Though, probably not.
This morning inThe Athletic (subscription required), Andrew Baggarly talked about the San Francisco Giants coming up short in trade talks for the likes of Kyle Tucker and Garrett Crochet, mainly because the only prospect desired by other teams is Bryce Eldridge. It’s a lingering problem. Will 2025 be the year the team finally focuses on player development?
In September and again in November I talked about how drafting and developing players is the Number One problem faced by the team. Except for one little hiccup there with the Cain-Lincecum-Posey-Bumgarner run, it has been a reliable source of frustration for the franchise this century. If you want to be especially ungenerous, it has been a big problem since the team moved to San Francisco, with that mid-eighties burp the only other time when the farm system was of aid to the major league roster.
Think about it: they aren’t going to land the top of the market free agents that are available every year. They aren’t going to be able to make any big trades for said players, either. The only way the Giants are going to be competitive again is if they find a way to supplement their roster with major league caliber prospects, rather than free agents. Marco Luciano didn’t — and probably won’t — pan out, and so here’s Willy Adames. That’s fine, but where was their Matt Chapman? Where’s even their Michael Conforto or the next Mike Yastrzemski? Heliot Ramos, Tyler Fitzgerald, and Patrick Bailey are a really solid starting point, to be fair, but at the end of the day, we all sense (and the numbers suggest) that this group is not enough.
To that point, Baggarly’s article is all about signalling to fans that the team knows this. There’s a “We tried!” plus “Hang in there!” vibe to the reporting and that makes a lot of sense. You can’t signal to fans that 2025 is a lost cause on January 2nd — even if it plainly is. But at this point, and more than likely, even as we head into Spring Training, there’s nothing on paper to suggest that the Giants will be very good in their division this season, which means they probably won’t be competitive for the third Wild Card, which means that all fans have to hope for here at the start of a new year is a radical run of luck that favors them.
Focusing on building a roster of pitching and defense makes a lot of sense, too, but on that note, we’re in a wait and see pattern. The current pitching depth doesn’t tantalize, it merely offers a spate of solidly league average upside. That’s not bad, but it’s hardly the promise of a Yoshinobu Yamamoto or a Roki Sasaki, two players they probably never really had a shot to land in the first place, despite their open market, and it makes the passes on Blake Snell and Corbin Burnes sting even more.
It’s clear that the ownership group would rather spend money on things that can be seen, which means players who are on TV. Spending extra to give prospects more instruction, better tools, etc. doesn’t seem to be a top priority, but that sort of retrenchment looks like what their current situation demands — the Giants have simply fallen too far behind their competition and there’s no hope of them closing the gap in the next few years.
At the same time, I get the urge to keep with tradition: the San Francisco era of the franchise has been bad — historically — at drafting and developing. It seems foolish to double down on its glaring weakness. But, if the plan is to chase closing the gap via free agency and trades, then nothing has fundamentally changed about the organization in quite a long time, which ought to mean the results will remain the same. They have been unable to “win and develop at the same time” — that plan has failed. The Giants have failed, and it’s time to turn to address that rather than wondering if they’ll get really, really lucky.
What we should really hope for is to see the San Francisco Giants resolve to change their ways in 2025. I’ve resolved to be more positive this year, and so rather than leave on a down note, I’ll try to get at what a change might look like.
First, I must acknowledge that “fixing player development” is easier said than done. If it were easy, then lots of teams would have great systems. Second, it’s obvious that you can’t make mediocre players into great ones at scale — but that just means the emphasis should be on studying the gap between scouting and outcomes and applying resources to reducing this inefficiency. Third, there is always an inefficiency between scouting and outcomes, but the Giants seem like a team with the resources to conduct studies to figure out and then money to fix why they have been so bad in this area so consistently. It’ll take a lot of work probably the whole calendar year to get to improving the situation — a real test of Randy Winn’s teaching and advisory abilities; and, it would follow at least two other system-wide reassessments in 2018 and early in Zaidi’s tenure. That’s a lot of turmoil.
I just don’t think the Giants are in a position to maintain the status quo.
The situation calls for Buster Posey’s smiling face and a willingness to keep smiling as he becomes the bad guy over the course of the year. If it’s Willy Adames and very little else, who cares? Say that they’re hoping to get lucky this year but be competitive in 2026. He can say that the team has a lot of talent but he stepped in when he saw that it wasn’t being harnessed or developed properly. Posey is a balanced guy. He’ll always say something that’s encouraging but quickly comment when a situation butts up against something he doesn’t like. Basically, he can sell the idea of patience because he’s the type to declare when he’s lost his. Fans appreciate that.
He comes off as earnest and honest. I think fans and owners will take “Adames and a healthy Jung Hoo Lee? Let’s wait and see” as a reasonable slogan, and once Posey can sell that then I think the front office will be free to leave the major league roster to getting blasted into embarrassment by the NL West while they figure out how to improve a forgettable system.