SF heads back with blueprint
Playoff-bound Giants ready to shock league
SAN FRANCISCO » It took until the final day of a truncated season for the 2020 Giants to be eliminated from postseason contention, which made the sting of a loss to the playoff-bound Padres palpable.
“That disappointment is going to fuel us to have greater aspirations next year,” Farhan Zaidi said in the aftermath. “It’s certainly going to be a goal of ours to be a playoff team next year.”
Almost no one believed the Giants’ president of baseball operations could deliver on that goal, but his 2021 club has done so much more than that. With a 9-1 win over the Padres on Monday night at Oracle Park, the Giants (94-50) became the first major league club to clinch a postseason berth and now have their sights set on far greater heights.
“I’m really proud of what we accomplished,” Buster Posey said on NBC Sports Bay Area postgame. “As far as regular-season teams go, for me, this is No. 1.”
Expectations in San Francisco have been recalibrated overnight,
where a team that was projected to finish under .500 for the fifth consecutive season is now viewed as a legitimate World Series contender. The stunning transformation starts at the top with Zaidi, who became the organization’s top baseball executive in November 2018 and has turned the Giants into the most consistent team in the majors with a long list of “smart baseball moves” he promised back at his introductory press conference.
Zaidi’s penchant for making under-the-radar transactions
that have had an outsized impact on the club has shaped one of the most dominant iterations of any Giants roster. All it takes is a peek at the box score from Monday’s clincher to see.
With starters Alex Wood and Johnny Cueto on the injured list, the Giants had four relievers acquired under Zaidi cover the first six innings against San Diego. Two of those pitchers, Dominic Leone and Zack Littell, signed minor league deals with the Giants this offseason while another, Jarlín García, was claimed off waivers from the Marlins in February 2020.
José Álvarez, the lone member of the group who signed a major league freeagent
contract with the Giants, agreed to a one-year, $1.15 million deal with a club option and lowered his ERA to 2.38 with a scoreless outing against San Diego.
A lineup that scored nine runs in another blowout win has Zaidi’s fingerprints all over it and that was evident from the getgo as Tommy La Stella, the Giants’ top free-agent addition in the offseason, launched the first of four home runs San Francisco hit against Padres starter Yu Darvish to lead off the bottom of the first.
The Giants added on against Darvish immediately as LaMonte Wade Jr., who was acquired in a trade that sent out reliever
Shaun Anderson, drilled an RBI triple while Evan Longoria, who owns a career-high .931 OPS, hit a three-run home run that broke the game open.
Mike Yastrzemski, who was Zaidi’s first breakout acquisition back in 2019, hit his career-high 23rd home run in the fourth before Brandon Belt improved his career-high by launching his 24th home run beyond the right-center field arcade seats.
The mix of veterans enjoying some of the best seasons of their careers alongside once-unheralded prospects who have hit their stride in San Francisco has enabled the 2021 club’s surprising success.