State of the Giants: Ownership

With live baseball action still at least a month away and our Hot Stove League reviews completed, we'll start another series in response to a reader suggestion of looking at where the Giants are in their rebuild.  We'll start with an extended series on the Giants and then do shorter ones on NL West rivals and keep going until a season starts.

STATE OF THE GIANTS

The Giants are in a transition phase where their homegrown core of players who came on the scene winning championships had a collective regression in performance we typically associate with age.  The Giants invested a lot of money in those players and added expensive veteran talent from the outside.  While the Giants appear to remain open to investing in elite free agent talent, Bryce Harper explained what they are up against when he recently stated that he noticed the decline in the performance of the core players and it factored into his decision to sign with the Phillies instead.  So the Giants don't have much choice but to be patient and let a rapidly improving farm system kick in about the time those big contracts are completed.

Ownership:  The Giants ownership group remains one of the richest in the league.  They have an ownership stake in their broadcast partners.  They have full ownership of the stadium which is now paid off.  They own a lot of the surrounding property and are in the process of developing it into an even more lucrative revenue stream.  There has been a subtle, but possibly significant shift in control of the team.  Up to now, the more wealthy members of the ownership group were content to let minority owners with more interest in the baseball side run things.  Larry Baer is still around, but appears to have a reduced role after serving a suspension for a public scuffle with his wife which doubled as a public relations disaster.  Over the past year, we've seen family members of the "deep pockets" step into more active roles.  Speaking of public relations disasters, it didn't help to find out the deepest pocket, Charles Johnson, was contributing to right wing PAC's which ran counter to the Giants carefully cultivated image of supporting one of the more liberal communities in the country.  It remains to be seen if the increased involvement of the deep pockets makes any practical difference in how the team is run.  I suspect the decision to change management had more to do with them waking up one day and realizing the Dodgers had a lower payroll than with realizing the core was aging fast or the farm system had hit a dry patch.

Grade:  B.  Public relations disasters aside, the fundamentals still look good.