Is San Francisco responsible for an SF Giants free agent problem? No!
The SF Giants were disappointed, but far from surprised when Shohei Ohtani chose to sign with the Los Angeles Dodgers instead of them. As fans of the franchise have grown more and more frustrated with the Giants seemingly continued failed pursuits of their top free-agent targets, it seems that sentiment has begun to wear on prominent figures in the organization as well. Legendary former Giants catcher Buster Posey, who is now a part-owner of the team, spoke candidly in a recent interview with Andrew Baggarly of The Athletic about what he views as a "free-agent slump." Posey hinted that perceptions of the Bay Area were making it harder for the Giants to win over free agents.
“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 told Baggarly. “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.”
Posey reiterated his deep connection and love for the Bay Area, and perhaps was hoping to use the conversation as a vehicle to push back against those narratives. Although neither he nor Baggarly took the time to detail the ways many media criticisms of San Francisco are unfounded. Still, a false narrative could be impacting free agency.
It could.
However, the more you look into it, there is just no evidence that the Giants are facing a uniquely difficult situation.
SF Giants protest, Sam Coonrod, & conservative coalition
One of my most illuminating conversations with a professional ballplayer came following former Giants pitcher Sam Coonrod's decision not to participate in a moment of unity demonstration prior to a game in 2020. I had been corresponding with an active player and decided to reach out and see what they thought about Coonrod's decision.
Their response was somewhat surprising to me, not for its right-wing lean-far-right politics are commonplace in the sport-but the specific terms he used in articulating his point. He cited the Black Lives Matter organization's support of Marxism and criticism of the nuclear family.
A few hours later, reporters asked Coonrod why he had chosen not to participate. His response was a nearly verbatim rehashing of what the player I was texting had wrote. A quick google search later, and I discovered how both establishment conservative and far-right news outlets had been recycling that very talking point.
While the Democratic Party is stuck in a decades-long rhetorical fight between neoconservative, social democratic liberal, and more radical leftist thinkers, the Republican Party has always more consistently coalesced around narratives. The "decline" of majority Democrat cities like Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, etc. have been at the center of right-wing reactionary rhetoric for some time, escalating at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent demonstrations in response to police violence throughout the summer of 2020.
“Look what’s happened to San Francisco, so sad what’s happened when you see a slum," former president Donald Trump said. "It’s worse than a slum, there’s no slum like that. What they’ve done to San Francisco is a crying shame. And it’s something we’re going to do something about. Because, if they don’t fix it up, clean it up, take care of the homeless, do what they have to do — but clean up their city, the federal government is going to have to step in. We’re going to do it in Los Angeles and San Francisco.”
“This is an app where they plot the human feces that are found on the streets of San Francisco,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis noted in a wildly pointless debate with California Governor Gavin Newsom.
"Leadership matters," DeSantis wrote in a Tweet. "Cities like San Francisco that have embraced leftist policies have destroyed the quality of life of their citizens and sparked an exodus of productive people to greener pastures. We need to restore sanity across this country."
These prominent narratives have undeniably changed many people's perceptions of cities in the United States. Acting as if the far-right is solely responsible would also ignore the role prominent Democratic political figures have played in legitimizing this belief. President Joe Biden fully bought into the so-called 2020 crime spike, and used it to criticize Trump in the run up to the election. A slew of Democratic Mayors, like San Francisco's London Breed, have publicly adopted rhetoric and stances from far-right politicians like Matt Gaetz.
But San Francisco is not alone.
Everything isn't just about San Francisco
Posey's statement does not just address a changing perception of San Francisco, but also implies that San Francisco has been disproportionately impacted by these narratives compared to other MLB cities. There is just no evidence of this.
Baggarly does not make any explicit arguments, but does attempt to coalesce some recent examples of failed Giants pursuits into a general idea. He has previously reported that Cubs outfielder Seiya Suzuki fell in love with the city of Chicago and did have concerns about San Francisco, particularly that so many players did not live in the city itself. Baggarly suggests that more urban-centric planning in Japan will lead players to eye cities with more vibrant city centers.
It's not an unreasonable point, but Baggarly never really addresses that his article centers on Ohtani--a Japanese star who has now twice signed with teams based in Los Angeles, a city with notoriously inept urban planning. He has also previously reported that the Giants did not get a chance to match the Mets' offer for Kodai Senga last offseason because the pitcher was "keen" on becoming teammates with legendary starters Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander.
In other words, even among the subset of recent prominent free agents from Japan, the reasons the Giants lost out have been different and disconnected. Which makes sense. Public opinion is a useful tool for understanding cultural shifts, but it is also fairly useless at predicting individual behavior. In fact, there is decades of social science research trying to explain how most people reconcile seemingly contradictory beliefs.
The odds are some free agents have had their decisions influenced by crime narratives. But the odds are some have had their decisions influenced by a bad airport experience, a restaurant employee that rubbed them the wrong way, a family member who told them the city was boring, etc. We are talking about individuals with a myriad of experiences and complex consciousness, highlighting the "crime in San Francisco" narrative does nothing but bring attention to the very thing Posey is presumably trying to dispel.
It's even harder to translate this narrative to free agents since so many of the criticisms of San Francisco are also lobbed at other west coast baseball cities like Seattle and Los Angeles. It's frankly a bit baffling to see the Giants place themselves at the center of this narrative when non-southern cities with larger Black populations, like Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago, have been far more consistently peppered with this onslaught of propaganda, often rooted in anti-Black racism.
Bay Area residents may have caught wind of a Gallup Poll that came out in August asking folks throughout the United States whether they considered certain cities safe. While The San Francisco Chronicle highlighted San Francisco's decline in the poll results compared to 17 years prior, the city was far from an outlier. More than half of respondents (52%) still viewed the city as safe.
In fact, San Francisco was still viewed as safe by a higher percentage of both Democrats (74%) and Republicans (32%) than most cities, including Chicago (41% of Democrats/11% of Republicans), Philadelphia (65%/30%), New York (64%/22%), and Los Angeles (64%/21%). San Francisco did have the second-largest decline in positive perceptions, falling 18 percentage points. The city that had a larger drop: Chicago. The same city that beat the Giants in sweepstakes for Jon Lester, Ben Zobrist, and Suzuki.
The argument that perceptions of San Francisco as unsafe are the reason they have consistently lost bidding wars to teams in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, when those cities have even larger negative narratives around their lack of safety, just does not hold water.
Have perceptions of San Francisco shifted over the past decade? Undeniably. However, there is little evidence that the Giants are facing a larger uphill battle courting free agents than other big city teams in the league due to this perception.
As Ray Ratto wrote over at Defector, the Giants seem to be talking about perceptions of San Francisco to distract from a much more prominent problem: industry perceptions of the franchise.
Let's be honest here and just say this sounds like top-grade nonsense, unless you count organizational ass-covering as a part of modern urban planning. The neighborhood around the Giants' ballpark is seriously antiseptic, plus other cities—among them Los Angeles—have larger crime and homeless issues. It's a dog-whistler's exercise: We woulda had him if not for the Tenderloin.
No, it's all simpler than that. The Giants have nothing to offer a high-level free agent except more money than everybody else, and they don’t do that because they are now firmly established as the stalking horse for the teams that players like Judge and Ohtani really want. In other words, they are chumps, and chumps never operate from a position of equal footing. If we are to take Zaidi at his word (and because he is an executive in a major American professional sport there is absolutely no reason to do so), they offered Ohtani what the Dodgers did, but since the Giants are currently just the Angels in a poor disguise, Ohtani would never be interested in them except as a non-threatening threat to present to the Dodgers.
Have the SF Giants been less successful in free agency?
In the decades long history of free agency, the Giants have only signed the top free agent of the offseason once, when that player (Barry Bonds) had an unparalleled deep family lineage tying him to the franchise. If Ohtani's father and godfather had both been star outfielders for the Giants for most of their big-league careers, I imagine things would have played out differently.
And even Bonds, by the way, has admitted he may have signed with the New York Yankees if they had made a more aggressive pursuit, and had not insisted on a harsh deadline in their negotiations. Even with Bonds' deep familial ties to the Giants' franchise, money could have swayed him to New York.
Fans may point to the Giants signing of Barry Zito to a seven-year, $126 million contract back in the 2006-07 offseason, but it's important to remember they only pivoted to Zito after falling short in pursuit of several prominent position players.
Here is an excerpt from an article by John Shea about the Giants pursuits during the 2006-07 offseason:
They were runners-up again Wednesday, losing the Gary Matthews Jr. sweepstakes to the Angels even though their offer was nearly identical to the five years and $50 million Matthews, who's coming off a career year with the Rangers, accepted for staying in the American League West.
It was hardly news. The Giants, despite making competitive offers, were bridesmaids in the bidding for Juan Pierre and among finalists for the biggest prize of all, Alfonso Soriano, whose stunning $136 million, eight-year contract with the Cubs blew away the competition.
Later that same offseason, the Giants offered Carlos Lee a larger contract than the six-year, $100 million deal he eventually inked with the Astros.
All that sounds pretty familiar, doesn't it?
Only then, after failing to land any of the position players they coveted, did the Giants shift to jumping the market for Zito.
The much more rosy public perceptions of San Francisco did not seem to do much that offseason, and the presence of California's Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from 2003-2011 never seemed to pay dividends for the Giants in free agency.
Sometimes the simplest explanation makes the most sense. Free agents tend to sign with teams that have most consistently won and most consistently spend a lot of money. The Giants may have won three World Series this century, but they have also made the playoffs just nine times since 1990.
The Giants have consistently run up some of the largest payrolls in the sport, but they always prioritized retaining the talent they already had under Brian Sabean. With sizable contracts already on the payroll, the front office tended to be less aggressive in free agency.
Farhan Zaidi and the SF Giants approach to free agency
The Giants have developed a necessary desperation in their approach to free agency over the course of Zaidi's tenure. However, it's not difficult to see they did not have the same aggressiveness early on. While the Giants were finalists for Bryce Harper in Zaidi's first offseason, their final offer included less overall guarantees than what he ultimately accepted from the Phillies. Harper was heading into his age-26 season, and received a 13-year, $330 million contract. Looking back on what noticeably older sluggers Ohtani and Aaron Judge have gotten despite MLB's revenue hits from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's easy to envision the Giants looking back and wishing they had offered $350-$400 million.
The Giants were tied to Marcus Semien, a Bay Area-native who starred at Cal and in Oakland, but were among the many teams blown out of the water by a seven-year, $175 million offer by the Rangers. There's also Kevin Gausman, who the Giants notoriously chose not to pursue re-signing despite his public interest in remaining with the organization.
Harper, Semien, and Gausman have combined for more fWAR since signing their current contracts than any member of the Giants.
Big-time free agent pursuits are a numbers game. There are only so many top-tier free agents every year. Even fewer will address needs on a current roster. Even fewer will consider any team a favored destination. Caution does not win in free agency. To sign great players, organizations have to be bold and willing to risk the bad luck of health or unexpectedly deteriorating ability.
It's unclear whether the Giants' shift from politely perusing free agency to the more desperate Black Friday-esque pursuits of the past two offseasons are a result of a shift in Zaidi's approach or ownership loosening their financial constraints. Either way, it seems pretty obvious that despite losing out on Judge and Ohtani, the front office's new strategy is working.
Last offseason, the Giants convinced Carlos Correa, the consensus second-best free agent position player, to sign with them. The deal ended up falling apart because of their own concerns about his medicals, but it had nothing to do with the city. The Giants just convinced Jung-Hoo Lee to agree to a $113 million contract early in his posting period and it seems likely the team will be handing out another contract with nine-figure guarantees before the start of next season.
The Giants have failed to win more games than they lost in six of the past seven seasons. Judge and Ohtani were probably the two most desirable MLB free agents since Bonds signed with the Giants back in 1992. Judge did not spurn the Giants for the Kansas City Royals. Ohtani did not pass on San Francisco for the Cincinnati Reds. They signed with the two biggest brands in baseball, which happen to be located in two of the richest cities in the world.
And that's part of what makes the timing of Buster Posey's comments and this narrative coming from the team so confusing. The Giants have actually had decent success in free agent pursuits since they began going all-in. The franchise literally landed a highly-coveted outfielder the day Baggarly's article was published. The fact is, the SF Giants have primarily lost bidding wars to teams in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, like every franchise throughout the history of free agency in major American sports. Why are we acting surprised?
