The boats will be returning to McCovey Cove, the garlic is being freshly chopped for the fries, and the gorgeous, unmistakable mix of grass, dirt, brick, wind and water at Oracle Park is nearly ready to welcome us back for another season of San Francisco Giants baseball.

I absolutely can’t wait.

There is a certain undeniable rhythm to a baseball season, a long, grinding march that begins with the unbridled optimism of spring and usually ends in the cold, harsh reality of October.

For the Giants, however, reality means being stubbornly stuck right in the middle for a half-decade now.

So before we get started with another grueling season, I have one simple ask for the black and orange: It’s time to pick a lane.

For six of the last seven years, this franchise has been wandering aimlessly through the wilderness of baseball purgatory. The Giants aren’t quite terrible enough to trigger a massive, tear-it-down rebuild, but they certainly haven’t been good enough to make anyone in Los Angeles or Atlanta lose a single second of sleep — save for during that bizarre, post-pandemic fever dream we call the 2021 season.

All the while, the Giants have been telling the fanbase that competency is the same as contention. They’ve gotten a bit too comfortable with the ruse.

This year, that simply has to end. The Giants need a definitive direction.

Good? And by that I mean feisty, genuinely competitive and winning far more series than they lose? We’ll take it in a heartbeat. Nothing would please us more.

Because — and I mean this earnestly — there is nothing better in sports than the local nine being must-see TV every single night. Baseball is a companion sport, there for you nearly every day of the week. Who wouldn’t want to spend every day with a team that wins, and has fun doing it? Those are the exact summers that dreams are made of. And when the beautiful ballpark on the water is packed to the brim and the energy spills out into the city streets, San Francisco is as good a baseball town as any in America, even if we have to wear coats to enjoy it.

Then there’s the alternative.

I am certainly not advocating for the Giants to be a bad team this year — a squad that goes on long, agonizing losing streaks and lets the gap between itself and the legitimate playoff contenders balloon.

But if that is genuinely in the cards, at least we would know that the organization has finally played out the string in its quest to put out a product that keeps people buying tickets while not actually competing for anything serious. A massive cratering would force the front office’s hand. It would mean the end of the half-measures. I don’t know about you, but I’m done with the half-measures.

The fascinating — and perhaps slightly terrifying — part of this particular season is that both outcomes seem equally possible.

This might actually be the best Giants lineup since 2014. It’s a group that finally feels like it has some actual teeth at the plate — legitimate professional hitters such as Rafael Devers, who can change a game with one swing rather than relying on endless platoon matchups hoping to string together three seeing-eye singles.

The starting rotation might not look spectacular on paper, but it is sneaky strong—especially if Robbie Ray can re-establish his Cy Young form (and he might have done just that this spring). If Ray is right, suddenly the front end of that rotation with Logan Webb looks like a massive problem for the rest of the National League. The bottom part of it provides solid consistency in Tyler Mahle and Adrian Houser, alongside real upside in Landen Roupp or another exciting young Giants arm.

But then there is the bullpen, which — for a team that is highly likely to play 50 or more tight games — could be the reason the Giants don’t even sniff a wild-card spot. In today’s game, if you cannot lock down the seventh, eighth and ninth innings, you are going to bleed wins at an alarming rate. It’s a glaring vulnerability in an incredibly brutal division.

And running the show (ostensibly, anyway) is a manager with exactly as much Major League experience as I have. (Actually, I’ve been around big-league teams for 15 years, so I probably have far more.) You can have all the analytical data in the world fed directly into the dugout, but managing real human beings through a 162-game grind is a completely different animal. We are about to find out if this grand Tony Vitello experiment actually works at the highest level.

So here we are, at the precipice. The purgatory era needs to close for good. Either surprise everyone and make a thrilling run, or let the wheels completely fall off and force the front office to commit to building a genuine championship team through the farm system.

Either way, at least the agonizing holding pattern would be over.

We will happily show up for the romance of the game. But now, it’s time for the Giants to show up with an identity.

No more illusions. No more purgatory. Pick a lane, and hit the gas.

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