The most compelling argument for cleaning house

Fan demands are different from ownerships’, and that creates a tension that’s rarely resolved.

The San Francisco Giants won’t be a playoff team in 2024, but they have 30 games remaining. In that time, they have the chance to make it seem like they might be a playoff team or they could simply fall to pieces.

The latter seems likely, but fandom prevents us from denying the possibility of the former; and for smarter, wiser, better fans there’s always the joy that comes from watching minor young players develop, and the Giants have plenty of those.

By now, it’s all very simple: the Giants are neither good nor bad. It has never been more difficult to be good in Major League Baseball than today because of technological advancements. The quality of pitches has improved, scouting and game planning is more advanced because both use computing power that’s significantly better and faster than the human brain. That’s also why it’s never been easier than now to be better than bad. Any team that puts forth effort can raise their performance floor through some very simple math-based adjustments.

This is what the Giants have done and why they’re better now than they were 6-7 years ago. Now, are they better than they were 10 years ago? No. And the 2004 team, while having Barry Bonds, was not a better situation than the 2014 Giants, though it was, perhaps, better than the 1994 Giants. But we don’t get to 2014 as the capper to a run that began in 2009 without making a mess and going through some bad times. Most people understand this.

The calls for “FIRE EVERYBODY” after the Giants post their 3rd straight mediocre season are — and I say this knowing full well that with 30 games left, there’s still a sliver of a glimmer of a residue of a chance that the team could surprise on either side of mediocre — warranted in that it’s not the job of a fandom to stay on top of every minor positive development and then use it as proof that the future will be better. It’s not a fan’s job to carry the yoke of a baseball exec’s CYA-level statements about process and luck, either.

But “FIRE EVERYBODY” doesn’t offer a better future, either, and for a couple of reasons:

1. The next President of Baseball Operations or GM won’t be better

Now, is this me saying that I think, say, Kim Ng is a worse baseball exec than Farhan Zaidi? Absolutely not. What I’m saying is that the Giants are unlikely to go in that direction. If the Bob Melvin hire is any indication, they’re liable to bring in a guy from the previous generation to get the job done, and outside of maybe Dave Dombrowski that’s a limited pool of people whose style is unlikely to work in the 2020s.

Demanding change for the sake of change is precisely how the team went from Gabe Kapler to Bob Melvin (and Ryan Christenson and Bryan Price). This is not a defense of Gabe Kapler! I am only pointing out that the freely available household name isn’t a good thing — the old school guy is unemployed for a reason! (In Ng’s case, it’s because of Marlins b.s.).

2. Farhan Zaidi needs his “I am not an idiot” moment

Baseball execs sought and succeeded at becoming as (or in some markets) more popular than the players, and so they are as worthy of boos or (if you’re a kinder person) tough questions that intend to dig deeper into their mindset.

Brian Sabean was quick to anger and had very human responses. Can we crack the practiced presentation of Farhan Zaidi with heckling and dunks that would cause him to realize that we’re not trapped with him, he’s trapped with us?

Farhan Zaidi’s 12+-year old model has guaranteed a floor of 75 wins; but, as he said in 2013:

The question is: how do you get beyond that point? One way is to add at the top of the roster with stars, which for us [The 2013 Oakland A’s] just isn’t an affordable strategy, and the other way is to manage from the bottom and take players that are liabilities, even small liabilities, and say, “What does it do to the collective team at the end of 162 games, if we can shave some of this off the bottom in terms of the productivity?” Whether it’s a backup catcher or a utility infielder, the 9th or 10th bullpen arm that you have that’ll be up and down all year — really optimizing those positions for us became an important part about building a competitive team.

We have enough data now to know that he doesn’t know how to get beyond that point. They have blind lucked into 107, 81, and 79 wins, but maybe he’d argue differently, and I’d like to hear it. Players are judged for their swing decisions, why not the front office?

Point is, Zaidi is the face of the modern baseball exec, and if the Giants didn’t go old school Walt Jocketty-type and didn’t go with Kim Ng (a person who straddles the line between generations) they’d get someone who sounds a lot like Zaidi — or at least adhere to very similar principles. Which means the same stock answers and deflections. One of these cities has got to get these guys to crack and reveal a personality, an actual belief system. Why not us? “FIRE EVERYBODY” denies us this simple pleasure.

Okay, I’ll admit that this particular reason for not firing everybody is mainly for me. But, I promise, at the end of the day, I’m like everybody else: I just want to see the Giants win. Getting deep into the numbers can be disorienting sometimes. What are we rooting for here? I’m reminded of this tweet a lot:

The Giants traded away Jorge Soler and Alex Cobb and we were supposed to walk away from the trade deadline thinking the Giants were fielding their best possible team — because they said so. Because they had rookies who could step in. Even though we’d already seen rookies slump and burn out and unexpected injuries expose shallow depth.

I’m supposed to look at data like this —

— and ignore it because they still have a shot at the Wild Card and are around .500.

I’m a little tired of filtering my every thought about baseball — especially the Giants — through FanGraphs and all the relevant SABR orthodoxy but that’s how I’m able to make any sense of what’s going on with the sport most of the time and that’s how the game is managed. They’re there to disprove emotion and guide sensible decision-making.

At the same time, we know that numbers can be a crutch or a dodge, making the whole affair (being an MLB fan) sometimes feel like you’re being conned. And that’s why it’s very easy for me to agree from time to time that a cleansing fire feels great to imagine — like a relief. But ultimately, I (or we) can control our feelings.

The other extreme, of course, is being a punkasaurus in service of The Almighty Rebuild:

We don’t know anything, what’s the return?

For Eloy? A flippin’ bag of balls. I wanted to say the other word.

I can’t believe it’s come to that.

This is a joyous day. This is a joyous day. You guys know where I sit with Eloy. That’s a guy as catastrophic as any failure that’s come through the rebuild.

Human history has shown us that there are people who are simply programmed to devote themselves to leadership at all times. Makes sense. They provide a sense of certainty in an uncertain world. A more mature way to put this, I guess, is that Farhan Zaidi had a lot of work to do when he became the President of Baseball Operations and to any reasonable person he’s done a fair job of moving the team off of where they were in 2017 and 2018.

But the Giants will have to go 16-14 to avoid .500 again or 20-10 to end the season 86-76 (which might not even be enough to be a Wild Card). It’s unlikely they will accomplish either result or even somewhere in between. They haven’t been able to escape the gravity well of .500 for nearly three seasons.

Since going 107-55, the Giants are 226-230. The 17th-best record in baseball. They’ve scored 1,958 runs, 23rd in MLB. Their 98 wRC+ is 19th. Their 4.01 ERA is 16th, but their arms have been +44.6 fWAR or 10th-most valuable in MLB. But not this year — when they really needed to sustain their good pitching, they fell down to the bottom third in value (9.3 fWAR – 24th, 4.17 ERA – 20th).

Every offseason feels like a mini rebuild with lots of moving pieces. Sure, they’ve managed to add new players to the mix every season (Bailey, Harrison, and Walker in 2023, Wisely, Ramos, Fitzgerald, and Birdsong this season) but in practice it’s like watching somebody deal with a leaky boat — just as they scoop out the water with a bucket more rushes in.

And so this is 1,575 words of backstory to setup the most compelling argument for why Giants ownership should consider making changes to the team, even if it’s only letting go of one guy. We know the Giants will never be able to compete with the Dodgers (barring a scandal that disrupts Guggenheim Baseball Group), but after 6 seasons, the Giant are looking up at Arizona and San Diego, too.

The Padres have a better international talent pipeline on top of their player development which has afforded them better players they could use or trade. The Diamondbacks are in a strong window of drafting and development, surviving some notable free agent flops (Madison Bumgarner, Jordan Montgomery).

While it’s true that Arizona and San Francisco have both been to the playoffs just once since 2019, which team’s future are most people taking? Don’t most of the online ball knowers hold up Arizona’s World Series run in 2023 as the goal? After ending the first half of this year 49-48, they’re 26-8 in the second half. They’re a model. The Padres will make their third trip to the playoffs in the past 6 seasons and they are better now since ditching Bob Melvin.

The Giants’ ownership group and its edicts (build & contend, the budget is the budget) can present a unique set of challenges for any baseball exec, but every team has unique parameters. Zaidi either hasn’t figured out how to excel within those constraints or ownership is pleased with the results behind the scenes. But the front of house stuff doesn’t look great. It looks fine. Sometimes.

The Giants aren’t better than their peers and haven’t been for a few seasons. I don’t think the goal was only to be better than the Bobby Evans years, but maybe I’m wrong about that. So, while I don’t co-sign the idea that it’s time to clean house, the fact that the Giants have fallen behind most of the competition is certainly reason for concern and complaint.