Where the San Francisco Giants stand long-term

When Farhan Zaidi sat alongside Giants CEO Larry Baer at his introductory press conference in November 2018, the franchise’s first president of baseball operations set forth a relatively modest goal for the organization.

Zaidi said he wanted the Giants to play “meaningful baseball” as deep into the 2019 season as possible, which represented a sharp contrast to the objective of his predecessors.

Under former general managers Brian Sabean and Bobby Evans, the Giants were adamant about contending for playoff berths and World Series titles on an annual basis. Even after the club lost 98 games in 2017, marking one of the worst seasons in franchise history, the ownership group and front office believed the club’s win-loss record was “an aberration,” and the Giants could avoid a multi-year rebuilding process.

“We had a last-place season,” Sabean said at an end-of-season press conference. “That can happen in sports. Like you have a lost year in life. But we’re not last place people. We’re not a last place organization.

We’re the furthest thing from that.”

With a push from Baer and other members of the ownership group to surround a core group of homegrown players with veterans from the outside who might be able to keep the Giants’ championship window opened, the front office executed two high-profile trades.

In December, 2017, the Giants sent four players to Tampa Bay in a deal that brought Rays franchise cornerstone Evan Longoria to San Francisco. Less than a month later, outfield prospect Bryan Reynolds and reliever Kyle Crick to Pittsburgh for Andrew Mccutchen.

The trades helped prove the Giants were not a last-place organization. In 2018, they finished in fourth in a National League West division that has five teams.

One year after attempting to convince fans the Giants would be back in the running for a playoff berth, the franchise went through its most significant front office shakeup in a quarter century. Evans was fired, Zaidi was hired and the process of rebuilding and modernizing the Giants was underway.

“We needed to take a fresh approach with baseball operations,” Baer said before hiring Zaidi. “We’ve had a very successful group here a long time, but we’ve got to bring a new approach to Giants baseball and take a look outside.”

Stability had been a hallmark of the organization since Sabean ascended to his role as the team’s general manager in 1997, but Baer and others acknowledged 98- and 89-loss seasons would require the Giants to recalibrate. They sought an outside perspective and a “next-gen” leader and settled on Zaidi, the Dodgers general manager who was partially responsible for turning the Giants’ rival into a juggernaut.

It didn’t take long to see the Giants’ approach to building a roster shift.

At his introductory press conference, Zaidi noted that “no move is too small to not be worth a certain level of effort and detail.” The minutiae became the mainstream.

From 2001-2018, the Giants made 16 waiver claims. In Zaidi’s first nine months on the job, he topped that number. He claimed outfielder Alex Dickerson on waivers, signed Donovan Solano to a minor league deal and traded a relatively unknown pitcher, Tyler Herb, for a longtime prospect who never cracked the majors in the Orioles organization, Mike Yastrzemski.

Zaidi also made plenty of moves that didn’t work. The ones that did were negligible to the team’s payroll and kept the rebuilding Giants from the embarrassment of another 90-plus loss season.

At the 2019 trade deadline, the Giants hit a minor milestone in the rebuilding process as they were eager to “sell,” in an effort to acquire prospects. Yet after trading a slew of relievers in deals that helped bolster the farm system, the team still had Madison Bumgarner and closer Will Smith on the roster through the end of the season. Instead of completely stripping the roster down, Zaidi kept enough of it intact for the Giants to finish at 77-85.

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