By Jeremy Harness

In baseball, the best thing that you can have is an opportunity. The Giants have that as the season’s second half gets under way.

The Giants will kick off the second half of their season Friday night in Arizona against the third-place Diamondbacks, a team that they have had significant success against this year.

However, there is one obstacle in that series that stands in the Giants’ way. They have yet to figure out how to get National League MVP candidate Paul Goldschmidt out on a regular basis, and that will need to be addressed if they are to distance themselves from the Diamondbacks and get closer to the top of the NL West.

Following that series, they will head a little bit west to pay a three-game visit to the San Diego Padres, another squad that the Giants have feasted upon this year to keep themselves afloat in the division.

If the Giants are going to narrow the 4 ½ -game gap between themselves and the first-place Dodgers, the best foreseeable opportunity would be this coming weekend. The Dodgers open their second half on the road against the potent Washington Nationals, who at 48-39, lead the NL East by a pair of games.

Upon leaving the nation’s capital, they will head down to Atlanta to face the Braves, which currently have a losing record but have shown a real knack for surging in the second half of the season to turn themselves into playoff contenders.

But then again, the Giants have been used to trailing the Dodgers in the division race in recent years, and that has worked out fairly well for them, to say the very least. While the Dodgers have won the division each of the past two seasons, they failed to reach the World Series each time.

Meanwhile, the Giants picked up yet another World Series ring.