When the Giants first played the Dodgers in April, it began a precipitous San Francisco collapse that sent the team to the bottom of the standings and the local media to begin the post-mortem reports.

What the examiners found nine days later was that the Giants, then 7-12, had died from acute lack of offense, complicated by anemic pitching. With no one to protect Barry Bonds in the order, other teams simply pitched around him without having to worry about the consequences.

It wasn’t unlike the dissection going on around the same time in the Bronx, where the Yankees had just been brutalized in a home-and-home by the Red Sox and the pundits were observing that the Yankees had no pitching.

That the Yankees recovered and now occupy their hereditary throne at the top of the AL East did not require deep analysis to explain. The offense got rolling after a slow start, the pitching began performing as well as the Yankees hoped it would, and the rest was inevitable.

But the Giants seem to defy explanation. Monday, they rejoined their rivalry with the Dodgers, and the battle will be for first place in the NL West. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

So how does a team that had no offense other than Bonds find itself fighting for first place, especially when other teams are intent on not letting Bonds hit the ball?

Jerry Reiter, a statistics professor at Duke and a Red Sox fan, told The New York Times that the reason is because of all the walks to Bonds.

It turns out that the Giants score more runs when Bonds walks than when other teams pitch to him. He’s closing in on 100 walks with the season not yet half completed, and he’s also scored 50 runs on just 52 hits. Eighteen of those hits are homers; so someone else has driven him in 32 times already.

No player on the Giants is among the lead leaders in RBI, but the men behind Bonds — Edgardo Alfonzo, Pedro Feliz, and A.J. Pierzynski have a combined 106 RBIs. Michael Tucker and Marquis Grissom, hitting ahead of Bonds, have 69 more. And the Giants, who weren’t supposed to be able to hit, are averaging nearly five runs a game — fourth in the National League.

The Giants pitching isn’t great — 11 teams have better ERA’s than San Francisco’s 4.66 — but it’s not hitting that is carrying them.

This should be proof to the league that Reiter, the statistics professor is right: The Walk-a-Barry defense has made the Giants better not worse. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Bill James, the stat guru who now works as a consultant for the Red Sox, long ago argued with numbers that great hitters are great hitters regardless of whether they have someone “protecting” them in the line-up.

That argument holds that if Bonds had someone terrific behind him, he’d get more pitches to hit. But even if Babe Ruth were hitting behind Bonds, pitchers would still pitch him as carefully as they do now. They’d pitch Ruth carefully, too. These days, they pitch everyone carefully, which is a prime reason why games last so long and few pitchers get out of the seventh inning.

But by walking Bonds, the opposition has seemed to make everyone else on the Giants a little bit better. It’s not necessarily because they’re getting more pitches to hit, although that could be part of it. Pitchers may breathe a sigh of relief after walking Bonds and lose concentration on whomever’s next.

Mostly, though, these Giants may not look as frightening as former editions of the team, but they’re major league hitters. Keep putting runners on base, and major league hitters will eventually drive them in.

Boston, which believes in the gospel according to James, just finished a three-game set against the Giants. They pitched to Bonds — carefully — issuing him four walks in three games. Against most teams, Bonds would get six or seven walks. But he had just one hit and, although the Giants won two of three, it wasn’t because of Bonds’ hitting. It was everyone else in the line-up.

So, now that the truth is evident, it will be interesting to see if the Dodgers pick up on it and decide that pitching to Bonds is better strategy than walking him. And if they and other teams do, it will be really interesting to see if the Giants can continue to contend.

The NL West is one of the weakest divisions in baseball. But it’s not as weak as everyone thought two months ago. Back then, they thought the Giants were finished. Today, they’re fighting for first place, and it’s all because, even when Bonds doesn’t get a chance to hit, he still drives the offense.

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