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 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. 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. 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. 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.
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