S.F. Giants fans may be getting taste of life without the A's in town
This winter has had some rough headlines for the San Francisco Giants, and they've all been self-inflicted. First the team missed out on Shohei Ohtani, which wasn't necessarily unexpected, but the Giants finished as the runners-up yet again for a top free agent.
That led to franchise icon Buster Posey telling The Athletic in December, "Something I think is noteworthy, something that unfortunately keeps popping up from players and even the players’ wives is there’s a bit of an uneasiness with the city itself, as far as the state of the city, with crime, with drugs. Whether that’s all completely fair or not, perception is reality. It’s a frustrating cycle, I think, and not just with baseball. Baseball is secondary to life and the important things in life. But as far as a free-agent pursuit goes, I have seen that it does affect things."
This led to a lot of talk in the following weeks about how San Francisco the city is perceived, but what is wild here is that the franchise icon kind of threw the place the Giants call home under the bus a little bit. Instead of showing these free agents that the city is in fact great, they seemingly just shrugged their shoulders and agreed. San Francisco also happens to be a place that many fans have chosen to live their lives. This feels more like the way that A's owner John Fisher has gone about "attracting" fans rather than how the Giants typically do business.
Then, just last week, the team decided to release J.D. Davis after signing Matt Chapman. Davis has won his arbitration hearing, but thanks to a loophole in the CBA, his contract wasn't guaranteed since he had his case heard by an arbiter. The Giants are now on the hook for just $1.1 million of the $6.9 million he'd been owed. The A's signed him to a one-year contract for $2.5 million with some incentives that can kick it up to about $4 million by the end of the year.
That's the business side of the game.
On Monday, the team announced that they have parted ways with long-time PA announcer Renel Brooks-Moon. She had been with the club since they opened Oracle Park back in 2001. She was there for Barry Bonds and all of his splash hits. She was there for the entirety of Posey's career and three World Series titles in five years. Brooks-Moon was beloved by the fan base, and now she's just gone.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, friends of Brooks-Moon say she was forced out of the job she'd held for 24 seasons. To get this out of the news cycle, the Giants finally signed Blake Snell to a two-year, $62 million deal on Monday night.
For years the headlines have been about how the Giants can't secure that top free agent, but that's understandable. Not every team gets to sign the biggest names in the game. But when the franchise is going about things by calling into question the city they play in, making players around the league perk up with a labor issue, and parting ways with a beloved PA announcer, then you may be able to see why guys don't necessarily want to sign with the Giants if there are other options. Getting Chapman and Snell this offseason could end up just being a bandaid for the team, as both players have opt-outs after the 2024 season.
It doesn't look like a coincidence that all of a sudden the Giants, who had been above reproach for awhile there, are all of a sudden acting differently once the A's announced their plans to leave town for Las Vegas.
Here's the thing: What's going to stop ownership from continuing down this path? If the A's get their way, they'll be out of town in a few years, if not as early as 2025, and then the Giants would be the only game in town. If you want to see a Major League Baseball game without traveling to Los Angeles, then you have to go through them. Other than for the sake of competing, which is debatable as to whether or not owners actually care about, what would be the reason to spend money if they don't have to? The fan experience?
They may have just pushed out the PA announcer that's been at the job for 24 seasons. It's hard to fathom that they were paying her even middling reliever money, if not the big-league minimum, or less. In the grand scheme of cost, whatever she was making was worth it because of the atmosphere that she helped create at the ballpark for decades. To save a little money, the Giants went a different route.
Giants fans may have to get used to that feeling without the A's in town.