Shohei Ohtani's deal with the Dodgers exasperates SF Giants' problems
Well, this isn't great news for the SF Giants. Shohei Ohtani has announced a 10-year, $700 million dollar contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers, making him (eventually) the recipient of the largest athletic contract in North American sports. There are pros and cons to this, even for the Dodgers, but the details aren't particularly important right now. The face of the entire league has just signed with the Giants' archrivals. If you're a San Francisco fan right now, this is Bad™.
Star two-way player Shohei Ohtani will continue playing in LA - for the hated Dodgers.
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It's also not the end of the world, and that might just be the most frustrating part of it. Shohei Ohtani will be hitting dingers and throwing heaters against the Giants for the next decade, and we'll just have to live with it. As much as it's going to sting seeing Oracle Park filled up with even more blue than usual when the Dodgers come to town, the reality was that the Giants didn't and shouldn't have bet their franchise on signing 'Sho-Time'. They have their own challenges to face that wouldn't have been fixed by Ohtani signing in SF, even if it would've been a fantastic facelift.
Baseball simply isn't the type of game where one man can carry his team straight to a championship - the Angels spent the last six years proving that. Patrick Mahomes in the NFL, LeBron James in the NBA? Sure, yeah. Meanwhile, Barry Bonds, the greatest hitter to ever walk the earth, doesn't have a title to show for it. Baseball's a weird sport. I bet the Diamondbacks aren't much more thrilled about this news, but they also just walked into LA as an 84-win team and swept the Dodgers in a postseason series.
The ingredients for success in the postseason are just different. You need a top-tier starting pitching and clutch position player performances, and there's no actual guarantee Ohtani provides either in the extremely short term. He could bat .600 in the playoffs this year, or he could go 4-17 while the Dodgers get swept again in the Division Series. Playoff performances are overstated, given how small the sample sizes are, but we've never seen Ohtani in even a Wild Card game before. There's certainly a world where he has a 'meh' performance and everybody's talking about how he's a "choker" going into 2025. At the very least, he won't be pitching in the playoffs during his Dodgers debut.
Still, that's the "Dodged A Bullet" scenario, and all the Giants can do is cross their fingers and pray it comes to pass. The problem with Ohtani in LA isn't that he can beat the Giants all by themselves, but that the Dodgers just put a world-class player in a world-class organization with world-class support. Ohtani played in Anaheim with half of Mike Trout and the ghost of Anthony Rendon. He's got a little more help this time.
Despite not being able to pitch in 2024, Shohei Ohtani is still a marvelous athlete at the plate and on the bases.
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In LA, Ohtani gets to play alongside guys like Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Max Muncy. That much talent in the same lineup is a capital-P Problem, one that'll almost assuredly cost the Giants a few wins next year. The Giants have played the Dodgers better than almost any other team this decade, but even if they keep that up, the results won't be pretty. San Francisco already had to make up a ton of ground on their archrivals, and now they even more still.
Which brings us back to the glum reality that Ohtani alone wouldn't have pushed the Giants into the Dodgers' stratosphere. The Giants are spending a decent amount on free agents, but they don't have a solid core to add Ohtani to. The Giants have invested heavily in player development, but they don't have breakout rookies to buoy the roster with. They're not bad enough to tear down and rebuild, but they're not good enough to go all-in for championship contention. They're in the worst place possible for a professional sports franchise - the mushy middle.
Let's walk through each case. The easiest thing to do would be to strip down the roster and perform some kind of sell-off this year. The Giants, despite a lack of consistent success in recent years, haven't been able to benefit from the type of resources in the draft and minor league pipeline that rebuilding teams like the Orioles and Diamondbacks have. Fixing that would be a straightforward manner to address the issues the Giants are currently facing. All they'd have to do is start selling players at the deadline, advertise a rebuild to a rapidly dwindling attendance base, and potentially completely restart the front office and management positions they just (re)filled. The only obstacle is that they've almost never done any of these, and ownership likely won't authorize a step-back year, let alone a full rebuild. Okay, I may have lied about this being the easiest path.
The optimal route is to develop the youth and build a sustainable contender through a pipeline of minor league talent. That strategy is, as mentioned, hindered by the lack of recent rebuilding. The Zaidi administration has done a fair job of working around that - their 2020 strategy around drafting Kyle Harrison in the third round was a minor masterwork that netted them their best prospect in a decade. But the totality of the Giants' draft-and-develop strategy has been suspect. For all the players that emerged last year, none of them were in the national conversation as one of baseball's next stars, nor did they deserve to be. Patrick Bailey looked to be the most sure long-term piece amongst Giants rookies last year, and he had a 0.7 WAR season. That's not enough to keep this team afloat. Even if the waves of prospects Giants fans have been promised are finally arriving, we'll just have to wait to see if any of them actually pan out. That wait could end in 2024. It could end in 2027. It could never arrive. The fact that this is currently the Giants' best strategy is an indictment on the front office. It's also one that could take until 2030 to fix.
Will SF Giants prospect Patrick Bailey be part of the next great homegrown Giants core?
Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports
So is there a way to go all-in and go for wins now, trying to salvage the fruits of the last 5+ years? Well, Ohtani being off the market takes away a big one, and to be honest, this ain't really the year for it. Want to go all-in on Cody Bellinger and Matt Chapman? I mean... sure, but it's not the Correa-Swanson-Seager-Turner bonanza of yesteryear. The Giants have been spending decent money in recent years, but it's been on guys like Pederson, Haniger, and Conforto, and keeping that up surely won't cut it. Maybe there are still trades to be made, and the Giants at least have young, major-league-ready-or-near-it players to trade as a result of last year's boon. But jeez, there sure doesn't seem to be a readily available path towards trying to hoard great-to-elite talent even if San Francisco were to go for broke.
There is one possible route. Unfortunately, it's one that's not incredibly sexy, and that's turning the 2024 Giants into the Brewers. San Francisco already has Logan Webb and a couple of potential veteran anchors. If they were to acquire Yoshinobu Yamamoto in free agency and trade for, say, Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes, they'd all of a sudden have the most lethal rotation in baseball. Given that San Francisco's bullpen has been a top-10 unit in the last few years (especially when a one-man rotation isn't working them to death), this could be the silver bullet to a dark horse postseason run. Sure, they'd have to figure out the hitting side of things, but maybe things open up a bit at the Trade Deadline.
Of course, the Giants went 15-18 in Webb's starts last year. San Francisco's offense went from "okay" to "historically inept" out of nowhere, and no amount of pitching can fix that. I'm not sure what will, and that seems to be a pretty big sticking point - it's hard to tell what the Giants are putting their chips on. If they wanted to stake their claim on postseason-ready starters and figure out the rest, that'd be good to hear. If the Giants want to fix their offense at any cost and will pour "stupid money" into making sure that happens, then heck, I'm on board. If it's all about the rookies and a competitive "if you're hitting, you're playing" environment, then go for it and don't deviate. Right now, though, the plan seems to be to let the cards fall where they may and just figure things out from there. That's not good enough.
Ohtani's a Dodger now. Los Angeles has been shoving San Francisco into a locker for years now, and it's only going to get worse. If the SF Giants' leaders want to let that keep happening while some legendary strategy percolates over the next several years, then they'll have to deal with the consequences of getting lapped by their division rivals right now. The Giants better have a plan that's good enough to keep me watching when Shohei Ohtani is launching 500-foot dingers off our best pitchers. Otherwise, all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put this franchise back together again.
