Who needs a big-time free agent signing Aaron Judge or Carlos Correa?
The 2023 San Francisco Giants have Michael Conforto and Joc Pederson.
Who needs a clear-cut, mow-’em-down ace to pair with Logan Webb?
The ’23 Giants have seven solid starting pitchers.
Who needs to compete for the National League West title this season?
After all, 84 wins and a Wild Card berth entitles you to the same number of playoff games.
The San Francisco Giants brass wants you to believe all these alternatives are superior.
In fact, they’re surprised they have to convince you of it.
“I think we’re finding that some of it takes some explaining,” Giants CEO Larry Baer told this news organization earlier this month. “It’s not in the headlines… When [fans] start seeing [Ross] Stripling pitching and Sean Manaea pitching and Conforto, Taylor Rogers, it’s like, ‘OK, I get it, you did a lot of moves that added up.’”
But heading into the season, these Giants project to be a mediocre team with a mediocre farm system. Under President of Baseball Operations Farhan Zaidi, this team is treading water.
So do those moves add up?
That’s the real question of the Giants’ 2023 campaign.
If this organization’s leadership is functional, the stakes should be high for Zaidi — the architect of this roster — who is reportedly in the final year of his contract, and Gabe Kapler, the 2021 National League Manager of the Year, who is in the penultimate year of his contract.
Both have made their marks with this team — the Giants won 107 games and the NL West in 2021 — but looking at the roster, five years into Zaidi’s tenure, there are few foundational pieces, if any, on the San Francisco roster.
That’s why the Giants entered the offseason looking for one of those franchise cornerstones. They were banking on a big star taking the money of one of the most profitable teams in sports.
The Giants wanted to rebuild this roster from the top down.
But even when a big star — Correa — took the Giants’ cash, the deal fell apart.
So the team made its now age-old pivot: they’re building up from the bottom of the Major League roster once again.
But here’s the strange thing: It could work. You’d be a fool to discount it before the start of the season. At least wait until June.
For all quants who run baseball teams like hedge funds, success in baseball is yet to be fully quantified or formulated.
You’ll make the playoffs in football if you have a great quarterback and a marginally respectable defense.
You’ll make the playoffs in basketball if you have a superstar player and a couple of guys who can knock down 3s.
But in baseball, the two best players in the game can be on the same team, and that squad doesn’t even sniff the playoffs. (What do you think about sliding one of those guys up here, Angels?)
Baseball is an individual sport — eight fielders and a rotating cast of pitchers and hitters —played by so-called teams.
And I’ve come to understand that people are unpredictable.
The Giants are leaning into that unpredictability. They want the rest of baseball to overlook their roster. Surprise enough teams, and you might have a pretty good one yourself.
There might not be a deeper team in baseball than San Francisco.
Using Wins Above Replacement — the catch-all metric of the modern game, the Giants went for a 10-win player this offseason in Judge. Instead, they’ll start the season with 1.5-to-3-win players holding every roster spot.
Add in some additional defensive versatility to a lineup already keen to platooning, and you have a team where no one is irreplaceable.
Yes, that’s a tough sell for the marketing department, but over a 162-game regular season, it’s a reasonable approach to roster building. It somehow won the Giants 107 games in 2021, breaking every projection system in the sport.
This isn’t to say this Giants’ no-star plan will work — only that it could. Again, we’ve seen it happen before.
Add in the dramatic changes being made to the sport with the introduction of the pitch clock, the banning of the infield shift, and larger bases, and the projections that slate the Giants to be a .500 team again this season could be off-base. It’s a strange new world out there, and the Giants might have back-doored their way into new-baseball relevance.
That or they’re even further behind than I suspect.
Because the Giants don’t have foundational pieces, there would be no issue in this team starting fresh — front office and manager included — if this team doesn’t win games in 2023.
But winning is the cure-all elixir. In baseball, it’s proven that if winning is the end, the means are always justified. (Hi, Astros!)
The Giants don’t need to go for that magical 107 again, but after an offseason of infamy amid so many years of non-contention, this organization needs more than last season’s 81, or this season’s FanGraphs projection of 82.
Top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top, the pressure is on the 2023 Giants from the first pitch of Thursday’s Opening Day in New York against Aaron Judge’s Yankees.
Maybe the moves add up. Perhaps they don’t.
We’ll find out in the months to come.
