By Morris Phillips

After a month of baseball, the Giants continue to have the most confounding identity in recent professional sports memory.

They’re reigning World Champions of their sport, winning a thrilling, seven game Series, along with a wildcard game on the road, and two playoff series last fall-but they’ve won just 61 of their last 130 regular season games. The stretch is so poor, had the Giants began 2014 at 61-69, they would have had no chance to recover in the final 25 games for a playoff berth.

So any fan regardless of affiliation would have to ask… are the Giants really any good?

And the answer is yes juxtaposed against a greater amount of no.

If that’s the case–and the club continues to play at or below .500—the Giants won’t get a chance to defend their title in the 2015 post-season.

But first a closer look at the radically different stretches the team has experienced since Opening Day 2014:

43-21: The Giants open 2014 with the major league’s best record through June 8.  So torrid is the streak, not only is it the best record in 2014, but the best start of any major league team in the previous ten seasons.  In this stretch, Romo saves 20 of 22 chances, the clutch-hitting lineup (with a healthy Angel Pagan) scores more than half its’ runs with two outs, and Ryan Vogelsong up and goes 3-0 in his last four starts.

26-41: The Giants 98 percent probability of winning the NL West along with a 9 ½ game lead on the Dodgers evaporates in a hurry as Pagan’s injuries crop up, the offense disappears, and the revolving door of emergency replacements including Dan Uggla and Jake Peavy (at least initially) fail to produce much of anything.

19-12: After such a lengthy run of bad baseball, the Giants somehow manage to turn it around in the final month of the season, and sneak into the post-season as the fifth and final qualifier.  The starting pitching—led by Peavy and Madison Bumgarner—is noticeably better and post-season heroes Joe Panik and Travis Ishikawa step into prominent roles.  Still, the final month is no knockout: the Giants sweep Colorado, Arizona and Milwaukee, but post losing records against San Diego and eventual NL West champion Los Angeles.

12-5: The magical post-season starts with a blowout in Pittsburgh and doesn’t end until the improbable, Game 7 win in Kansas City.  Bumgarner has the post-season of a generation and plenty of help from Jeremy Affeldt, Yusmiero Petit, Buster Posey, Ishikawa, Panik and Santiago Casilla.  The gritty champions win nearly every close game, and find some of the most innocuous ways to push across runs you can imagine to win the World Series for the third time in five years.

16-16: The Giants lose two starting pitchers, endure an eight-game losing streak and open 2015 as a .500 team through 32 games.  The injuries to Matt Cain, Peavy, Brandon Belt and Hunter Pence almost insure the team can’t excel. But they avoid falling completely off the map by sweeping the Dodgers and winning some close ones.

None of these stretches suggest the Giants could win, let’s say 72 of their final 130 games to match last year’s record.  Their periods of success have been over much shorter stretches, often punctuated with Herculean performances rather than any sustained methods of success.

And of course, the Giants don’t do anything easy especially with their starting rotation which has shown some decline along with the two, significant injuries.