Harrison Bader’s first home run in orange and black didn’t just get the attention of the box score guy, it got the attention of a food truck insurance adjuster.
In a wild Cactus League slugfest against the Brewers, Bader finally unloaded his first homer as a Giant, a 408-foot three-run missile that left his bat at over 113 mph and went screaming out to left field. Instead of nestling gently into some kid’s glove, it clanged off the Cactus Bowls acai truck parked beyond the berm and left a very real, very permanent dent in the side panel, instantly turning spring training into a body shop estimate.
To his credit, Bader handled it exactly the way a player with a brand to protect should by walking out there, checked out the damage, and signed the dent with a big SORRY underneath his name like he’d just fouled a ball into someone’s windshield in beer-league softball. The whole saga has already made the rounds on social media and highlight shows, and MLB.com even leaned into the bit with a recap titled ‘Sorry’: Bader’s first Giants homer makes a dent — literally, just in case anyone missed the pun.
Giants fans, understandably starved for fun offense, are treating this as a sign from the baseball gods that maybe this lineup has a little more juice than advertised. Bader is supposed to be the glove-first center fielder, the guy you sign to chase down balls in Triple’s Alley and prevent crooked numbers, not the guy terrorizing small businesses with surface-level exit velocity experiments. When your new defense-and-vibes outfielder is putting dents in local cuisine, it’s easy to start dreaming big.
Then you remember the unstoppable Dodgers exist and are the Giants division rivals.
While the Giants were testing the strength of food-truck aluminum, the Dodgers are quietly (and by “quietly,” we mean on every national broadcast) assembling yet another cheat-code roster and being installed as overwhelming favorites to win the NL West yet again. Projection systems and betting markets basically have the division race listed as Dodgers vs. gravity, with Los Angeles sitting in the 100-plus win range and carrying division odds that hover in the don’t overthink this neighborhood.
Depending on which set of numbers you trust, the Dodgers are predicted to win 102 games and take the division, with projections that put them more than a dozen games clear of the next-best team. This is what happens when a club that has already dominated the West for over a decade — 12 division titles in 13 years, if you’re scoring at home — keeps stacking MVPs, Cy Young candidates, and now even more star power on top of an already ridiculous core.
So yes, Bader denting a food truck is objectively hilarious and a perfect spring story, the kind of thing Giants broadcasters will happily bring up every time he steps to the plate until at least July. It’s a great sign that his timing is there, that the ball is jumping off his bat, and that his impact in San Francisco might be more than just tracking down gappers and growing out elite lettuce under that cap.
But in the cold, sabermetric light of the NL West, one very loud home run — even one that nearly sent an acai bowl into orbit — is not the thing that’s going to topple a Dodgers machine that projects to win triple digits with room to spare. The Giants need a lot more than a spring training truck-denter to close a gap that big: breakouts up and down the lineup, a rotation that overperforms, a bullpen that doesn’t spontaneously combust in July, and probably a couple of surprise trades sprinkled in for good measure.
Here’s the thing, folks: This does not mean that Bader’s blast doesn’t matter. It matters for vibes more than for Vegas. On a team that has felt a little stuck between eras, adding a center fielder who can turn defense into appointment television and occasionally launch a ball through small-business property is a step in the right direction. The Giants absolutely need that edge, that personality, that little bit of chaos that turns a random Wednesday in March into a story everyone in the clubhouse is still laughing about two weeks later.
With that… It is important to understand that while Harrison Bader might be able to put a hole in a food truck, the Dodgers have spent the last decade putting a hole in everyone’s division title dreams — and one very loud swing in Arizona is not about to change that.
If you cannot play with them, then root for them!