When I say something like “The Giants view players solely as assets, which is dehumanizing and makes it harder to root for them as a franchise,” there’s always going to be a part of me that thinks, Am I being too hard on them? I understand that this is a business and there’s a lot of money involved. I understand that sometimes the boss has to make hard decisions for the good of the group. And so maybe I shouldn’t take Farhan Zaidi’s callousness as a sign of a rot deep inside both him and the San Francisco Giants. Maybe I should withhold judgment until more evidence is in.
Usually I’m happier when I’m proven right.
I guess I’m still happier than JD Davis, though.
Yes, the Giants officially waived Davis yesterday, getting rid of last year’s starting third baseman for the sweet, sweet reward of paying him a lot less than he won in arbitration. While he beat the team and a panel awarded him $6.9 million (Nice!), because he was cut more than 15 days before the start of the regular season, he will only see $1.1 million of that (Not nice!) and is also out of a job (Perhaps…the least nice? No, that’s probably the money).
I have seen some Giants fans make the argument that this is good for both sides. The Giants save some money and JD Davis gets to pick his next team. Win-win! Boy, isn’t it great when a situation just works out for everyone and there are no bad guys? Like, when a player comes to the Giants, you know Farhan sits him down and says, “First of all, we have a No Assholes rule.” And it’s great to see the team live up to that.
Gotcha! Just kidding! What a great joke that was. No, the Giants come off like a big bag of dicks here.
I understand the impulse to want to see the best in the sports team you have probably loved for a long time. “Here’s how the bad thing they’re doing is Actually Good,” you want to say, telling yourself that you haven’t wasted tens of thousands of hours of your life on a baseball team that is not only going nowhere but owned and operated by the most boring-ass garden variety shitheads imaginable. “They must have to have a secret plan to not just screw over a perfectly decent player who didn’t do anything wrong.”
But they don’t.
From Davis’s perspective, he’s going to lose a lot of money and will likely end up with a team that is worse than the Giants. It’s hard to see that as a positive for him. From the team’s perspective, well, it could not be more clear that the Giants have no plan beyond Patch The Roster Together Until The Prospects Start Being Good. Matt Chapman was a better patch than JD Davis, so out goes JD Davis. They could solve this problem without paying too much money, so they did that. It is a simple calculation, lacking both fuss and muss.
It is also, as I argued a week ago, an inhuman, amoral way to run a business. It places profitability as the main goal of the baseball team, which seems understandable until you consider that a team which is more profitable in the short term at the expense of its on field profit will likely be much less profitable in the long term, since it will not attract the new fans it will need in order to continue making money. Does it seem like the Giants should have kept JD Davis, who by both Fangraphs and Baseball Reference WAR was one of their five best position players last year? Yes, it does. Would they rather have saved $5.8 million that they could then not spend on Blake Snell? You can plainly see that the answer is yes.
Because, really, money is the only way to explain going from Starting Third Baseman to Not Good Enough To Be On The Team in the space of signing one player. The Giants aren’t alone in not wanting to pay Davis — multiple teams have openings at third base, and none of them picked him up for the low, low price of paying him some money but not giving up prospects — so maybe they just had a terrible Plan B for Matt Chapman. Maybe everyone can see that JD Davis is actually bad, and that’s why nobody wanted to trade for him or sign him.
But it does seem suspicious that the Giants seemed to very deliberately maneuver their way into taking advantage of the loophole that means they don’t have to pay Davis. It seems questionable that they went out of their way to go to the arbitration trial with him, even offering a pre-arbitration settlement that was less than the number they offered in arbitration, an hour before their self-imposed deadline for making a deal. It sure does seem like they only wanted to have JD Davis as insurance in their negotiations with Chapman, and that as soon as Scott Boras was convinced that the Giants might walk away, Chapman’s price went down and Davis went away.
And that’s a dick move. Screwing with JD Davis’s career in order to save some money on Matt Chapman is an action taken by a dick. Setting a precedent in order to strong-arm players in the future — and do not be mistaken, because that is exactly what will happen — is a thing that a dick would do. If the counterargument is that these are exactly the things that make it a good business decision, well, okay, but if a good business decision means being a dick then that’s still a bad thing.
I understand this deal from a business perspective because I understand that the Giants are not going to spend money that they do not have to spend. The fact that this money-saving loophole even exists is absurd, of course, but that’s beside the point, other than the part where the point is about how people who run baseball teams seem to actively loathe the players on said baseball teams.
But there seems to be an awfully big crowd determined to tell everyone not to think about the people who make up baseball rosters. Don’t worry about them, they’ll say. They make more money than you, so they’re doing great! But that’s a shitty way to look at sports and a shitty way to look at life. The economic structures of baseball should not be set up to incentivize this behavior. There should not be a specialized carveout in the CBA that says “You have to pay every player the money you agreed to pay them, except in this one particular instance.” Baseball set that rule up anticipating screwing a player over in a situation just like this, so the “The Giants were just playing by the rules” argument is a bunch of weak horseshit, because the Giants helped create those rules.
You are what you do. The Giants saw a chance to save money by being dicks, so they did it. The Giants are dicks. It’s not what any of us want, but then, JD Davis doesn’t want to be a free agent right now either.
Well stated.
I’m reading this as the Giants set up Davis in such away that if they got Chapman, they could release Davis and it cost them just 1.1 million instead of 6 million. And the Giants are dicks for doing so. Normally I’d say that just business but the tactics they used and you highlighted do seem sneaky? Also, Davis was ill served by his agent.
I think the bigger picture is that this is another chapter in which a Giant leaves with bad feelings about the organization. Each episode of Gausman, Wood, Crawford and Davis can be explained. Sort of. But when you add all these pissed of players (and those we don’t know about) to the churn and burn “Giants”, it creates a picture of…
A big bag of dicks!
I am equally fascinated by some fans on MCC contradictory stances of basing their support of Zaidi in part on the grounds that having a front office lead by a POC is a good in itself for progressive diversity and inclusion reasons while the same front office leader behaves in ways that are dickish to employees (labor). It’s a topic for another day or perhaps another substack, I suppose.
Anyways, what a dick that guy!