Still waiting for the future
Bringing back Pablo Sandoval and Hunter Pence was the clearest sign yet Farhan Zaidi and the Giants brass realize this is going to be a slow rebuilding process.
Sorry, but it’s going to be another lost season.
How many is that in a row now?
How much longer must Giants fans suffer?
The problem with a total, topto-bottom, bottom-to-top rebuild of a baseball organization is that, well, they take a while.
And this Giants rebuild is going to take a while yet to start showing the fruits of President of Baseball Operation Farhan Zaidi’s efforts.
The selling point — one I’ll echo — is that the benefits of breaking it all down and starting from scratch more than covers for the growing pains at the start, but projections of a brighter tomorrow can only ease so much.
So in the meantime, the Giants are hoping nostalgia still plays around these parts.
Think of Hunter Pence and Pablo Sandoval coming back to the Giants as black and orange methadone. A bit of the old to take the edge off.
The World Series hero duo will rejoin these aging Giants as part of a sub-replacement core of Buster Posey [84 Ops-plus (100 is league average) in 2019], Brandon Crawford and Brandon Belt to create a reunion tour event that Zaidi and his modern front office hope can tide San Francisco fans over until the real players — the ones that give the Giants a chance to compete against the juggernaut Dodgers —
are promoted to San Francisco.
Now, you might be asking: If the Giants were so keen to push nostalgia, then why not bring back Madison Bumgarner this past offseason, too?
Well, there are myriad reasons — the most significant being that it takes two parties to agree on a contract. Bumgarner was looking for something the Giants weren’t offering at this juncture — something they might never offer again — so he found it elsewhere. He’s right, the Giants are right. That’s the way it goes sometimes.
The second reason — and this is a big one — is that the Giants might be about nostalgia, but only in the short term.
Bumgarner wanted to be paid for past performances for the next five years. That’s fair.
But the Giants don’t play that game anymore.
Zaidi’s Giants aren’t committing big, or even moderate money, to anyone long-term, opting instead to remain financially flexible for the future, as to augment a young (and cheap) core they believe will help the team contend for pennants again soon.
Meanwhile, the Diamondbacks — a franchise without a plan or a steady fan base, and, therefore, always in a perpetual state of panic — are perpetually keen to make a splash, hoping that the next one will be the one that makes their troubles go away. They ponied up what Bumgarner was looking for this offseason, and now he can hang out with his horses year-round.
Don’t blame the Giants for how it all went down. Blame baseball and its ridiculous system of player compensation.
The past decade of baseball has seen hedge-fund managers take over the game. And — get this — these could-be billionaires in charge of billion-dollar franchises are running things like hedge funds.
That means exploiting market inefficiencies — no matter how small, no matter how cold they might seem — in an effort to profit, be those defined by wins or actual monetary gains.
Over the last few years, it’s become undeniably evident that there is one — just one — way to build a sustainably winning team in this day and age. It makes the game homogeneous and, frankly, boring, but the method is tried and true. Build from the bottom up and only spend at the top after the foundation is fully set. And even then, don’t spend much. After all, young players are paid less than they deserve, older free agents often make more than they should.
It’s Moneyball 2.0 — this time everyone is cheap.
But it works. The Astros used this model, an algorithm and some trash cans to win a World Series (for now). The Red Sox and Cubs bottomed out and won soon thereafter, too. The Yankees and Dodgers didn’t need to go all the way to rock bottom — such is their financial clout — but they weren’t far off and they’ve used the model to become juggernauts.
The Giants were the last of baseball’s uber-rich teams to catch the wave.
And all those years of burying their heads in the sand created a real toxic situation — it was a franchise rotting from both ends. The farm system had marginal prospects and needed a major influx of talent. The major league roster was so bad and expensive that Zaidi couldn’t have traded away some of the players unless he attached much-needed prospects to a deal.
After one year, the Giants aren’t even back to square one — the rebuild is well underway, but the end result is still at least two years away. The new guard needs time to develop, the old guard’s contracts need to run out.
Which brings us back to Pence and Sandoval. Why them? Because this is still a business.
They’re not taking away meaningful at-bats from future core players — this team’s future, hopefully winning core is in the minor leagues right now. No, they’re here to sell tickets.
Last year, the Giants were able to bring people to the ballpark on the basis of it being Bruce Bochy’s last season in charge of the team. It was a contrived and somewhat effective promotion.
This year, the motto can be summed up as “if you’re going to stink, at least be likable.”
Though it doesn’t hurt that Pence and Sandoval are cheap, too.
The Giants stand a chance of being a juggernaut like their other big-money brethren.
It’s just going to take some more time to find out when the new era of prosperity can truly begin.
Until then, let’s pretend that the good old days are still happening at Third and King.