As the Giants quietly and steadily ascended a 107-win precipice last season, the baseball cognoscenti did what it always does. It questioned the implausible. It sought to reestablish order in line with expectations. It came up with reasons that the surprising Giants were about to slip.

One of the most common hypotheses: They were too dependent on the home run.

They scored 49.5 percent of their runs on home runs. And because home runs come in bunches, eventually, it’ll even out. Eventually, they’ll be exposed.

It never evened out. The Giants just kept ascending past the tree line. They led the NL with 241 home runs. They hit more home runs than the 2001 Giants, which featured a guy who pummeled 73 of them. They hit the most homers in franchise history.

But cautionary tales don’t have an expiration date. Maybe sometime over the winter, the Giants front office and coaching staff considered how their offense was fueled last season. Perhaps they decided it really would be smart to leverage other aspects of their offensive game. Perhaps it would be a good idea to cultivate a more well-rounded group of hitters with a more diverse skill set. Perhaps they even galaxy-brained the potential impact of the universal humidor and whether it would deaden the baseball in certain environments. Perhaps sharpening their base running, and yes, bunting for base hits could serve as a grain silo for those fallow times when the ball withers at the track.

Perhaps all the work they did in the spring and all the times they showed bunt in exhibition games was a prelude to a game like Saturday afternoon’s 5-2 victory at Nationals Park, in which they collected two bunt singles and no home runs.

Perhaps this was concrete evidence of a plan in action.

“We will hit home runs,” Giants manager Gabe Kapler said. “I have zero doubt of that.”

This small-ball emphasis isn’t about replacing a trebuchet with slings and arrows. It’s equipping the Giants with another weapon that they can use to start rallies. And because they are bunting against the shift, the armory is more or less unguarded.

So Mike Yastrzemski bunted the second pitch of the game to the vacant left side of the infield. In the sixth inning, new arrival Luis Gonzalez did the same. Neither scored in a victory that clinched a winning record on a grueling 11-game trip with two to play. But the bunt hit was the topic that dominated conversation in the clubhouse afterward.

Kapler stood in front of cameras and notepads and was asked: What about this game — which featured a four-run rally in the fifth inning, five solid innings from Alex Wood, more clean work from a bullpen that has a major-league-low 1.78 ERA and another sliding, run-saving catch in the outfield from Austin Slater —stuck out the most?

“I thought our bunts were excellent, obviously,” he said.

If it seems like the Giants aren’t hitting home runs with the same frequency, it’s probably because they haven’t gotten many in the absolute clutch and haven’t hit many of the pretty, sparkly ones that blow games open. Slater’s three-run homer in Friday’s series opener was their first of the season with multiple runners on base.

Still, they entered Saturday with 15 home runs in 14 games, tied for fourth in the majors. And their plus-8 home run differential is right in line with one of the biggest reasons for their success last season, when they finished with a plus-160 differential between runs scored on homers and runs allowed on homers. That’s a run a game, basically. (Their bullpen, by the way, has allowed exactly one home run in 37 2/3 innings on this trip and has a 0.96 ERA through nine games.)

Tyler Rogers did this to the best hitter on the planet. (One of the top three, at least.) pic.twitter.com/nvNDp7vSSH

— Andrew Baggarly (@extrabaggs) April 23, 2022

So the Giants aren’t changing their identity, per se. Sure, they’ve scored 33.9 percent of their runs on homers this season, which would appear to reflect a more balanced offense. But it’s also been an underperforming offense with a .668 OPS. Kapler believes more slugging will come.

What about the familiar line of thinking that bunting for a single, even if it’s uncontested, is an action that limits your slugging potential? When Yastrzemski sneaks a ball up the third-base line, isn’t he giving up a chance at splitting a gap or putting one in the seats?

“No, I don’t think I’m giving up anything,” Yastrzemski said. “Because Brandon Belt’s hitting behind me and his slug is still there. He hits a homer, it’s an extra run. There’s so many things that can happen in this game. The bottom line is we give ourselves a greater opportunity when we get on base. And it’s always nice to start your day off with a hit, anyway.”

The second-order effects might be difficult to measure, but it stands to reason that they exist. Anyone who bunts for a base hit probably has above-average speed (with the exception of Belt, but we’ll include him here because he’s always telling everyone how sneaky-fast he is). So the Giants get a runner aboard who is a threat to steal a base, or at minimum, will draw some of the pitcher’s attention. A slide step to be quicker to the plate could lead to a little less finish on a pitch.

Then there’s just plain old math. The Giants have an 88 percent success rate when attempting to bunt for a hit, according to Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle. Even if they were successful just half the time, a .500 average far exceeds the league average for balls in play (between .290 and .300). And that’s if a hitter even puts something into play.

“We are going to bunt into outs,” Kapler said. “Pitchers are going to grab a baseball and throw us out at first base. We’ll sometimes fall behind in counts, 0-1, 0-2, trying to put that bunt down. And that’s the most important time to stay the course. It’s really important to take the long view and recognize what the batting average on those balls over the course of time is going to be when the defense gives it to us.”

That leads to the most important potential second-order effect: getting defenses to respect the bunt and play something nearer to straight up, which should in theory create more holes for grounders to scoot through and potentially improve the team’s overall batting average on balls in play.

Kapler was not preaching from the Book of Bunt when he arrived in San Francisco. The Giants had just two bunt singles in 2020 and 16 in 2021. But by the second half of last season, he was talking about it more often. He would engage in long, philosophical discussions with bench coach Kai Correa. And when you’re presenting a new initiative to players, winning 107 games is one heck of a way to create buy-in.

So third-base coach Mark Hallberg spent more time on a back field this spring feeding baseballs into velocity machines and slider machines as players like Yastrzemski and Mauricio Dubón worked on their bunting form. Yastrzemski increased his proficiency at recognizing certain pitches and situations when he’d need to deaden the ball versus bunting with the barrel. Then they attempted a slew of bunts and put nearly everyone in motion — even Darin Ruf and Joc Pederson — in exhibition games.

“It’s starting to emerge,” Kapler said. “It’s not an accident. … If we’re given the gift of just getting a ball on the ground, why not take it?”

If you think all of this sounds so refreshing, perhaps you’re one of the folks who have been screaming for years for players to attack the shift by bunting against it. You’d rather see the game and the players respond organically to force an alteration to what has become a common strategy rather than have the league legislate against it. And it’s true, defenses might change as players like Yastrzemski rewrite scouting reports. But there are still a lot of big, slugging left-handed hitters — the Joey Gallos of the world — whom opponents will welcome to limit themselves to a bunt attempt. So organic change will only go so far. A shift ban is likely coming next season.

But for now, as a strategic play, the bunt against the shift is one the Giants are wholly embracing at any point in a game — including when they’re nine up on the Padres in the sixth inning. And Kapler no longer has to preach the message within the clubhouse.

It’s the players who are doing it. How do we know that?

Not one of the Giants’ bunt attempts against the shift has been called from the dugout.

(Photo of Mike Yastrzemski: Al Bello / Getty Images)