To be clear, I don’t think there is a straightforward explanation to why or how the San Francisco Giants ended the month with a 19-12 record, one of the best in baseball. What follows might not fulfill the promise of the headline because weird things happened last month. The Giants are a knot of contradictions. They did the most basic baseball thing well — i.e. win — and yet a lot of basic baseball things were a struggle.
If their record sat around .500, maybe a game below or a couple of games up, there’d be any number of numbers to point to and say “Ah, yes, this all makes sense.