Massive ambitions, massive disappointment, and now comes austerity.
Moments before I hit publish on this weekend’s BP, I got an alert on my phone about this Andrew Baggarly piece for The Athletic: “Giants anticipate a payroll reduction in 2025: Source.” I skimmed it quickly and put a couple of quotes into that other post and then went back to sleep.
Having slept on it, I’ve gotta say, the San Francisco Giants are not the team we hoped they’d be after last decade. While they’re far from the team we imagined the past few years, I don’t think we were prepared for a sauceless, also-ran personality, not just after three championships in five years, but after winning 107 games just a few years ago.
So, Baggarly’s article does a great job — like Shaq’s dunk on Chris Dudley — factchecking some of my figures and thoughts in my post from the other day about the team’s payroll situation and actually making clear that the Giants are simply not in a good position, financially. $30 million dollars off of revenue projections! Austerity measures! Tangible information that might make you feel like how I can make you feel when speculating or projecting the Giants with far less data.
The real world implications of this austerity remains to be seen. They never had a shot at signing Juan Soto and after all the high profile failures — not just missing out on big names previously, but also winning only 80 games the year that they did add some — I think Giants fans have been conditioned to expect nothing less than failure in free agency.
But, they’ve also been connected to Ha-Seong Kim, who would improve the roster while not costing them a whole lot of money and resources (draft picks & bonus money). Plus, as Baggarly notes on Twitter/X, they did sign Matt Chapman, and if Farhan Zaidi had let him go to free agency, then he would’ve been the best third baseman on the market. So, with that in mind, and the certainty that they won’t trade Logan Webb, it’s clear they have a somewhat intriguing roster to build off of — the situation going into next season isn’t exactly dire, it’s just not exciting. It might not even be all that interesting.
And that’s what the last decade has proven out: the Giants are boring and lack character. Back in September, I opined,
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.
Whether it’s shifting demographics or a surge in the cost of living, the team has simply not been able to capitalize on their success beyond constructing the Mission Rock development around the park. When a previous generation of this ownership group kept the franchise in San Francisco, they had the goal of winning championships and building a new stadium. They accomplished both and used that momentum to drive the next phase, literally “Giants Baseball 2.0,” as Larry Baer told Sports Business Journal back in September.
The San Francisco Chronicle reviewed Mission Rock this past August, concluding, “At this stage […] there’s a whiff of make-believe to the grand ambitions. The Bay Area already has its full share of new towers and infill blocks that come wrapped in lively rhetoric but turn out to be drab. […] Who knows? With time and patience, Mission Rock might actually feel like an actual neighborhood. Sometimes, there’s substance to the hype.”
Hardly a glowing review, but it’s also sort of like what’s been going on with the Giants: “I don’t know… maybe? The 50th percentile projection presents a decently high floor, and if other conditions break right, maybe it’ll turn out great?” The Mission Rock investors had better hope the development has better luck than the baseball team. The best laid plans in that facet of the business have failed to bring in more money.
The Giants helped kill the A’s and it didn’t bring them a windfall. Farhan Zaidi was brought in to make 30 cents look like 30 dollars. That never happened. Both he and Bobby Evans were able to spend big in an offseason and it resulted in abject failure that pushed the team further behind the competition.
We also know that there’s some wordplay going on. Did the Giants lose $30 million dollars and need to take out a loan to pay it or did that $30 million eat into projected dividend payments? Since they didn’t need a loan I assume this is just an issue with dividends. And taxes. Fans don’t want to hear excuses or be forced to care about dividend statements. Franchises are eternal, but the lifespan of a fan is not. If an ownership group doesn’t want to win, then they’re losers. They might be savvy business leaders whose wealth immiserates the unworthy (or whatever craven capitalist stance you want to take in defense of people who profit off a pro sports team), but from a simple competitive standpoint, they’re losers.
Since they’re not going to keep spending, why not go the other way? The one thing the Giants haven’t done in earnest is reinvest money back into the team. Yes, they did build the Arizona complex to finally bring their player development operation into the 21st century — that shouldn’t be seen as proof of effort, but the bare minimum required to function in the sport. In the Baggarly piece, there’s austerity measures for the organization but not player payroll? If they have “perhaps $30-$40 million” to spend in free agency, why bother?
Why not hire back some terminated scouts? Why not hire more coaches? Why not build in more technological training infrastructure, think tanks, etc.? Spend a little bit on player payroll and hope to get substantially lucky on the field is turn of the century thinking. The other teams out there with more resources or smarter guys are really, truly lowering the odds of the baseball flukes we grew up on. Baseball flukes do still happen, but this isn’t a Mission: Impossible movie. Hope is not a strategy.
Now, perhaps Baggarly’s report isn’t the final word on this and maybe the team will adjust as the offseason progresses, but it seems to me that the Giants don’t intend to become really good in any one area or corner the market on any type of player or personnel. Buster Posey wants to be a scouting-led organization, and yet we haven’t heard anything about new scouts being hired. We’ve heard a lot about people leaving the organization, however.
The industry consensus is that it’s important to reduce costs by reducing human labor, and so I suspect the Giants won’t suddenly hire more scouts and outpace every other team. They’re also a pennypinching team (given their lack of popularity as defined by revenue — Baggarly was quick to point out that the attendance spike was mostly attributable to discounted tickets), and that’s probably why they’re getting rid of some computers and servers and they won’t staff up more in that area.
Despite all that, there’s a logical reason to spend that meager amount of available funds on development & scouting and not on MLB payroll: it has a better chance of making the team better — and I don’t mean better as in 2-3 years, as I often joke, I mean in 2025. If they can get even 3 players out of their big pool of questionable young players — Luis Matos, Grant McCray, Wade Meckler, Casey Schmitt, Brett Wisely, Hayden Birdsong, Tristan Beck, Landen Roupp, Kyle Harrison, Keaton Winn — coached up to 2-win players (that’s generally considered “league average”) and hit on one trade, then that should show up very strongly in the 2025 standings, and that’s before considering the possibility that Bryce Eldridge might be able to help or Heliot Ramos and Tyler Fitzgerald build on their success.
As I reach the end here I can feel how some of this is alarmist. As Andrew Baggarly notes, the Giants haven’t been a top 5 payroll team in nearly a decade. We are all fully conditioned to know that the Giants are not even in the same tier of talent and competitiveness as the Dodgers, Yankees, Braves, Phillies, and Mets. They’re currently the fourth-best team in their division and probably will be for the next few seasons unless the Diamondbacks and/or Padres suffer surprise setbacks. They are a “middle of the pack” team” in every respect.
It’s hard to square that reality with the history of the franchise, the city it plays in, and who’s now running their Baseball Operations — the team can’t escape the romanticism that surrounds it. I am not advocating for the team to become the Tampa Bay Rays, but I am saying that the one thing they have not tried is simply reinvesting gobs of money back into the organization. Buster Posey’s main value as the face of the franchise is that he can make any idea seem like the best idea to a significant majority of its fans. If the only idea his peers in the ownership group want him to sell is austerity, though, that’s a signal to fans that we should trust our gut and care less and less about a thing we all love. Tough times!