It’s a cruel, cruel summer
· Yahoo Sports
The San Francisco Giants are dead. Long live the San Francisco Giants. They were killed by one of the funniest cases of oversteering in the history of professional sports when a former jock bound for the Hall of Fame roundhouse kicked an overhyped nerd into baseball oblivion to make sure the team stopped letting computers make decisions for them. The team instead became a creation sprung from Buster Posey’s memory of what his championship teams were like. Last season was rocky and this season has been an unmitigated disaster, another losing season (their 7th of the last 10 seasons) locked in before June! With the franchise firmly rebranded as a loser, what can we look forward to these next four months?
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Just how bad can this bad team be?
Yesterday afternoon’s loss was certainly a microcosm of the season, but going 0-6 against the Diamondbacks over the past week has really started to create some separation from the early season and as the weather changes and other teams improve, it stands to reason that as bad as the Giants have been… it can be a lot worse.
With 56 games played, we can look at the current season in 14-game chunks.
Games 1-14: 6-8 (.429)
Games 15-28: 7-7 (.500)
Games 29-42: 5-9 (.357)
Games 43-56: 4-10 (.286)
So, the Giants scuffled when teams were still trying to get their bearing after launching from Spring Training and then once they did, the Giants were relegated to batting practice for the opposition. There are 106 games remaining in this season, which on the one hand is quite sad because the Giants are so bad, but on the other hand… well… I suppose there’s a chance we could see some improved play. That’ll be the tension opposing the “Yeah, but they’ve been so, so stinky to start the season that it would make sense if the stench was unwashable.”
Let’s just look at their schedule through the end of June. Tomorrow kicks off a 3-game series in Colorado. Then they play 4 in Milwaukee, then 3 against the Cubs at Wrigley Field. Host the Nats and Cubs then travel to Atlanta for 3 and Miami for 3. Host the Athletics for 3 and Atlanta for 3 before traveling to Arizona for more Diamondbacks. That’s 18 on the road and 12 at home. If you just apply their current winning percentages for their home/road split to this schedule (.357 road / .429 home), that’s 11-19 or 12-18, which would put the Giants at either 33-53 or 34-52 entering July. Here are the ten worst records in Giants history through the team’s first 86 games:
10. 2005 SF Giants: 37-49
9. 1900 NY Giants: 35-50
8. 1994 SF Giants: 36-50
7. 1943 NY Giants: 34-51-1
6. 1976 SF Giants: 34-52
5. 2017 SF Giants: 34-52
4. 1984 SF Giants: 33-53
3. 1956 NY Giants: 32-54
2. 1985 SF Giants: 31-55
1. 1902 NY Giants: 28-57
So, 16-14 just to stay out of the top 10 worst starts to a season and 13-17 to avoid paralleling the 2017 or 1985 seasons. But we’ve seen how these jabronis play and, well, when they’re not being overmatched talent-wise, they are impossibly stupid in the field. It’s your right as a fan to hope they turn things around, but there is no evidence to suggest that a turnaround is in progress and based on aging curves for the core hitters plus the current results about the same amount of evidence to start building a case that one might be possible. That schedule doesn’t obviously present the pathway to a nice winning streak, either.
The Giants have told us for 56 games that they’re a bad team out to dispense bad times. We should believe them.
The trade deadline.
Obviously. It’ll be like an organ donation, right? Which parts of the Giants’ corpse can help another team thrive down the stretch or even beyond? Buster Posey’s moves at last year’s deadline shows that he’s not afraid to purge a roster when he feels it’s due for improvement. The problem is, he’s running out of the previous guy’s guys to move… unless Logan Webb miraculously returns to form this season; and then, there might be an opportunity for a big move.
Robbie Ray, it feels like we hardly knew ya, but appreciate watching you pitch most of the time. Luis Arraez, way to play your way into being the Giants’ lone All-Star representative. Tyler Mahle, Harrison Bader, Adrian Houser… you think they’ll be sticking around? I have never understood the compulsion by some fans to do a Rain Manesque “Trade Chapman. Trade Chapman. Trade Chapman.” every day and I can’t understand why the Giants would try to convince Chapman to waive his no trade clause in order to facilitate a deal, but that might be the move a lot of people want to see and will really be paying attention to as the calendar turns to July.
The Giants can’t formally “rebuild,” but watching them remodel this termite-infested, water damaged house that was once the centerpiece of China Basin will be at the very least interesting to watch as the summer goes on.
The farm system’s success.
Winning is good, even when it’s just in the minor leagues. That all of the levels are finding success with age appropriate prospects is heartening to see, too. There aren’t a lot of Chase d’Arnauds leading the groups. Pick some players or pick a team to follow the rest of the year and you probably won’t be disappointed. Personally, I’ve staked my mental health to Jhonny Level’s success.
When I wrote up the Chicago White Sox series preview, I learned that the White Sox’s GM Chris Getz was previously their Director of Player Development (2017-2020), and it got me wondering if maybe Randy Winn, VP of Player Development, might take over as President of Baseball Operations once Buster Posey moved on. If most of the minor league teams win championships this year, I’d think that’d be a pretty big plus on his resume, and it’d be hard to argue against him being a pivotal part of the front office.
The palace “intrigue.”
Recently, I had to change a baby in an airplane bathroom. The changing table was more like a bowl in that it had a divot in it, presumably to make laying the baby down easier. It was not easier. The changing table was also very smooth, so the baby — who likes to stand when being changed — kept sliding around… along with all the items needed to facilitate the diaper change. This led to the following sequence: diaper off, baby steps then slides into discarded pajama pants, bringing them back underneath baby just as baby urinates, soaking the pajamas. While cleaning all that up, baby poops and while trying to hold the baby in one arm to clean up with the other, the baby keeps trying to move and slides around, stepping in the poop, stepping back onto the pajamas. The baby peed again. It was 15 minutes of pee-pee-poo-poo nightmares in a 3 ft by 5 ft space and once I left I felt like Buster Posey must feel every day trying to run a baseball team: confused, angry, annoyed at having to jettison stuff that cost a decent amount of money, and covered in human waste.
Each change he has made has led to more pee, more poo, and more stepping in both. Should he have boarded this particular plane? Probably not. For most of us who suspected we’d be seeing him learn on the job, all we get is the satisfaction of knowing that there’s no use getting worked up about the team’s record anymore. It’s going to take him a long time with many lessons learned the hard way in order to turn the franchise around. Which is why I advocated for him sticking around longer than 3 years. It’s why it’s worth keeping tabs on the minor leagues. This could be very painful for a long time but then turnaround overnight.
But already we’re seeing cracks in this dilettantes’ ball. Posey’s slightly tense conversation with Brian Murphy on KNBR the other week was interesting in that he repeated “baseball is hard” more than I’d like to hear from an exec whose team isn’t so much losing to other teams as being embarrassed by them. Farhan Zaidi was a notoriously poor interview, too, and that Buster Posey has wound up sounding like him more often than not in such a brief time is funny and troubling. But Andrew Baggarly has pivoted to questioning the wisdom in hiring Hector Borg to the coaching staff. Tony Vitello has put it out there that he wasn’t as involved in the staff hiring as we were led to believe in the offseason. Buster Posey takes the blame for the team’s performance to this point and so this effort to hang some of that on the third base coach stinks, too.
Unrelated to the coaching stuff, but related to the Giants being bad, I enjoyed this posting from the other day:
It has all been amateur hour, and in an organization where Larry Baer won out over Peter Magowan and Bill Neukom, it’s pretty clear that things aren’t going to be getting “better” behind the scenes anytime soon, either. If the Giants were playing better, it probably wouldn’t matter too much, but with everything on the field able to be safely ignored, this front office and ownership group will probably get more stories written about them than they expected heading into the season.
You’re probably screaming at me for leaving out something about the young players developing. What of Bryce Eldridge? Or Jesus Rodriguez? Is Landen Roupp the Logan Webb replacement the Giants didn’t know they had until this year? Is Trevor McDonald? Will the bullpen be able to evolve into something above average? These are the obvious questions that should feel very heartening to see because it means the Giants have developed some potential major leaguers alongside all the failure and that’s before considering the players at the lower levels who are generating most of the excitement about what Randy Winn and the player development group have been doing (all of which you can track through Brady’s reporting here or at Roger Munter’s excellent There R Giants site). But I can’t help but think about the past 10+ years of Giants player development and conclude that while it’s nice to imagine a world in which the Giants draft and develop their own players who can serve as more than 20th to 26th on their depth chart, the reality is that we should keep our expectations low until proven otherwise.
That goes for everything related to the team. The championship era ended a long time ago, but now we’re past those era re-definining teams of the 80s/90s/00s/10s, too. You could maybe characterize those decades this way: Prospects/Bonds/Ballpark/Championships. What are the 20s? Disappointing? Disaster? Forgettable? Skip? Bust? Whatever it winds up being considered, what’s clear is that the Giants as we knew them are dead and gone. Nobody wanted to be in this situation on May 28th. I was hoping for a disappointing season that unraveled in August or September, as has been the custom for many years now. Was looking forward to sneaking away to catch a game and spend that time in Schrödinger Stadium, where the team could be either good or bad. But we know they’re just bad.
What’s next for the franchise is anyone’s guess, but a rebirth during this season is the only thing certain to be out of the question.