The stewards of the franchise haven’t had success for a while now. Sustainable?
For a while now, site creator Grant Brisbee has been doing a bit noting over how many games the Giants have played .500 baseball. Because that’s basically where they’ve been since 2021. It’s been an easy cudgel to use against the supposed brilliance of the current front office group, but if you expand the data set, it implicates the owners, too.
The Giants have played 1,506 games since 2015, the season following that memorable night in Kaufmann Stadium. They have won 753 games in that span and have lost… 753 games.
In the decade since the San Francisco Giants last won the World Series, the team’s ownership group has gotten literally everything it has wanted (revenue, territory, accolades) and yet for the people who only watch the team — not invest in it or have a lease on Mission Rock or have signed an above market rate free agent contract — all of the off-field gains have amounted to exactly nothing on the field.
Oh sure, there have been three winning seasons (2015, 2016, 2021) and two playoff appearances (2016 & 2021), but the bad has outweighed the good. More fiascos than fun. Not only did those playoff appearances have memorably disastrous endings, they were followed up with two franchise-defining seasons: one of the worst losing years in team history and their first .500 mark. The farm system has improved from awful to… below average and they’ve yet to — and seem unlikely to — get lucky again with player development creating a new crop of superstars.
Just 10 years ago, the San Francisco Giants were a championship brand. Now, they’re the exemplar of mediocrity with a little bit of pathetic sprinkled on top. Maybe it’s karmic payback for all that success. The Giants had even year magic, unprecedented luck with drafts and player development (especially for them!), and great storylines attached to each of their victories. In the years that have followed, it’s been a slow-moving trainwreck, from the last gasps of the Bochy era to Larry Baer’s anger to Charles Johnson’s politics and the way the team has opted to handle its business on and off the field.
The team has responded to complaints where they can, though. The dreadful plan to replace memorial tiles that they offered fans during Oracle Park’s construction with a digital kiosk went away (though, has the replacement plan be implemented?). Fans who hated Renel’s politics but didn’t mind her voice got a soundalike as a replacement after the team dumped her before the season. The Giants made themselves less competitive by caving to season ticketholder demands and foregoing the opener strategy and they hired a manager who is past his use by date because the fans wanted him, too. They also added more Spanish language broadcasts to their slate after John Shea exposed the team’s discrimination against an important demographic.
And, as much of a fiasco as the offseason has become for them, the team has been willing to tie its hands and dive right into a plate of what they’ve been told is chocolate pie just to see if they can finally taste the delicious prize that is top of the market free agency. It hasn’t worked out, of course, and we’ve all learned an important lesson: that the Barry Bonds signing was as big of a fluke as the 2021 season.
The Giants haven’t sat on their hands and that’s what makes this lack of success feel so… discouraging. They moved in the fences, dumped fallible human scouts and replaced them with infallible computers , built a new minor league facility in Arizona to finally bring their player development into the 21st century, spent the most money on their major league payroll than ever had before, offered Carlos Correa and Aaron Judge impossibly large sums of money to play for them, allegedly agreed to Shohei Ohtani’s terms to receive infinity dollars — and this offseason they landed Blake Snell and Matt Chapman. They’ve done everything a team can do to show that it’s not just pocketing revenue and extracting value.
They just haven’t fielded a good team.
That .500 record over their last 10 seasons? 15th out of 30. Pitching fWAR? 17th out of 30. Batting fWAR? 17th out of 30. And, oh yes, it’s only that high because WAR factors in defense. The Giants have had the #5 defense in MLB since 2015 (+201.4 Defensive Runs Above Average). Subtract that from the calculation and the Giants’ 6,457 runs scored is 25th out of 30, ahead of only the Royals (6,389), Pirates (6,282), White Sox (6,269), Tigers (6,185), and Marlins (5,955). This is the group of teams they belong with now.
Why hasn’t any of it worked? We know from the baseball side of things it’s because Marco Luciano didn’t emerge as the next Jose Ramirez and Patrick Bailey isn’t going to be 80% of the hitter Buster Posey was. The team has made well reasoned moves and reactionary ones. It has all amounted to the team not having an identity in its post-Bonds, post-championship era. For the time being, they are merely an attraction in the Mission Rock neighborhood.
It was refreshing to read that ownership became so frustrated by a stalemate with a player they wanted that Buster Posey got involved to sign the deal. A sign of changes to come in the front office? Possibly, but not because of that. The franchise has been coasting for a decade and now it has found itself coasted into a ditch of its own creation.
I think it’s a good thing that the franchise has become untethered from its recent past (we’re not going to be seeing “remember the World Series wins!?” as much), and you’d like to think that it’s setup to chart a new future, but the Johnson family, Larry Baer himself, and the current front office all seem too slow and set in their ways to explore the unknown.
They say you can’t fire ownership, so maybe it’s like the Supreme Court and you just need to pack the group with people who haven’t seen and done it all and made more money from their investment in the team than they ever thought possible. Again, good that there’s Buster Posey in there to give them a spark, but the vibes are very solemn and corporate.
The Giants are a massive success if you don’t pay attention to the team.