San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Zaidi, Posey missed shot to pitch city
Got caught in the San Francisco doom loop Thursday night.
I was downtown near Civic Center and witnessed a violent scene. A young girl was being attacked by a gang. Help finally arrived. A cannon was fired. The melee ended in the stabbing death of the gang leader.
Rough town, man. Fortunately, my family was safe, watching the horror unfold inside the War Memorial Opera House, the famous mice-versus-soldiers scene in the San Francisco Ballet’s “Nutcracker.”
No wonder Shohei Ohtani and other really good baseball players are afraid to sign with the San Francisco Giants. Even San Francisco’s ballet is violent.
Farhan Zaidi, the Giants’ president of baseball ops, and Buster Posey, a new minority owner, are helping sound the alarm. Posey recently told the Athletic that some players considering signing with the Giants have expressed concern over the city’s growing reputation as an epicenter of crime, filth and homelessness.
Homelessness is a serious and growing problem in San Francisco. It’s also a serious and growing problem in Los Angeles and New York, two cities whose ball teams beat out San Francisco’s ball team for marquee free agents Aaron Judge (to the Yankees last year) and Ohtani (to the Dodgers
last week).
Crime and homelessness are not the reasons for the Giants’ struggles, and bringing them into that conversation is to trivialize the crisis. But here it is, and Posey’s comments, and those of Zaidi a year ago, set off the cringe alarm for many fans and observers.
The comments sounded like a regurgitation of the talking points of a certain former U.S. president and his worshippers in the extreme right-wing media. Do Zaidi and Posey realize they are carrying the gas can for nut-job arsonists?
When Zaidi and Posey felt compelled to make public statements about San Francisco’s rep possibly costing them
players, they should have seized the golden opportunity to also give their side of the sales pitch. Folks, this is what we’re hearing from a few players and agents, and here’s the truth.
They could point out that San Francisco is in the same leaky boat with every major American city, but has a ton of benefits and delights that other cities can only dream of enjoying. After hearing the facts, if a free agent and his wife are still drunk on the extremist Kool-Aid, they probably would be better off in a crime-free Xanadu like New York or L.A., where every man has a mansion.
The Giants also could point out that they are taking steps to help resolve some issues.
They are building 1,200 housing units just across McCovey Cove, 40% of them renting for below market value to lowand middle-income folks.
Zaidi and Posey also should recognize that there are homeless people rocking Giants gear, and those folks have enough problems without their beloved baseball team blaming them for the team’s inability to sign good players and chew gum at the same time.
On a non-political level, the Giants’ comments come off as a lame excuse for losing too many potential free-agent adds. It’s unlikely that the players whom the Giants have had a legitimate shot at signing — and there’s no proof that Judge or Ohtani is in that category — rejected San Francisco because of the crime and the grime. More likely, they rebuffed the Giants because there’s no here here.
The Giants under the banner of Zaidi are a lackluster, boring squad built to aspire to .500 ball.
The willingness to spend enough to compete with the big-ticket teams like the Dodgers, Mets and Padres just hasn’t been a Giants’ selling point until the last year or so. Free agents know that. It might be unfair to take Giants chairman Greg Johnson’s recent comment about the team’s goal of breaking even as a mission statement — they offered Ohtani the same $700 million deal, after all — but it’s probably not out of line with how free agents see the Giants.
You couldn’t blame Ohtani, for one, if he had concern that the Giants giving him a huge contract would have been the end point of their team-building, rather than the starting point. Ohtani knows that the Dodgers aren’t done shopping.
There are signs the Giants might be pulling out of their own private baseball doom loop. Zaidi and his folks just signed Jung Hoo Lee, a Korean outfielder who might give them big-league cred in center field, and is the kind of subOhtani player the Giants should be targeting right now on their climb to credibility and watchability.
The Giants can’t make the real world go away, unless they decide to move their ballpark to Danville. They can be more honest, though, and sensitive. How about a Homelessness Night next season?