Should SF Giants fans be upset with Farhan Zaidi's extension?
The SF Giants went 79-83 this year. They missed the expanded postseason by 5 games. Ask yourself this - would they still be playing right now if they had signed Aaron Judge? Carlos Correa?
Maybe. Then again, maybe not. Aaron Judge can carry a lineup when he's healthy, and this lineup needed a great deal of carrying. But Wilmer Flores came out of nowhere with a .919 OPS in the second half, and the Giants collectively still couldn't hit worth a damn. That's to say nothing of Correa, who - for all his efforts this postseason - still only hit .230 with 18 home runs in the regular season.
But Judge wouldn't have fixed a shortstop position that was worth nearly two wins below replacement between Brandon Crawford and Casey Schmitt. Correa wouldn't have stamped his mark on an outfield that didn't have a single qualified player this year.
It's tempting to think that the right move was out there, ripe for the taking, if only someone had the guts and tenacity to go for it. It's just as tempting to think that if not for Gabe Kapler pinch-hitting Mark Matthias for Brandon Crawford, the Giants would have rallied back and taken another crack at a title. Hey, if the Diamondbacks can do it, right? But the reality is, with as little stability as the Giants had coming into the year, there was no obvious-in-retrospect move that doomed the Giants. It was all the little things that came home to roost.
Which brings us to president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi, whose team it has been his to run, if you'll pardon the stilted inflection. I don't bring up the Giants' muddled position to denigrate his ability to pilot a franchise. Indeed, he's overseen a historic 107-win team and has done well to polish up and integrate core contributors like Logan Webb and Mike Yastrzemski. It certainly makes me wonder what he could do with a prime Buster Posey, Brandon Belt, Brandon Crawford, and Pablo Sandoval.
More importantly, it makes me wonder what Zaidi could do with a Corbin Carroll-type player, or perhaps an Adley Rutschmann. Hell, even a Zack Wheeler-type that you get from trading away good-but-temporary players to a contender would be helpful. Have the Giants had many of those recently? I'm struggling to recall. It's almost as if the Giants have created an internal mandate to never rebuild - even for a year - so that they won't lose out on ticket sales during competitive downturns... but that would be comically myopic of them, right?
Whatever the reason, the Giants have consistently failed to take advantage of the opportunities afforded to them to strengthen their major league roster. They've let high-impact players like Kevin Gausman and Carlos Rodón walk without getting adequate compensation for them in trades. They've failed to lure in superstar players like Bryce Harper and Aaron Judge in free agency. They've barely made a dent in trade deadline headlines, in part because they've refused to risk in dealing away some of their top prospects. And when the talent level of the roster inevitably lags behind the rest of the league, the organizational consensus is to add a few mid-tier free agents and settle for a ceiling that's one rung above mediocre.
That stubbornness was admirable the first few times, when the Giants squeezed a couple more postseason appearances out of the roster than anyone else thought they had a right to. It's long stopped being cute. It's become an profound drag on a team with every right to become a juggernaut - few payroll obligations, a big market, talent-starved fans - that has instead constantly tripped itself up on the easiest stretch of the steep climb towards contention. The ownership group - willingly or not - has become an obstacle to the success of the SF Giants.
And now they've extended Zaidi's contract for another two years. Sorry for burying the lede this deep, but the news really isn't about Zaidi. His strengths and weaknesses are fairly apparent, and he shouldn't (by himself, anyways) be the weakest link even in a championship-caliber organization. He gets another handpicked manager who can make a winning team more winningful, as is the technical term. Nothing about the Giants' floor or ceiling has changed, though, and I'm not sure there's a realistic way to replace Zaidi and have the Giants improve next year because of it.
So it falls on Giants executives to put this team in a better position to succeed. On the one hand, that's trouble. Going into last year, they didn't want to fold a modest hand, but going all-in with Correa's medicals was apparently too dangerous. So they chose the mushy middle, and lost a bunch of time and money in the process. Problem is, this year's hand doesn't look better. And if things don't improve, they're going to lose a lot more money when people tune them out by mid-July.
On the other hand, maybe they'll recognize they finally have to commit to something? The Giants are purportedly unwilling to get outbid on NPB star Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the top international free agent. That's a start. But one starter won't cure the Giants' ills. They'll need to go bigger. I'm thinking HBO big. Unless I was thinking of Cinemark, or even...
Regardless of how they do it, the SF Giants need great players. They need MVP-caliber hitters. They need impactful youngsters. It doesn't matter how they get them, only that they do, because the slow and steady approach has not worked. A lot of that is on the president of baseball operations, and many Giants fans rightfully wish there was more to gain on that front. But beyond Zaidi, there's been too much complacency from ownership, which has kept the cupboard too bare for too long. If they don't give the team the resources to really, truly succeed, then the Zaidi extension screws over us all.
