The San Francisco Giants answered some questions last offseason that must now be asked again this offseason… along with a few new ones. But how confident should we be in their reassessment and possible new direction?
It was an up and down year for the San Francisco Giants, the third of a 3-year run that shook off all expectations created by their 107-win season in 2021. As with many things in life, nobody knows anything, and as smart as the Giants’ front office is, they don’t know how to make a good baseball team.
At least, that’s a reasonable takeaway from this latest losing season.
Say what you want about FanGraphs and ZiPS Projections, but I put a little stock in them in that major league front offices have hired away a number of FanGraphs contributors over the years. Since we don’t have any decision-making responsibilities, I think it’s okay for us to follow some projections from this source and presume there’s overlap with actual front office numbers. The past 3 years of projections for the Giants:
2022: 85-77 | Actual: 81-81
2023: 83-79 | Actual: 79-83
2024: 84-78 | Actual: 80-82
The team aimed to be middle of the road and still missed. Every team has bad injury luck and surprise underperformances, but the promise of the premise when moving on from Brian Sabean/Bobby Evans to the next generation of baseball technocrats is that your team is going to have solid depth to weather these storms.
Instead, six years on, the Giants had to sign a wrong-side-of-30s Matt Chapman to a long-term extension because they couldn’t develop a Matt Chapman of their own or create him in the aggregate. When they lost Jung Hoo Lee they lost basically the only leadoff hitter in the organization. They didn’t have any arms ready to go to plug in for Alex Cobb and Robbie Ray, and either overestimated or underperformed on the coaching side with Kyle Harrison and Jordan Hicks. This is not to say there weren’t successes, but those wins mostly covered the losses, and as projection vs. reality shows, it still wasn’t enough to break even.
This year and in most of the last six, the team has been unable to achieve escape velocity from the orbit of .500 Baseball, and .500 Baseball looks right now to be their absolute ceiling. But since nobody knows anything, whether or not the team makes a change in the front office, the situation could flip by next March.
On top of Ryan Walker and Patrick Bailey, they have a couple of young position players and a couple of young pitchers who lay a foundation for hope next season. And so if you want to be generous — or at the very least fair — you can hang on that side of the line and bark at people like me who feel it’s time for a change. I’ll argue the actual track record outside of 2021 and add that every season has some measure of hope simply because it’s new. That’s why hope springs eternal: there’s always next year.
For a moment in time, the franchise had the chance to seize the “champions” label and stay in the same conversation as the Yankees and Dodgers (which, if we’re being honest, is unearned, but because they succeed & spend and occupy the other coast, sticks), but they’ve fallen so far that they’re not even in the “perennial contender” tier like Atlanta and the Cardinals — and even St. Louis is at risk of slipping out of that consensus with back-to-back down years. The Red Sox took themselves out of this classification, too, because it’s extremely profitable resting on their laurels here in the 21st century.
The Giants haven’t done that, but they have tried to field as compelling a product as possible under their self-imposed limitations. One can’t argue that they’ve tried everything because they haven’t:
Tanked
I don’t think the Giants should lose 100+ games in 4-5 straight seasons just to scoop up maybe 8-10 players with star prospects and wait for 3-4 of them to hit. I think that would be a terrible path to pursue given that they’re now the only game in the Bay Area and installing a poop factory in the middle of Mission Rock would be bad for business. Plus, there’s no guarantee they’ll become the next Astros or Orioles by tanking.
Spent like Steve Cohen
They’re not going to offer Juan Soto 10 years and $500 million even if they might’ve been on board with Shohei Ohtani’s offer. I’ll give the Giants credit and believe that they were on board with whatever Ohtani’s group suggested because they knew he wouldn’t sign with them ultimately — on the other hand, if the discussions had gone in their favor, it would’ve been easy to convince the team’s 10,000 investors that this was a good deal because of how it opened up the Japanese market.
But because of how hard this season’s record-setting payroll flopped, knowing that spending $250+ million won’t improve their chances, a strategic retreat from the Competitive Balance Tax threshold is to be expected, and since the Giants already have to pay players 10% more just to get them interested and the team will have plenty of holes to fill as they do every year, there simply won’t be any money for big splashes.
Could the next baseball exec pull off some kind of big trade? Stay tuned.
Allowed Baseball Ops to allocate more money for development
While the Giants did build a new Arizona complex to finally bring their minor league operation up to date, they haven’t innovated in that part of the operation. There’s a very good chance that the owners want to see every penny on the screen rather than spent on minor leaguers or coaches or player development; at least not in a way that doesn’t simply hit the bare minimum, a minimum that has shrunk ever since Jeff Luhnow devised a profit-boosting plan to creatively destroy the minor leagues.
While the Bill Neukom termination many years ago was at least 50% a personality clash, it’s also true that his plan to reinvest earnings into the business was not a popular one, and the team has mostly struggled to develop since. The Barry Bonds home run chase from 2005-2007 gave cover to a rough roster that allowed for a kind of soft tank. Coupled with some key additions to the front office, those better draft picks would help Brian Sabean & co. find gems in the draft that created the era of success we all miss today.
This trio of actions shouldn’t be taken as a call to action, only as background to lead you to the point I think we’ve all realized for some time now, whether we consider who’s in the front office or who’s on the top step of the dugout. In order for the Giants to succeed, they need to have the right personnel.
They’re not the Angels, Rockies, Reds, Pirates, White Sox, A’s, and Marlins, franchises that are hopeless from the jump because of their owners. The Giants might make the wrong choices this offseason, but we can at least have in mind that they’re committed to getting better; but, whatever the process for making sound baseball moves was before today, I have to believe it’s gone now.
Most fans are tired of the status quo. Buster Posey certainly is, but again, nobody knows anything. If they did, then they wouldn’t be in the spot they’re in now — at least from a frustration standpoint. So, I think they are firmly in trial and error mode. That might be a good thing, though, as they’re probably just a couple of moves away — on or off the field — from a vibe shift that does the trick. But we can only hope that it all works out.
If you’re not interested in hope as a strategy, I don’t blame you. At least Oracle Park hasn’t lost its luster.