After tough year, where do Giants go from here?
Joe Panik was packing his gear for the winter Sunday when a reporter shook his hand and said, “See you soon.” The second baseman responded with a look that was easy to translate. It said, “Let’s hope.”
Change is coming for the Giants. It has to come. They did not fire general manager Bobby Evans and launch a baseball-wide search for a leader who would walk into AT&T Park and say, “Hey, this was a fluky two years. Let’s stay the course.”
Ownership and management need not apologize for trying to keep the good times rolling after three World Series championships in five seasons. Fans in cities such as Cincinnati, San Diego and Miami would kill for that kind of annual commitment to prosperity.
But history shows that sustaining success without steady reinvention is difficult to achieve. The Giants need to get younger, faster, stronger and healthier, and that cannot be done with tweaks.
Any analysis of the Giants’ 73-89 season starts with health.
“We’re back to back well
over 1,000 (disabled list) days the last two years,” executive vice president Brian Sabean said Sunday. “Nobody has enough depth for that. You can’t produce players in the minor leagues fast enough.
“The health — who’s in the lineup or not — does roll into people’s individual performances. We’ve been one of those lineups that needed all hands on deck. When we’re missing pieces, because we don’t knock the fences down, and we rely on timely hitting, it affects us more, especially in this park.”
Injuries hit young and old alike, in traditional ways as well as fluky.
Age did not cause Mac Williamson to trip over the bullpen mound and slam his head into a fence, getting a concussion that ruined his season. Nor did age cause Madison Bumgarner’s pitching hand to break when he was hit by a line drive in his final spring training start.
Age probably did play a role in injuries to starters Johnny Cueto and Jeff Samardzija. Innings do mount and affect the arm.
Pitching was not the major issue for the 2018 Giants. They had bullpen depth and the rotation got stronger when newcomer Derek Holland joined rookies Dereck Rodriguez and Andrew Suarez to steady the unit after Bumgarner, Samardzija and Cueto went down.
Going into the season’s final game, the Giants ranked third in the majors in ERA after June 1 at 3.51, behind the Dodgers (3.32) and Astros (3.36).
Indeed, one of the critical questions the new baseball executives must answer is the wisdom of busting up this pitching staff by trading arms to strengthen an aging offense.
“This will all get flushed out in time,” Sabean said, “but we have to pay attention to the numbers. We’ve done pretty damn well, at the top of the starting pitching (rankings) as well as the relief group at hand. I would consider that a plus going forward.”
But can the Giants be competitive anytime soon if they do not deal pitching for offense?
The numbers this season were damning.
Their 603 runs ranked 29th in the majors, trailing only Miami, which seemingly tanked the season. The Giants and Marlins tied for the worst OPS+, a measure of batting average, on-base percentage and slugging adjusted for park and league variances.
They ranked 25th in walks (448), had the fifth-most strikeouts (1,467) and hit the second-fewest home runs (133). One can blame the Giants for lagging in the home run revolution, but a few more clutch hits would have made a huge difference.
The Giants were 52-20 when they scored at least four runs a game, 21-69 when they didn’t. They also scored two or fewer runs 63 times. Only the Orioles (66) and Marlins (65) were worse.
Again, the numbers must be viewed in the context of injuries that destroyed any semblance of lineup continuity.
Buster Posey played most of the year with a hip problem. Panik, Brandon Belt and new third baseman Evan Longoria spent significant time on the DL with multiple ailments. Even the excitement and potential that younger players such as Williamson, Ryder Jones and Steven Duggar briefly brought ended in DL days and surgeries.
“My biggest disappointment in all this was Duggar, obviously,” manager Bruce Bochy said. “This was an area we had trouble in, at the top of the order, and he was getting ready to go into that role. He was coming around. It’s a shame we lost him.”
Assuming Duggar (shoulder dislocation), Posey and others return to full health, the Giants’ new baseball-operations chief will not inherit bare cupboards. That’s true below the majors as well.
The Giants, belatedly, have begun to infuse more resources into a less-than-robust farm system and international scouting. They added a slew of talent when they drafted second in June, starting with catcher Joey Bart at No. 2 overall, and should be able to add a difference-maker with the 10th pick next year.
Their past two No. 10 overall picks were Tim Lincecum and Bumgarner.
Also, the Giants have the financial wherewithal to outspend their mistakes, by helping pay down undesirable contracts via trades or even to pursue big-ticket free agents such as Bryce Harper and Manny Machado.
The question, of course, is whether that would be wiser than taking a step backward in 2019.
Bumgarner will be a bellwether this offseason. His fate — trade him or keep him? — should provide a solid clue to the course the new executives believe the Giants should take to contend again.
The Big Fella wants to be a part of that next winning season, and soon.
“No team is just win, win, win, win,” Bumgarner said. “I like to say you’ve got to take the good with the bad. But I don’t think that means you’ve got to be OK with the type of years we’ve had the last couple of years. You can speed up the process. It’s just about how much everybody in here learns from their experiences.”