What if the problem is the organization itself?

The Giants are collapsing again. The Giants are irrelevant again. At least one of those has been true in every year (other than 2020 and 2021, though it’s not like they were anything special in 2020) since 2016, and both have been true repeatedly since 2021. Hey, let’s make a table!

Fantastic¹! All those check marks really tie the room together.

But why? Why does this keep happening? It seems like there’s an inevitable descent into suckery just about every year, and the entire roster and coaching staff have both turned completely over in the last decade. Ryan Walker wasn’t blowing saves in 2016, and Eduardo Nunez isn’t choking with men in scoring position in 2025.

So really, honestly, truly: What’s wrong with the Giants?

Back in 2016, this problem was new. Sure, the Giants had missed the playoffs in 2015 after a promising start, but that was because every hitter on the team kept getting injured. That was a Hey, sometimes it’s not your year situation. In 2016, the team fell apart after the All-Star Break. The closer situation was the eye-catching disaster, of course, but the offense went from a 100 wRC+ before the break to a 91 wRC+ afterward. The starters’ ERA and FIP both went up half a run in the second half. The relievers, as a whole, were actually better in the second half, and I did quintuple-check that because it was so unexpected. But in the ninth inning, things went very badly, and that’s all anyone remembers.

We all remember what happened next, too: a devastating playoff loss, and then an offseason in which the big move was to sign Mark Melancon, and then a 2017 season that was abysmal from the jump. Over the next offseason, the Giants traded for Evan Longoria and Andrew McCutchen, and they were respectable if mediocre until September, at which point they collapsed sans McCutchen (traded to the Yankees in a waiver deal) and Buster Posey (hip surgery). Then it was on to the Zaidi years, most of which were also disappointing, and finally Posey took charge for 2025.

All the while, the players cycled through, and the coaches cycled through (Except for Taira Uematsu) and other than a fluky 2021, the results stayed the same. So at some point, if you’ve considered the other options, what does that leave you with?

A rot. A pervasive, all-encompassing rot within the Giants organization.

At some point, that becomes the only explanation. Different people are teaching different players throughout the minor league system. Different people are also teaching different players in the majors. Nothing is working. And so, inexorably, you come to the conclusion that the problem is the Giants front office.

When I talk about the front office, I don’t mean only Buster Posey. I don’t mean only Farhan Zaidi, Bobby Evans, or Brian Sabean either. There is a whole organization dedicated to running baseball operations, they’re not doing a good enough job, and they haven’t been for a long time.

I think this is a big part of the organizational consistency that we’ve seen, even as the team is bouncing between top executives. Maybe Posey hasn’t been around forever, but Jeremy Shelley has. Farhan made a lot of changes when he came aboard, but getting rid of Yeshayah Goldfarb wasn’t one of them (Goldfarb and the Giants parted ways in January, and per his LinkedIn page, he is still looking for work).

That’s not to say that either of those two men was The Problem, but there’s a whole lot more front office where they came from, and not a lot of outsiders are going to be familiar with those names. But those are the people with institutional knowledge, and it’s possible that institutional knowledge his more of a hindrance than a help.

After all, the Giants keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. Farhan Zaidi was brought in to be an innovative baseball mind, yet the Zaidi era was eerily similar to the Evans/Sabean one in terms of keeping inventory on hand, not trusting rookies, playing veterans when they were bad, and it even had its very own Dan Uggla in AJ Pollock. Buster Posey was hired to be the anti-Zaidi in a lot of ways, yet when the chips are down, he’s resorting to a lot of the same moves that Zaidi used.

This is not a Posey problem or a Zaidi problem. This is an organizational problem. It’s why I was so disappointed when Posey’s first big couple of hires didn’t come from outside the organization. I thought, and think, that the Giants need new blood in their front office. They need new opinions, new ideas, and different perspectives. They seem to have chosen institutional stagnation over challenging themselves. Just look at the special advisors that Posey has:

You have Posey and Minasian, and then four long-time Giants and Posey’s former agent. You’re not going to find new ideas there, and those are the people who Posey’s bouncing ideas off of to try to figure out how to make the team better. You can run down the list of baseball operations people if you want, but there aren’t a whole lot of them who have come in recently. These people have all been with the Giants for several years, and bully for them, but also, the Giants need people who will make them better, and it seems clear that the current crew isn’t it.

Is that why so many careers are stalling out in San Francisco? Is that why the team is so bad at hitting fastballs down the middle? Is that why Patrick Bailey’s bat has regressed so badly? I mean, probably not, but it’s not like there are enough good things happening to counteract those bad ones, so somebody’s performance is lacking.

Buster Posey’s biggest job this offseason isn’t going to be to shore up the rotation or figure out which outfielders might actually be good. His biggest job is going to be evaluating the organization and figuring out who should stay and who should go. It will not be a sexy job, and it is unlikely to make headlines, but something is rotten in Giantsland. Something does not work. And as long as that not-working something sticks around, the whole team suffers. It’s long past time to figure out why this team is in the doldrums. Otherwise, we’ll be right back here next year, which no one wants.

1. Just to be clear: my definition of collapse is that at some point in July or later the team was either contending or respectable, only to fall out of contention/respectability because of a stretch of games in which they would not stop losing. The 2018 team was .500 at the end of August, and then won 5 games in September. The 2019 team was 2.5 games out of the wild card on August 17, only to go 14-24 the rest of the way. In 2022, the team was 5 games over .500 at the All-Star Break, and 8 games under .500 two months later, before rallying to finish at .500. I hope this extensive footnote satisfies your curiosity and please don’t hesitate to encourage me to write longer, David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes in the future.