This story was excerpted from Maria Guardado’s Giants Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

The Giants have proved quite erratic through their first four games of the regular season, alternating between shutouts and impressive power displays while going 2-2 against the Yankees and White Sox. It’s too soon to start making sweeping generalizations, but San Francisco has already had some interesting developments that will be worth monitoring in the coming weeks.

Here are three early takeaways from the 2023 Giants:

1. The Giants’ offensive identity will revolve around power

The Giants struck out 41 times while dropping their first series of the year at Yankee Stadium over the weekend, but they rebounded with a huge seven-homer barrage against the White Sox on Monday. David Villar led the way with two homers, including his first career grand slam, while Joc Pederson, Mike Yastrzemski, Thairo Estrada, Michael Conforto and Bryce Johnson each went deep, as well.

The power ensemble was reminiscent of 2021, when the Giants paced the National League with 241 home runs despite not having a single 30-homer hitter on their roster. Pederson led San Francisco with 23 homers last season, but the lineup should have more thump this year, especially following the arrival of Conforto and fellow outfielder Mitch Haniger.

“I really think we’re going to hit a lot of [home runs],” president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi said last month. “We don’t want to be one-dimensional. We want to run the bases well. We want to have good at-bats. But I just look at our lineup and really everybody one through nine has the ability to hit 20 homers if they haven’t hit 20 homers in the past.

“So I just think the length of our lineup, having patience and power one through nine, even though we’ll probably have a couple of different looks to our lineup, I just think that’s going to be a real strength of ours. And when you can combine that with more aggressive baserunning, then you really have something.”

2. DeSclafani could be poised for a bounce-back year

The Giants’ slugfest on Monday overshadowed a promising outing from right-hander Anthony DeSclafani, who fired six shutout innings in his first start since June 26, 2022. DeSclafani made only five appearances last year before undergoing season-ending right ankle surgery in July, but he didn’t miss a beat against the White Sox, allowing only three hits while walking none and striking out four.

“It’s been a while,” DeSclafani told reporters afterward. “It feels good to throw a good game, especially after last year. It was good for game one.”

DeSclafani enjoyed a career-best season with the Giants in 2021, logging a 3.17 ERA over 31 starts, so if he can sustain that form this year, he could help bolster the front-end of the rotation further mitigate the loss of All-Star left-hander Carlos Rodón, who left to sign a six-year, $162 million deal with the Yankees over the offseason.

3. Doval is still adjusting to the clock

Closer Camilo Doval was one of the Giants’ slowest workers last year, but he seemed to adapt well to the new pitch timer during Spring Training. Still, things got a little dicey for the 25-year-old flamethrower in his season debut on Saturday, as he drew two pitch clock violations before closing out a tense 7-5 win over the Yankees.

Manager Gabe Kapler said he would likely meet with the Doval to encourage him to pick up the pace moving forward.

"It's not just on Camilo," Kapler said. "We need our catchers to be [on it] and [Roberto Pérez] did a nice job of trying to slow the game down for him. We didn't see any of that sort of thing in Spring Training. We saw a pretty good mastery of it. This is a different environment, and it's understandable that things sped up a little bit, but no pitcher is going to survive giving away balls like that.

“It doesn't matter how good you are. We were fortunate to get out of that one with a victory, but we're going to need to address it. Camilo is good at making adjustments."