runs.

Seven of the ten runs scored without a home run, which for this particular team is the strange part. San Francisco has hit 174 home runs and scored 643 runs this year, and the swing has been most of the plan. On the night it finally got to ten, seven came on three singles, two doubles and a groundout, the way runs used to.

Rafael Devers spent Tuesday in an operating room in Philadelphia.

Zach Sweet of MLB.com, on a St. Louis dateline, reported Tony Vitello saying before the game that Devers had come through surgery to repair the left-side core muscle injury that ended his season, and the club's own outlet put "on track for 2027 return" in the headline. He finishes at 148 games, .258, thirty-seven home runs, thirty-six doubles, ninety-eight runs batted in. The best season anybody in this clubhouse has had in years ended under anesthetic on the same afternoon the rest of them were busy dodging a round number.

Called Shots#

San Francisco finishes the 2026 regular season with 66 or fewer wins. That means three or fewer out of the last ten, and the schedule carries it: six against a 92-59 Dodgers club, three against Minnesota, one more in St. Louis. The case against is that a .414 team stealing four of ten is not exotic, and four is very nearly as likely as three. This one is close to a coin and it is priced like one. Price: +110.

Sources: Record, games remaining, opponent records and the franchise's year-by-year won-lost history from the league's own statistics feed, read the morning of September 16. Tuesday's box score and play-by-play, gamePk 823007, from the same feed. Turner Hill's age, debut date and career at-bat total, and Rafael Devers's final 2026 line, from the league's player records. Devers's surgery from Zach Sweet, MLB.com, September 15, 2026, quoting Tony Vitello.