Good morning, baseball fans!
Throughout the season, I checked in periodically to see how everyone was feeling about the San Francisco Giants season as it progressed. Now that both the regular season and
postseason are over, I wanted to check in again. Not just about the season that was, but the direction the organization is heading in as a whole.
Personally, I’m annoyed. I’m annoyed that the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series for the second year in a row. And I’m annoyed that the Giants don’t seem to want to read the writing on the wall in what that means for their relevance. And I’m even more annoyed that the rest of the league seems to think that what the Dodgers are doing is bad for the sport.
I hate the Dodgers as much as the next orange-blooded Giants fans, but not for the success they’re having or how they achieved it. They are doing what every team should be doing, in my opinion. The response to having a super-villainy team in your division should be to make your own super-villainy team. And if you (as in the team owners) don’t want to spend the money to do that, then sell the team to someone who does.
That is, of course, a wild oversimplification of the issue, and I’m certain we’ll cover it in more depth as time goes by and we get closer to whatever the next offseason has in store for us. But it’s a good place to start for how I feel about the organization right now.
I have faith in Buster Posey as the president of baseball operations. I trust his instincts and understanding of both the game and the organization to do his best to keep the team competitive.
I have concerns about Buster Posey being both the PoBO and an owner, however. Concerns I’ve expressed in the past, but that still sit at top of mind for me. Because I do not necessarily believe that the ownership group as a whole has the success of the team as a top priority. And I still believe it is a conflict of interest for Posey to hold both positions, when they have such a potential to be so at odds with each other in terms of priorities.
I feel like the ownership group, en masse, have coasted on the goodwill that the three World Series wins of the previous decade afforded them. Choosing instead to focus on real estate development projects, while expecting fans to just keep showing up no matter what the product on the field looks like.
And personally, I think that grace period has long since expired.
The organization as a whole needs to have a real reckoning with what the future looks like, especially in the NL West. That reckoning really should have started about a decade ago, but now is the next best time to do so.
As I mentioned at the top, the Dodgers are a super-villainy team. But as much as I hate it (because it’s the Dodgers doing it), it’s really good for baseball.
I think that the Giants need to make a decision about what the future holds. It seems like they need to either fully commit to chasing the Dodgers at their level, or fully commit to planning for a future when their reign of terror is finally over.
But the commitment to half-assery and aggressive mediocrity is something no one asked for more of, yet they keep serving it.
Even if catching up with the Dodgers is realistically off the table, the team now continues to lose ground to the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks as well.
As far as I’m concerned, if they’re going to continue to commit to being irrelevant, the fans should treat them as such and save their money. Because I don’t know about you, but the thought of several more seasons of being told “we’re doing everything we can!” and then having third place be the best we can hope for just doesn’t sound appealing to me.
How are you all feeling about the 2025 Giants and beyond?
