Putting the fun in fungible

They're on a four game winning streak and I'm still complaining. I'm incorrigible!

The biggest thing Ross Stripling did was being honest. He was frustrated that the Giants had made promises to him about being activated that they reneged on, frustrated that he was supposed to be pitching and he couldn’t, frustrated that he wasn’t a started all year even though that was explicitly why he had signed with the Giants, frustrated that he had fallen out of the team’s plans.

So when the media came to talk to him before Saturday’s game, he was honest. He told them how he was feeling, why he wasn’t happy with how things were going. He was perfectly aware that he hadn’t pitched the way he’d wanted to this season, but that didn’t make the situation better, and so he was honest, which was his main mistake.

Wait, no.

The biggest thing Ross Stripling did wrong was pitching badly. The second biggest thing Ross Stripling did wrong was being honest.

If Ross Stripling spends the season pitching well enough to stay in the rotation, then there’s no issue for him, and also the team probably wins more games. Also, then he gets to opt out of his contract at the end of the year and sign a much larger contract with a new team that he would not live up to, but hey, that’s the Diamondbacks’ problem.

So yes, the original problem here is that Ross Stripling has not pitched particularly well this season. He’s been serviceable in the second half, with a 4.10 ERA in 37.1 innings, but still not particularly good, and not worth squeezing out Keaton Winn (he arguably would be worth DFAing Alex Wood, but the team seems loath to do that) in order to add him to the active roster.

But also … this is just how the Giants treat players, and it sucks.

A person who plays baseball for the Giants is a fungible commodity, and the team has made that very clear. A Giants player is simply a series of inputs in the world’s most complicated spreadsheet, and the team’s goal at the end of the day is to get the spreadsheet to spit out the biggest number possible.

They might do this by taking multiple guys who were told they’d be starters and making them 3-4 inning bulk guys in bullpen games. They might do this by pinch hitting for their right-handed starter in the 4th inning because the other team put in a left-handed pitcher. Or they might do this by keeping a healthy player on the IL when he could come back.

it’s not that any of these moves are objectively bad or illogical ones. It’s that, when you take them all together, they feel shitty. Of the 28 guys in that clubhouse, at least 23 of them think that the team doesn’t really believe in them and that they will never do anything to change that. If, after last night’s game, Gabe Kapler said, “We were really happy to have Sabol lead off the 10th because we really believe in him,” Blake Sabol would be perfectly justified in thinking, No you don’t.

Because they don’t. They might well think that they don’t have any better options in that particular situation because they already used those bullets, or they might think that they just have to suffer through a Sabol AB because they don’t have another catcher, or they might think that that, for some other reason, they’re not going to do better right now. But management’s opinion is that it is their job to get a better hitter in that situation, and that is what they’re going to try to do. It’s not that they want Blake Sabol there, or that they want Blake Sabol at all. Believing in him or not believing in him is irrelevant. The spreadsheet is in charge, and one day it will choose someone else, and the team will go with that new guy instead.

So what Stripling was really saying, beyond the specific complaints about his situation, is that all of that just kinda feels like shit. When someone says, “Hey, I’ve got your back,” you don’t want to intuit a tacit until someone better comes along. When you’re a little off in your AB in the 2nd inning, you want to be able to make adjustments in the 4th instead of waiting until tomorrow. When a team tells you, “We see you as a starting pitcher,” you would like more than one start before they go, nah, never mind, we’re doing this other thing instead.

Now, I don’t want to act like I don’t see this from the team’s perspective. It is their job to get the best players they can. It is their job to get the best matchups they can. It is their job to keep a pitcher who’s pitching badly from getting a lot of important innings. And honestly, the best option for getting Stripling on the roster is taking Alex Wood off, and that would still mean problems in the clubhouse. It’s hard running a baseball team and I don’t want to pretend it’s not.

I mean, I WANT to pretend it’s not, because then I can very easily write a newsletter about how I’m smart and they’re dumb, and a bunch of people who are angry at the team for whatever reason will click on it and read it and recommend it to others, and then I can maybe create a cult of personality around myself and seize the state of Wyoming in a bloodless coup, but I already wrote that paragraph about how it’s hard to run a team, so maybe I’ll start all that on Thursday.

But there’s just a sense in which it has to feel kind of shitty being on the Giants. Not decline-a-lucrative-2024-option shitty, but a low-grade malaise. You want to be in an environment where you’re valued and you’re given a good chance to contribute. I think it’s pretty clear that a good chunk of the team doesn’t feel that way. I see it from the team’s perspective, but that doesn’t make it suck any less.