Fine, let's wade into the stupid San Francisco Discourse

Please believe me that I don't want to do this

Last week, the Giants didn’t sign Shohei Ohtani. They also didn’t sign Shohei Ohtani the week before that, or the month before that, or ever, but suddenly it became a News Story for whatever reason. Who can remember if he actually signed with a team recently? I sure can’t!

But last week, for whatever reason, it became a story, and the team had to answer some questions about it. Farhan Zaidi first insisted that the team wasn’t being cheap — they had agreed to Ohtani’s demands regarding both salary and salary structure — and that he simply chose another team. Then Andrew Baggarly called Buster Posey, who offered a few reasons that big free agents haven’t signed with the Giants.

One of the factors Posey listed was the perception of San Francisco as an unsafe, undesirable city to live in. Surely this observation, which we have all witnessed in both national and local media, wouldn’t ruffle too many feathers, right?

Folks, those feathers turned out to be extremely ruffled.

I mean, it makes sense, right? We’ve all been hearing this for years. San Francisco used to be the shining jewel of California, the beautiful city, the place where arts and technology and commerce all came alive and came together to produce something unique and beautiful. There was energy there, and excitement, and innovation. Now there’s shit.

Sorry, I wasn’t saying the city is shit. I was saying there’s shit on the sidewalk right now, and I don’t want either of us to step in it. Sorry for the confusion.

Also the city is shit.

That message has been playing and replaying and echoing and rhyming like jazz for years. San Francisco: bad. Homeless. Feces. Dirty. Rent is $3400 a month for a studio in the Tenderloin, but it’ll only be discounted that far if you take a shift selling fentanyl on the street three times a week. Shoplifters routinely go into Walgreens and take everything on every shelf, and the police aren’t allowed to catch them because they’re too woke. Some people even still believe in crypto. It’s a madhouse.

To the wider world, the story of San Francisco has been almost completely taken away from people who like San Francisco. So, to that wider world, San Francisco is a miserable, crime-ridden shithole with no redeeming qualities and that’s it. That’s the end of the story. It’s like St Louis, but without the big arch.

And if this is what people say to Buster Posey — if he talks to Aaron Judge, who says, “Everyone knows SF is going downhill. My parents won’t even go into the city anymore, they’re so scared of it. I’d rather stay in clean, polite, homeless-free New York, thank you very much.” — and then Andrew Baggarly asks him about free agents not signing with the Giants, then that will be a factor that Posey brings up.

Do I think that’s the biggest reason? No, I think the fact that the Giants have had one good season since 2017 is a larger factor. I think Scott Boras, while also trying to get the Giants to pay more money for his clients, was essentially right:

The Dodgers were already a great team, and Ohtani made them greater. The Diamondbacks went to the World Series last year. Even without Juan Soto, the Padres are a more talented team than the Giants. The Rockies have a nice ballpark and the state of Colorado features many outstanding national parks. If the money is equal, what would make a free agent sign with the Giants over those teams? Well, a city with a strong reputation for safety would be a good start, and, uh-oh, Spaghetti O’s!

The fact that San Francisco is not an especially dangerous city is no more relevant than the fact that Buster Posey did not trash San Francisco. As soon as the narrative is out there, people look for evidence for it, and confirmation bias runs amok. You can debunk misinformation until you’re blue in the face, but a lot of the time, that just makes people dig in deeper with their preconceptions, and then they’re going to call in to sports talk radio and yell about how Posey hates the Bay Area.

But the larger question here is something else. Why can’t the Giants sign the big free agents? That’s the thing that everyone wants to know, right? That’s the real issue. Well, okay, I’ll tell you.

It’s because the Giants aren’t special.

To us, the Giants are special. To Giants fans, the San Francisco Giants are the main characters of baseball, and all the other teams exist solely to be their foils, and create obstacles that the Giants may or may not overcome.

To professional baseball players, the Giants are one of 30 teams, and that’s it. That’s not to say there aren’t special teams. The Yankees are special. The Dodgers are special. A tier below that, you have the Cubs and the Red Sox and the Cardinals. Then a tier below that, you have whoever’s good right now and can be expected to keep being good for a while: the Braves, the Rangers, the Astros, the Phillies. Then you have the Giants, who have history on their side the same way the Tigers do. There are good things about the organization — I still have them above average. But there are better things about other organizations, and they’ll take priority.

The way for a team like that to sign a big free agent is to offer way more money than anyone else. That’s how the Mariners got Robinson Cano back in the day, and that’s how the Giants almost got Carlos Correa this time last year. Shohei Ohtani wasn’t interested in more money, and so he wasn’t going to pick the Giants. Yoshinobu Yamamoto might be persuaded by $30 million more from San Francisco, or he might prefer to use that as leverage to get another $10 million from the Yankees, trusting that increased endorsement revenue will make it up for him. I don’t know. I’m not optimistic about the Giants signing him, but we’ll see how it plays out.

The larger point is this: the Giants may well have made a great pitch that Ohtani just wasn’t interested in. Part of that lack of interest probably had to do with the reputation of the city — maybe the first thing he always wants to do in a new place is visit the local drugstore — but more of it is likely the situation of the team.

We can complain about perceptions of San Francisco all day (and I’m considering it), but changing those perceptions is just about impossible, and won’t get free agents in the door anyway. But it’ll leave the door just a bit more ajar, so that if one day the team is a perennial contender again, instead of winning 107 games and not being over .500 for the previous or next two years, guys will want to be part of this team.

The answer is winning. If you win, players will give the city a chance and see it’s more than its reputation. If you win, players will want to come to the winning team. If you win, it all kinda takes care of itself. If you have that farm system that everyone knows will churn out a bunch of stars, then free agents will come to play with those future stars (see: Lester, Jon, signing with the Cubs). The formula is simple but very, very difficult to pull off.

When you win, the streets look cleaner. When you win, the city seems safer.

When you win, none of that other shit matters.