I would've gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for you meddling owners
Doesn't have the same ring, does it?
It was several years after Bobby Evans’ firing that I first saw the truth from the Giants beat writers. After the disastrous 2017 season, he had committed to the core of the roster, acquiring Evan Longoria and Andrew McCutchen to turn a 98-loss team back into a contender. It was a bad idea, as I argued at the time. It looked bad in foresight, sight, and hindsight. There were pluses — the 2018 Giants were more watchable than the 2017 Giants — but also the massive minus of losing Bryan Reynolds and what turned out to be the smaller but still notable minuses of losing Kyle Crick and (eventually, after he reached his fourth team) Christian Arroyo.
How could Bobby Evans not realize this was a stupid idea? How could he mortgage the future to polish a turd? Why wasn’t he as smart as me, someone who knew he shouldn’t have done that? Why was he ruining my favorite baseball team by being bad at running it?
Oh, Andrew Baggarly et al said later. It wasn’t Evans. It was ownership. They ordered him to go trade for some stars, and so he did it because they were his bosses. Sorry for blaming you for the idea, Bobby! I should have only blamed you for giving up Reynolds, who presumably was the key part of the McCutchen deal, which could not have gone through without him. Oh well.
This concludes the portion of today’s newsletter that is about Bobby Evans.
Farhan Zaidi entered this offseason with a mandate from ownership: Make the team less that (gestures at 2023). For the entire second half of the season, the Giants were dull, lifeless, and unwatchable. Attendance was low. Excitement was nonexistent. Thesauri were worn out looking for other ways to say “feckless.” And so, the team had to make a change. Goodbye, Gabe Kapler. Hello, we hope, exciting new players who are not last year’s non-exciting players.
And then the Giants struck out (baseball term!) on the biggest free agents and so they traded for Robbie Ray.
I don’t want to minimize the Jung Hoo Lee move, but what ownership wanted was Shohei Ohtani or Yoshinobu Yamamoto. They wanted something to sell for a long time, and they didn’t get it. Now, instead of that, they could have pivoted to Cody Bellinger (former MVP!) or Blake Snell (Cy Young winner!), but their contracts at current asking prices are phenomenally likely to go badly (9 years for Blake Snell? 9 years for Blake Snell???). Isn’t there another option, I can imagine Greg Johnson asking Zaidi. Isn’t there something we can put together?
I don’t think it was a directive that Zaidi go out and get Robbie Ray specifically. I think, after the misses on the two guys the Giants actually wanted, he had to find something to sell. I think that ownership probably learned at least a little from “TRADE FOR GUYS I’VE HEARD OF OR ELSE” but their overriding philosophy isn’t that much different. I also think that this is understandable and possibly even generally a good thing — it has been several paragraphs since I mentioned how unpleasant the 2023 Giants were, so let me reiterate: no one enjoyed watching them and mandating this year’s team be better is understandable at the least.
So, when Zaidi was casting about for a way to acquire a guy who had some kind of award win under his belt, I think he struck on a way to do it while also making a Good Baseball Move and also also trading with his bestie Jerry Dipoto. I think he’s reasonably satisfied with Robbie Ray as an improvement to the roster. I think he sees all the possible upside on the current roster .
But I don’t think the owners do.
When you look back at that last Bobby Evans year, you see a team that understood that there had to be something fans wanted to see. Yeah, yeah, I also remember when Zaidi’s shit worked and the team won 107 games and everything, but those days are now three years old. In the here and now, the team needs a jolt in the community, and Bob Melvin just isn’t going to do it.
And that’s why all the Matt Chapman rumors seem so plausible. Sure, I have lots of concerns about Chappie, but he’s going to make a lot of money, he’s going to improve the team, and he might draw in some disaffected A’s fans who have lost faith in their own team just because of everything they’ve said and done over the last several years. The Giants need to have all of those things if they’re going to rebuild the reputation they had even in 2016.
So I still think Chapman is coming. If that falls through for whatever reason, I don’t think the Giants are going to force a Whisenhunt-and-Matos-for-Corbin-Burnes trade or anything, but they can’t be satisfied with what they have. Farhan might be; he may very well be happy to work the margins and acquire nice players cheaply and wait for that big fish to fall into his lap. Even knowing that the roster as-is isn’t really good enough, he might still be content with it heading into the season, with the knowledge that he can keep tinkering until the last out is recorded at the end of September.
Ownership, though, can’t be happy. Sure, they like not spending money because it’s cheaper than spending money, but I believe that the Giants ownership group wants, at the very least, to put a superficially entertaining baseball team together. If they have to meddle to make that happen, so be it. Six years ago, that meddling had some disastrous results. If they did it today, well, we won’t know the consequences for a while. Just like back then, a Chapman deal would make the team more interesting this year. As for the long term, well, whatever, that’s a problem for later.
It’s hard for me to imagine the Asset Managers to really care or know enough about baseball to instruct Farhan to make the team better. They will likely only come to the realization there is a problem if attendance drops again. But I can’t imagine they would seriously think about firing Farhan and going in a different more expensive direction. The goal is to be good enough for the 3WC, break even and ride the pro sports asset appreciation wave while the surrounding businesses (CRE, stadium, media rights) provide healthy income streams. These are not baseball people or entertainment industry types.