Sean Manaea was dominant in his initial two starts with the Mets. Joey Bart homered in his first at-bat with the Pirates. And Joc Pederson is crushing right-handed pitchers again in Arizona.

The former San Francisco Giants are digging their new environments while their old team has struggled out of the gate. The Giants did not start the season as anticipated and found themselves in an early hole thanks to getting swept by the Dodgers and losing two of three to the Nationals.

Too many players got off to rough starts, and thank goodness for Jordan Hicks and the fact the Giants won all three of his starts. They hope to evolve into the team they expected to be and contend for the playoffs, but the early going has not been particularly pretty.

With several 2023 Giants finding homes elsewhere, we at Small Sample Size Theatre wonder whether any of them would have made the Giants better by sticking around. Let’s go down the list.

Bart: It’s the smallest of small sample sizes, but this is the chance the second overall pick in the 2018 draft has been waiting for. No longer feeling the pressure in the organization that Buster built, Bart joined a team that got off to a hot start and began his Pirates career 3-for-8 with four RBIs in his first two games. The homer was his first since Sept. 10, 2022. Not only is he thrilled for a big-league opportunity, he has a lot of family in Western Pennsylvania to provide support. His dad, Tommy, grew up nearby and was drafted by the Pirates in 1979 but did not sign.

Pederson: The Giants got a tremendous first half of the 2022 season out of Pederson, who made the All-Star team, but he never returned to that level and was shown the door to free agency after last season. He signed for $9.5 million with the reigning National League champion Diamondbacks and is wisely used only as a designated hitter predominately against right-handed pitchers and was hitting .368 through the first two weeks with a .520 on-base percentage and zero strikeouts in 26 plate appearances. On a very athletic team, Pederson is hanging in there.

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Manaea: The left-hander opted out of his Giants contract, which had one year and $12.5 million remaining, and signed a two-year, $28 million deal with the Mets — of course, agent Scott Boras included another opt-out. After cutting his hair and all the flowing locks that ran well below his shoulders, looking more like he did in his early A’s days, Manaea thrived in his first two starts as a Met, yielding one run in 11 innings while striking out 14 and walking four. The lefty signed with the Giants to be a starter, but he spent more time in the bullpen (27 appearances) than rotation (10 starts including his final four appearances), so it was an easy call to bolt to a team that trusts him to start. Here’s a telling stat: Over his past six starts entering the weekend, including the four in September, he had a 1.80 ERA.

Mitch Haniger: He’s more comfortable playing for his original team, the Mariners, after a career-worst season with the Giants when he appeared in just 61 games and hit .209 with a .631 OPS and six homers. In his first 12 games in Seattle, the right fielder hit .262 with an .807 OPS and two homers. The Giants traded Haniger and pitcher Anthony DeSclafani for pitcher Robbie Ray, who continues to recover from Tommy John surgery, and also shipped $6 million to Seattle to even out the finances of the deal. How the trade fares for the Giants will be based on how well Ray pitches in the second half and whether he opts out after the season.

J.D. Davis: He’s handling his transition to Oakland the best he can after his rotten experience with the Giants, who lost to the third baseman in arbitration and then released him before the season, which deprived him of the salary that he had earned, forcing him to take a pay cut with the A’s. Through two weeks, Davis’ offensive numbers were better than successor Matt Chapman’s. It’ll be intriguing through the summer to continue monitoring the third basemen by the bay.

Brandon Crawford: The four-time Gold Glover and two-time World Series champion has had little playing time with the Cardinals, going 1-for-8 with four strikeouts in three games as 22-year-old shortstop Masyn Winn’s backup. Crawford will be back in the Bay Area with the Cardinals playing a three-game series at the Coliseum starting Monday night.

Alex Wood: The lefty was chosen to start the A’s opener after signing for $8.5 million to wear the green and gold, but the results weren’t good in his first three starts, as the 8.03 ERA attests.

Ross Stripling: Following Wood in the A’s rotation after the Giants dealt the right-hander to Oakland in February for minor-league outfielder Jonah Cox, Stripling has a 5.50 ERA in three starts but threw one gem, giving up one run in seven innings in a 1-0 loss to Boston. Cox opened the season at Low-A San Jose.

Jakob Junis: Junis made one start for Milwaukee, giving up one run in four innings in the Brewers’ home opener, then was placed on the injured list with a shoulder impingement.

DeSclafani: We won’t see the pitcher again until 2025. Three weeks after the Giants traded DeSclafani to Seattle, he was shipped to Minnesota, but he developed more forearm soreness in spring training and underwent season-ending surgery two weeks ago.

Would any of the former Giants have made a difference if they had remained? Manaea would, for starters. The Giants’ rotation entered the weekend 20th in ERA and would have ranked 28th excluding Hicks’ mastery. But Manaea left on his own via his opt-out, wanting to go somewhere where he knew he’d remain in the rotation. On the other hand, neither Wood nor Stripling has pitched well enough to be missed.

Pederson? Entering the weekend, he certainly had out-hit Jorge Soler, who faces both lefties and righties as the Giants’ DH, but things could change in a hurry. Bart could revitalize his career in Pittsburgh, but there was no hint he would do that in San Francisco. The Giants might miss Haniger, who could put up a big year if healthy.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if Davis has a better offensive year than Chapman, but Chapman’s defense and leadership are difference-makers. Crawford wasn’t trending in the right direction as a Giant and was replaced by Nick Ahmed, who has been steady on defense and stunningly OK on offense.

The bottom-line answer is that the Giants could have used Manaea’s arm and Pederson’s bat, at least one-tenth into the long season. Check back in a month or three for updates. Meantime, could someone explain why Brandon Belt (Giants class of 2022) mysteriously remains unsigned?

Reach John Shea: [email protected]; Twitter: @JohnSheaHey

April 14, 2024

National Baseball Writer

John Shea is the San Francisco Chronicle's national baseball writer and columnist. He has been covering baseball for four decades, including 37 years in the Bay Area. He wrote five baseball books, including the New York Times bestseller with Willie Mays “24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid” and Rickey Henderson's autobiography, “Off Base: Confessions of a Thief.”

He can be reached at [email protected].

The word "iconic" gets way overused these days — if every other thing is "iconic," what does the word even mean anymore? But I think I can safely say the rotating former Equinox restaurant and bar atop downtown SF's Hyatt Regency, which is about to turn 51 years old, is an iconic piece of the city's hospitality history, and the hotel is bringing it back.

The revolving (or rotating, if you prefer) restaurant has stood still since 2007, when the turntable ground to a halt for the last time during one of the hotel's transitions in ownership. The circular space with 360 degree views of the city and the Bay has more recently been used as The Regency Club — an upsell for hotel guests that gives them access to free breakfasts and a happy hour with a view up there.

As hotel manager Matt Humphreys explained several weeks ago, in the video below for Hospitality Daily, an engineer at the hotel who is getting ready to retire suggested to him last year that they try to get the thing rotating just one last time. This led to a couple failed attempts — the motors turned on but nothing wanted to move — and to some remodeling that had to occur because tile and other things had been installed with the assumption that the turntable would never move again.

Equinox, back in the day, functioned like a carousel — the outer ring of the restaurant rotated while the central section remained fixed. This, anecdotally, led to guests going to the bathroom and then losing track of their tables, because they had moved. The turntable took 50 minutes to complete a full rotation, and as Humphreys explained, it ultimately was a money-losing enterprise for the hotel, because guests would linger to take in the views, and there weren't enough tables for it to turn a profit.

The restaurant opened with the hotel in 1973. Architect John Portman, who also designed Embarcadero Center and Los Angeles's Bonaventure Hotel, said he was inspired by a 1935 sci-fi film called Things to Come, and the hotel's dramatic angles, glass elevators, and towering lobby — still considered the largest in the world, per Guinness — reflect a sleek and futuristic take on 60s/70s brutalism.

Rotating restaurants were a bit of a trend for city landmarks in the era — Seattle's Space Needle, opened in 1962, has one that is now known as Loupe Lounge, and Portman installed another atop the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Atlanta, which was completed three years after SF's Hyatt Regency. And San Francisco's Equinox became a legendary tourist attraction, with long lines in the lobby of waiting guests.

Humphreys says in that video that tourists still regularly come into the hotel asking if they can go up to the rotating bar, and are disappointed to hear it's closed to the public and no longer rotates.

But all that is changing! The Chronicle reported today — and Humphreys revealed in the video — that work has been ongoing to get the turntable spinning again. Staff Engineer Dennis Alcaire has been oiling the gears and the series of 200 8-inch wheels that sit beneath the rotating dining platform. And one night last year, he tells the Chronicle, after using hydraulics to crank the turntable out of its rut, he flipped the motor on and the floor began turning once more — and experience he compares to "waking a dinosaur."

"It had just been sitting too long," Alcaire tells the Chronicle. "It got comfortable in that position and didn’t want to move.

Humphreys tells Hospitality Daily that the hotel made a tidy profit on the Regency Club upsell last year, and now they figure they'll reinvest some of that in getting this fanciful icon of a space rotating again, and see if it doesn't attract more hotel stays.

Tonight, Hyatt hotel guests who pay the $100 extra for Regency Club access will get exclusive access to the soft reopening of the rotating bar. The grand reopening will coincide with the hotel's 51st birthday, on May 1. And the Chronicle reports that the public will have a chance to get in sometime later, as a ticketed happy hour experience that will be called Club Revolve.

Below, see a sped-up video from the 1980s of the bar rotating past the city skyline — with what appears to be a mannequin sitting at that table?

Top image via Yelp

Performers, musicians, and dancers lit up the stage at the corner of 18th and Valencia streets to participate in the ninth annual 415 celebration, an outdoor party honoring old-school San Francisco.

Many wore retro and vintage 49ers, Giants and Warriors hats and jerseys; some spoke in a circle about the Giants’ poor start to the season as they compared their one-of-a-kind jackets. Others said that, more than anything, they came because of the vibes.

“It is a bunch of love going around the city. It is a bunch of people from different walks of life celebrating one thing, all being together,” said one artist. “It makes me feel like I don’t have friends. It makes me feel like I have more of a family. Everyone around here is a close group of family.”

San Francisco was officially incorporated 174 years ago today — April 15, 1850. Cosmically, “415” is also the city’s much beloved area code.

This was not lost on the at least 200 people who filled the parking lot where the party took place Monday evening. On the stage, a DJ spun between performances to keep people dancing as they waited for the next act.

One of those performers said that it was special to be able to take the stage on this day.

“It feels amazing. Giving back to my community with my vocals means so much to me,” said Miss Nanaa. “My late grandfather, who recently passed away, is the reason why I sing so, for me, to be performing in the Mission is big for me, because I am representing him and his vocals all the way from the skies.”

And, as usual in the Mission, some revelers took the opportunity to drive up in their shining low-riders. A couple of the drivers were kind enough to show people the interior of their vehicles.

While others partied, some took the opportunity to sell art, crafts and vintage wear. At least half a dozen vendors offered a variety of hoodies, T-shirts, hats, prints and even beer cans and koozies. All of them had one thing in common: The San Francisco theme.

“The turnout has been very good. I love it. It is like our holiday, and all of my art is city stuff. My whole brand is to keep the nostalgia of the city alive,” said artist Casandra Pintor.

Pintor said that she wanted to pick something for her art that everyone in the city could relate to.

“I do different districts, but I try to pick Muni, because I feel [Muni] is very generalized with the city, and workers, and all of us, how we grew up,” said Pintor. ”415 day means a lot to me, because I try to keep my art to where it keeps the city alive.”