If you follow Major League Baseball closely, you probably are thinking to yourself the following: “What is this dude smoking? The Giants will be good this season? No way, Jack!.”

But hear me out first.

Yes, the Giants finished 64-98, the second worst record in all of baseball last season.

Yes, they looked pretty bad doing it.

But what you need to understand about last season is that everything that could have gone wrong, went horribly wrong. Almost from the very start of the season.

Ace pitcher Madison Bumgarner, whom Giants Nation has affectionately nicknamed ‘The Horse’, went on the disabled list for the first time in his career, and he has been in the league since 2010.

The way he got hurt wasn’t a result of his body breaking down due to some organic bodily process. Nope, instead he decided that it would be a good idea to go four-wheeling on one of the team’s off days in Denver.

And as if the baseball gods were punishing him for being reckless, he crashed and injured his ribs badly, keeping him off the field for about 3 months, of half of the season.

I feel confident in saying he won’t make that mistake again and his absence had a profoundly negative effect on the success of the team.

Adding to the woes of the ill fated team by the bay was the down seasons by several of the teams key bats in the lineup.

Shortstop Brandon Crawford had by far the worst offensive season of his career. The veteran fixture of a team that has experienced so much success over the last eight years had a batting average of just .253 and slugged a paltry .403, well below his capabilities.

Still he provided a surplus value of 2.0 Wins Above Replacement (WAR) according to baseball statistics website Fangraphs. If he were able to just return to what his career numbers are, which I wholeheartedly expect him to do, than that would significantly increase the depth of the lineup.

Hunter Pence has been the teams right fielder since halfway through the 2012 season, and although I don’t have quite as much optimism about him this year as I do about Crawford, I do think that he will at least be league-average with the bat while providing solid defense.

The problem with Pence the last few seasons has been his inability to stay on the field. Since 2015, Pence has only played in 292 of a possible 486 regular season games, only a 60 percent clip.

The Giants front office has done a wonderful job over the offseason to address some of the major weaknesses that plagued the team all of last season.

Left field was a major question mark even heading into the start of the 2017 season and the Giants decided to look within the organization for an answer and well, the plan failed spectacularly.

If there was one glaring offensive weakness all year long, it was that position. General manager Bobby Evans and vice president of baseball operations Brian Sabean pulled the trigger to acquire star outfielder Andrew McCutchen from the Pittsburgh Pirates in a trade this week.

McCutchen rebounded from a subpar for his standards 2016 season with an All-Star caliber season in 2017.

The veteran hit .279 with a slugging percentage of .486 and played in 156 of 162 games.

Third base was also a major hole in the Giants lineup in 2017 so San Francisco traded for longtime star for the Tampa Bay Rays Evan Longoria.

Longoria is well respected throughout baseball from all public accounts and should fit right in to a clubhouse that has been renowned for its team chemistry.

As far as on the field, Longoria should provide some good home run power to a team sorely lacking in that department. The Giants were last in MLB last season in home runs, hitting just 128 in an era where the long ball has become increasingly instrumental to offenses all around the game.

Not to mention his stellar defense at the hot corner, third base. Longoria won his third career gold glove award last year, his first since 2010, indicating that his glove is far from on the decline.

Relief pitching was also an achilles heel for San Francisco. Lefty reliever Will Smith is set to return after missing all of 2017 due to him needing Tommy John surgery on his elbow. When healthy, Smith has proven himself to be an effective arm for manager Bruce Bochy to turn to in high leverage situations during the game.

Hopefully the case that I have just made will put some Giants fans at ease and the non-believers something to think about.

The 2018 Giants are coming and they have vengeance and redemption on their minds.