What if the problem is the owners themselves?

A sequel? Man, nobody has original ideas anymore

Last week, I discussed the inexorable disappointment of the San Francisco Giants, and wondered about why, no matter who’s leading the baseball ops department, who’s on the coaching staff, and who’s in the field, they seemingly (thanks for making me put in a qualifier, 2021!) always end up languishing in their own irrelevance by mid-September.

The conclusion, for those of you who don’t want to read that newsletter but do want to read this one: I don’t know, but Buster Posey should fire some people this offseason.

But there was one aspect of the team that I didn’t consider, partially because I had trouble fitting it in smoothly, partially because it’s a whole other topic on its own, and partially because as I was wrapping up, I was getting tired and just couldn’t start another topic. That aspect might be the most consequential of all: the fans.

Are the fans good enough? Are the fans providing enough cheers and support? It is possible that this whole thing is…

Nah, just having some fun. It’s the owners. We’re finally going to consider the question: Are the owners the ones screwing this whole thing up?

If I had to pick one moment where things started going wrong, one original sin that explains the whole enterprise, it would be back in 2011. The Giants were riding high after their first championship in San Francisco, the money was pouring in, and then-managing partner Bill Neukom wanted to invest it back into the team. After all, one trophy is great, but you know what’s greater? More trophies.

The rest of the ownership group declined. They had put money in, and now, just when they could get lots of money out, they were being told they shouldn’t? This is why you invest in something. This is the mission, and it’s about to be accomplished. I mean, evacuate in our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances, and no, I don’t know who the “they” is supposed to be in this one. Maybe the Pirates? Sure, let’s say it’s the Pirates.

The point is, instead of that money going into the team, it went into the pockets of Scott Seligman and Jed Walentas and Larry Baer. This is not to say that these men are personally responsible for that decision — for all I know, Walentas was pounding the table, insisting that the team build a modern minor league facility in Arizona a decade before they actually did, but it was falling on deaf ears — but the ownership group, as a whole, prioritized the wrong thing. They put themselves first instead of the team.

And then they got rewarded for it! With Larry Baer as Managing General Partner, the Giants won two more World Series. The farm system hadn’t completely dried up, but where just a few years earlier it was pumping out the Poseys and Bumgarners and Brandons of the world, now the team was developing Matt Duffy and Joe Panik and Hunter Strickland. These were still useful players, but they were not stars, and eventually, that was going to catch up with the team.

That catching up started in the second half of 2016, but it was 2017 when the opposite-of-fruits of the Giants farm system came into full bloom. The year was a disaster in every way, and at the end of it, ownership gave Bobby Evans a mandate: Compete in 2018. So he traded for Evan Longoria, and he traded for Andrew McCutchen, and while Christian Arroyo and Co, who went to Tampa for Longoria, never made the Giants regret that deal, the same cannot be said for Bryan Reynolds, who went to Pittsburgh for McCutchen.

Reynolds ended up being everything the Giants needed: a young, talented center fielder who put up a 4-win season in 2019, a 6-win season in 2021, and was a solid, consistent hitter for the next three years (this season hasn’t been going great for him, but you can’t win ‘em all). It’s hard not to look at the last few years of Giants baseball and not wonder What If? What if Reynolds had still been around? Would the team have avoided rushing Luis Matos or Wade Meckler? Would they have been a little less desperate and made decisions that were a little better? We know what ownership cost the team in Reynolds’s production, but what about the effects on everyone else?

Farhan Zaidi was hired after the 2018 season, and as much as the end of his tenure was disappointing, it’s hard to blame ownership too much for that. He seemed like the right hire to the baseball world, and sometimes it just doesn’t work out.

But Zaidi’s first season might be instructive about ownership’s last failing. In 2019, as the trade deadline approached, the team was not particularly good. Sure, Mike Yastrzemski was doing an unexpectedly nice job, and Alex Dickerson looked promising, but it wasn’t a championship-caliber team, and everyone knew it. The traditional move, then, would be to trade your best impending free agents at the trade deadline in order to restock the farm system. And the Giants had two really good ones.

Madison Bumgarner, a postseason legend, and Will Smith, an excellent closer, were both due to be free agents at the end of 2019. If the team was truly committed to the best long-term decisions, then it would make sense for both of them to go. As hard as it would be for fans to see Bumgarner in another team’s uniform, well, it’s not like the front office didn’t already have an idea that they weren’t going to re-sign him. And Smith had been around since 2016, but a good closer is exactly the kind of player a not-really-competing team will sell (see: Doval, Camilo).

Yet the Giants didn’t. They hung onto both Bumgarner and Smith. Sure, they traded Drew Pomeranz and Sam Dyson and Mark Melancon, but they clung to their prizes on a team that was going nowhere. It makes me wonder whose decision that was. Giants ownership talks a very big game about competing and not doing a full teardown rebuild, but what about when that’s the best thing for the team long-term? I generally appreciate the team never going into a season saying “We’re gonna be unwatchable this year,” but making them less watchable for 2 months in exchange for 6 years of more watchability seems like a good deal.

Is that philosophy doing more harm than good? I absolutely do not want this team to be the 2011-2013 Astros, who lost more than 100 games per year, but it’s not like what they’re doing now is the good option. This is the fourth straight year of mediocrity at best, and at what point does ownership look at their own actions to figure out where they can do better? At what point do they grant real autonomy to the people running the team? At what point do they face themselves?

I get it. If I were Larry Baer, who was seen on video trying to take his wife’s phone, causing her to fall to the ground, I wouldn’t want to be too introspective. If I were Scott Seligman, who has been hammered with wave after wave of crime allegations (charges were dismissed last year, though, well, I shouldn’t say anything that could get me in legal trouble), I wouldn’t want to think about my own culpability in anything. If I were Charles Johnson, I’d be too busy sending money to traitors to even consider changing my ways.

When you look at everything that’s gone wrong with the Giants, you’d be remiss to not consider ownership. As I’ve demonstrated, these are mostly real estate guys or tech guys, and they might know business, but that doesn’t mean they know baseball. They know business and they know ROI, and that comes first. Most importantly, they’re the one constant over the last decade. They’ve been around the whole time, and making decisions the whole time, and affecting the team the whole time. Maybe Buster Posey can fix things without fixing them. But it’s just as likely that change has to start at the top, and the top doesn’t have much intention of changing.