Posey delivers message: Players have to do better

When a leader as respected and savvy as Buster Posey publicly challenges his teammates to get better, as he did after the Giants’ final game Sunday, he surely told them the same things in private beforehand.

“We’ve got a lot of things we’ve all got to get better at,” Posey told reporters after acknowledging that he was relieved the 2017 season was over.

“Hopefully, everyone will take a little time to decompress, get away and spend that time thinking about what they can do to help the Giants win more ballgames next year, come back with the hunger to get us back to where we want to be.”

The players cannot fix 64-98 on their own. The 2017 Giants were flawed from the get-go,

and on Tuesday, team executives will hold their annual postmortem news conference to try to explain what went wrong and how they will execute their plan to become competitive in 2018.

But Posey has a point: Though the front office can and must acquire better players, others who already wear the orange and black, especially those with long-term contracts, will return in 2018 and must do what they can to improve, starting this winter.

Posey declared that begins with him.

“Overall, I’m pretty happy with it,” he responded when asked to assess his season. “Obviously, there’s stuff I have to work on in the winter and get better at. The great thing about baseball is you’re continually learning and continually adjusting.”

Posey did not offer specifics, but after hitting .320 to finish fifth in the National League while reaching base 40 percent of the time, his only real deficiency was power. He hit 12 home runs, same as Denard Span. That’s Posey’s career low for a full season.

The Giants need more pop from Posey. The front office has to help him by acquiring a commanding presence to bat behind him, but Posey understands there are changes he can make.

If that is true for the team’s best hitter, it is truer for everyone else.

Players get guidance. Many were ushered into manager Bruce Bochy’s office over the final days to discuss offseason conditioning and how to concentrate their efforts to get better.

Some will not. Players are who they are. When they age, they will not be who they were.

Then again, did Washington first baseman Ryan Zimmerman really become a .218 hitter, his number from 2016? Apparently not. At age 33, he hit .303 this season, jumped from 15 homers to 36 and added nearly 300 points to his OPS.

As they say on those TV ads, “Results not typical,” but even within 2017, some Giants got better, offering hope for 2018.

On Aug. 15, shortstop Brandon Crawford was hitting .224, dogged all season by a nagging injuries and mechanical issues. Over the final six weeks, he hit .331 with a .922 OPS to get his final batting average over .250.

Infielder Pablo Sandoval, whose 2018 role surely will be addressed during Tuesday’s news conference, ended with an 11-game stretch that suggested he could help the Giants some way next year (for a relatively paltry $540,000). He batted .385 with five doubles and three homers in that span.

Second baseman Joe Panik’s in-season turnaround was among the Giants’ most hopeful stories. After bottoming out at .240 on May 30, Panik hit .313 with an .831 OPS over his final 373 plate appearances. He finished with a .288 average and .768 OPS, compared with .239 and .695 in his concussion-marred 2016 season.

“After the year I had last year, it was kind of good to show that my first two years — 2014 and 2015 — were for real,” Panik said. “This is the hitter that I am. What you see is what you get. What I wanted to do this year from a personal standpoint, I was able to do.”

Though Panik and his legions of fans might not like it, he made himself much more attractive in a trade market the Giants must visit to try to address their biggest needs: outfield defense and a middleorder bat.

Team officials get no rest. The groundwork for trades and signings begins long before they are executed. As Posey said, after a short break, the players need to start doing their part to ensure they do not have to go through another 2017 anytime soon.