S.F. Giants Singing Familiar Tune to A's Fans
After the San Francisco Giants whiffed on Shohei Ohtani, there have been a number of quotes from the team about just how close they were to signing baseball's unicorn, or how similar their offer was to the one that he ended up accepting with the Los Angeles Dodgers.
There is one quote in particular that gained a good amount of traction yesterday, and it comes from future Hall of Famer Buster Posey, who is now a part of the Giants' ownership group (via The Athletic). "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,” Posey said. “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."
As has been pointed out plenty on social media, it's not like Los Angeles, where Ohtani ended up signing, or New York, where Aaron Judge signed last off-season, are utopias. Every major city has pockets that are better than others.
While there may be some truth to this quote, at least in that there is a perception of the city that could be hindering their pursuits of free agents, it does also make excuses for the franchise's inability to land free agents year after year. The A's haven't pursued any top free agents in some time, and the Giants have been runners-up seemingly every winter, but the two Bay Area clubs have ended up with the same number of top-tier free agents at the end of the day.
The excuse should ruffle some feathers.
To blame the city for the team not being able to land free agents is amateur. If players have an issue with potentially having their family or friends hanging around San Francisco, the Giants should be going above and beyond to assuage those concerns. Set up a limo service. Offer Ohtani $800 million over 15 years. Spare no expense. Sell the city, don't act as if it's a weight dragging you down.
They're also setting up the problem as being that nobody will take their money, while the team has made the playoffs just once since 2017. The Dodgers have won 10 of the last 11 NL West titles. If you're a player that wants to win, which team would you choose in that situation?
When the Giants rattled off three World Series in five seasons, they were built through the Draft. Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, Madison Bumgarner, Buster Posey, Brandon Belt, and Brandon Crawford were huge pieces on those teams. They were supplemented with free agents.
San Francisco hasn't built up the foundation of this team well enough yet to help attract those big ticket free agents. When you couple the lack of recent success with potential concerns about the city, that is a losing recipe. Want to change some minds? Go trade for a big ticket player. Use some of that farm system. The hard part is landing that first big player.
And that's what brings us to the A's.
John Fisher has spent the entirety of his ownership looking for a place to build a ballpark, essentially from day one saying that the Coliseum isn't a good enough place to watch a baseball game. He didn't start looking in Oakland for about ten years, so when you couple the vague threats of moving the team to Fremont or San Jose and tell the fans that the place they do play in isn't great, fans will stop coming. And that is part of the reason why we find ourselves where we are today, with the A's entering what could be their last season in Oakland.
This isn't to say that the Giants are planning on moving. Instead, with the A's likely to leave town, they could be setting up the fan base to accept that no free agent will take their money, therefore they can't have a top-tier payroll. The product on the field would suffer, but they're also hoping to attract a new swath of baseball fans who are in the process of having their hearts ripped out. Maybe in time those abandoned A's fans could become Giants fans so that they can share the game with their own children.
This feels like it's right out of the John Fisher handbook of belittling where you play and then wondering why people don't show up to games anymore. In the Giants' case, the end goal wouldn't be to relocate, but instead to keep payroll where ownership wants it be to maximize their own profits.
They'll be the only game in town, so who's gonna stop them?