Fitting end to bad Bay Area baseball year
It was Black Friday for the Giants, but what else would you have expected? The news that both Shohei Ohtani and Giancarlo Stanton had passed on the chance to wear the Orange and Black was perfectly in line with how 2017 has played out.
Add the implosion of the A’s fancy new ballpark plans, and the whole week was just one more dark chapter in one of the bleakest years in local baseball history.
For the Giants it was a worst-case scenario. Obviously, they had to go after the two marquee names on the market, and the pursuit was always going to be public. But by doing so, and being in the final running for both players, their frustrated fans’ hopes were raised, only to be shattered again.
(Small silver lining: The Chronicle broke the news Friday that Stanton is heading to the Yankees, not the Dodgers, so the Giants won’t have to face the player who spurned them on a regular basis.)
Both players were always long shots: two-way star Ohtani really only made sense in the American League, where he can both pitch and be a designated hitter. Stanton held all the leverage in his deal, and so he wasn’t likely to go to a team with so many needs, coming off a 98-loss season. He
went the easy route, ending up on the richest team in the American League, in a killer lineup, where he’ll be protected by Aaron Judge. (Wondering: will Stanton be blasted for his easy choice, like Kevin Durant was?)
The Giants head into the winter meetings, which start Sunday in Orlando, trying to pick up the pieces and find some other way to patch their many holes. That new path will be decidedly less sexy than the acquisition of the reigning National League MVP or the intriguing young Japanese player.
It could turn out that the Giants dodged a bullet by not landing Stanton. He has 10 years of enormous guaranteed money ($295 million) left on his contract. His eye-popping power numbers are exciting but may not be sustainable — and let’s not even start on the questions they raise, questions that Giants fans have spent a decade debating. Stanton would eat up a huge chunk of payroll that might be better spent on several players, since the Giants lack both front-line talent and depth.
But the concerns about how the Giants will rebuild are real. There are valid worries that general manager Bobby Evans lacks creativity in constructing a team. His forays into the free-agent market support those concerns: Last year he
signed the obvious reliever on the market and this entire offseason has so far centered on the two obvious candidates.
Again, the Giants needed to pursue both players. That was their duty. But we still haven’t seen what Evans will do when the choices are less evident.
Meanwhile, over in Oakland, the A’s worst fears came true. General manager David Forst said of Ohtani, “I just don’t want him to end up in my division.” Yet that’s where he landed, on the team with Mike Trout, in a division that already houses the world champion Astros.
Tough sledding ahead for the A’s, made even tougher by the harsh reality that they are starting over yet again on a ballpark plan. Team President Dave Kaval had stated that the team had “no Plan B” to back up the Laney College proposal, so that means we are truly back at the starting line. (Please, please, can they just
do the obvious and build on the Coliseum site, where they won’t have to fight concerns over neighbors or transportation or parking? Is it just too easy?)
Last year, Billy Beane made a big show of stating that the A’s were going to hang on to their young talent and pursue stability, so that they would have a good team ready when the new ballpark opens.
“We need to be disciplined with it, particularly with what we’re trying to do in the community as far as a stadium,” Beane said after he traded away relievers Sean Doolittle and Ryan Madson last summer for more prospects. “There’s only one way to open a stadium successfully, and that’s with a good, young team.”
No one with the A’s has publicly backtracked on that idea, but whatever ballpark plan emerges will surely stretch well beyond the mythical
opening date of 2023 that had been thrown about. So does that mean that any talented young A’s you start to enjoy will be traded in another round of Billy’s Prospect Shuffle? He already started, even before the disappointing ballpark news, when he traded Ryon Healy to Seattle last month.
My advice: Don’t run out to buy a new A’s jersey. Unless it’s a throwback for the team’s 50th anniversary.
Our two bottom-dwelling baseball teams had plenty of rough weeks in 2017, as they piled up loss upon loss, in their twin death spirals to the cellars of their respective divisions.
But the first week in December may have been the worst week of all.