Welcome to the Giants are world champions.

Welcome to the Giants Insider podcast on NBC Sports Bay Area.com.

Introducing your host, San Francisco Giants Insider, Alex Pavlovich.

Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Giants Insider podcast, presented by Wendy's.

I'm going to start with some good news today, despite everything that's happened over the last week,

what happened in Philadelphia, what happened in Pittsburgh, all the strikeouts, which really was incredible,

the short starts from the rotation, the injuries, all of that.

This team wakes up here on a Tuesday in the middle of May, 21 and 21, and there are only three and a half games out of first place

in their division. So I think they will take that and hope that they can be that close in, oh,

about two and a half weeks when I expect Madison Bombuner to return, and they'll go from there.

For now, you know, I'm going to focus on somebody who's not a giant, which is rare for this

podcast, but he was a giant for a long time.

George Contos, former giant, now the eighth inning guy for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

He was the guest on this week's podcast.

It was a good conversation with George. It always is somebody who I think has a future maybe with us on the pre and post game show. We'll see. I know he loves San

Francisco and would love to come back at some point. So we'll see what the future holds for him.

But for now we talked about kind of the trailer or his waiver claim that got him over to Pittsburgh

and how that all went down and how you keep in touch

with teammates, how we prepared for the Giants coming into Pittsburgh. And I also wanted to ask

him about the Pirates because I do think they're interesting when you look at a team that was

supposed to be rebuilding. And that's probably what a lot of fans want the Giants to do is take a step back

and kind of do what Pittsburgh's done and some other teams. And you look at

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