The Giants were in on Seiya Suzuki. They were interested in Nick Castellanos. They were a major player for Trevor Story. They were a finalist for Bryce Harper. They had a deal in place for Giancarlo Stanton. They could have signed a guy. They wanted to sign a guy, but he just didn’t want to come to San Francisco.
This has happened over and over in recent years. You, the Giants fan, know better than to get your hopes up. But then the Dodgers sign Freddie Freeman, and the Giants kinda have to respond to that, right? So the rumors start about Trevor Story, and you think, well, Crawford has shortstop locked down, but Story could slot right in at second or at third if Longoria gets hurt or…
It starts to seem plausible. Reasonable. Inevitable. They sign a guy, we sign a guy. Wouldn’t be much of an arms race if one side just sat it out, right?
Right?
Aw, nuts.
The Giants, it turns out, are not interested in your arms race. They have their own philosophy. They will give out deals that they think are smart and good over the long-term, and trust their scouts and player development program to do the rest. They will not go to six years for Trevor Story, or five years for Nick Castellanos, or long-term, however many years that means, for Kris Bryant. They will be cautious, and smart, and build slowly, and it will be so, so frustrating.
Like, unbelievably frustrating.
The Giants were incredibly good last year. They won 107 games, which (and I have said this before) is an unusually high number of games to win in a season for a baseball team. Then they lost their catcher, who you might have heard of. They also lost the hitter they traded for midseason, an All-Star who could play anywhere on the field1. They also lost their utility infielder, a slightly above-average hitter last year who had won the Silver Slugger in 2020.
To replace those guys, the team went out and signed a left-handed outfielder, a position the team seemingly already had covered.
I don’t want to make it seem like the team did absolutely nothing this offseason. They did a lot of work to shore up their rotation, re-signing a couple of starters, going out and signing a couple more, and then also finding some interesting guys who will show up later in the season. They’ve done good work there, and I don’t want to minimize that.
On the other hand, though, I’m going to minimize that by asking, what about the offense?
It just seems abundantly clear that the 2022 Giants offense will be categorically worse than the 2021 Giants offense. It is not an insult to Joey Bart to say that he will not hit as well as Buster Posey hit last year. It is not an insult to Thairo Estrada and Mauricio Dubon to say that they are not likely to replace Kris Bryant’s production. It is not an insult to the Giants to observe that the Dodgers went out and got a Freddie Freeman and the Giants did not.
And look, this strategy may well work out in the long run. When Farhan Zaidi was with the Dodgers, the team was notorious for not giving out long free agent contracts, which worked out reasonably well for them. Eventually, after Zaidi was with the Giants, the Dodgers had the opportunity to trade for Mookie Betts and sign him to a mammoth extension, which they did. Their financial restraint early on meant that when the team had the opportunity to acquire a generational talent, they could ensure they kept him around for a long, long time.
I very much think that Zaidi is trying to do the same thing in San Francisco. That’s why he was willing to meet with Bryce Harper and offer him the huge contract that he declined to go to the Phillies. When you have the money, you go out and find the guys it’ll be worth giving that money to for the next decade, and then you give it to them, and then you build your team around them. Zaidi didn’t think Bryant was that kind of guy, or Story, or Suzuki, so he didn’t offer the kinds of long deals they ended up getting.
And then add in that the Giants player development staff is magic. I mean, if you’re in the front office, you kinda have to take that into account, right? There will be several guys in the minors who light it up, and they’ll get a chance in the majors, and a couple of them will stick. Why pay lots of money for declining production from someone you don’t really believe in when you can pay very little money for improving production from someone who deserves a chance? Makes sense, right?
But that’s a lot of ifs. I mean, okay, I only used the word “if” once in the last paragraph, and that was to set up a hypothetical, but still, you get what I mean here. The Giants are taking their chances on a large number of individually improbable things, figuring a couple of them will work, instead of focusing on one individually probable thing.
It’s smart. It is. It’s also not very fun during the offseason. During the season, when Jason Krizan is hitting .305/.345/.455 with 3 game winning RBIs in a 4-game span, or Heliot Ramos blasts a 450 foot homer, it will be an absolute delight. If the team finds another LaMonte Wade Jr, another Darin Ruf, another Mike Yastrzemski, then we might not forget about Trevor Story, but we’ll have a nice feeling of smug superiority that our team can do it without buying the guy we wanted them to buy a couple months earlier.
If, though. If if if. Nothing is guaranteed, for Story or for the guys the Giants have in camp. There’s a lot of risk either way. Farhan and the Giants have shown which way they want to go, and we’ll just have to hope they can continue the player development winning streak they’ve been on for the last few years.
And also we’ll hope that Juan Soto wants to come to San Francisco in 2025.
Technically