Full season leagues were idle as usual on Mondays.
ACL: Giants edged out the Guardians 3-2.
Luis Hernandez SS(17 yo)- 1 for 4. BA= .315.
Luke Mensik RHP(18 yo(- 3 IP, 3 H, 2 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 2 K's. ERA= 5.40.
Chen-Hsun Lee RHP(24 yo)- 2 IP, 0 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 2 K's. ERA= 1.93.
Melvin Pineda RHP(22 yo)- 2 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 5 K's. ERA= 1.93.
Samir Chires RHP(22 yo)- 2 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 1 BB, 2 K's. ERA= 2.65.
DSL: Angels outscored Giants Black 7-6.
Keiberg Camacaro SS(19 yo)- 4 for 5, HR(2), SB(8). BA= .400.
Dennys Riera 3B(21 yo)- 2 for 5. BA= .343.
This is Keiberg Camacaro's 4'th season in the DSL. Is this a late breakout for him?
DSL: Mariners blasted Giants Orange 10-1.
Juan Colorado RHP(19 yo)- 2 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 1 BB, 2 K's. ERA= 12.27.
Juan Colorado is a converted shortstop pitching for the first time this season.
At the MLB level, the Giants are a reeling organization with no sign of turning it around anytime soon. They have consistently underperformed for an extended period to the point where there appears to be something fundamentally wrong with their talent evaluation process. Whether that is a personal failure on the part of individuals or a system failure is unclear. If it is an individual failure, it involves multiple simultaneous failures by multiple individuals. On top of the performance failures on the field, they have now drawn national attention for a divisive failure in an historically successful community outreach effort. Whether that is an additional factor in poor on-field performance remains to be seen, but it can't be helping.
Yesterday, multiple baseball writers broke a story confirming discussions we have had on this blog that the Giants are gearing up to go full sell mode as the trade deadline approaches. These reports indicate that not only obvious trade candidates whose contracts expire at the end of the season are available but they are gauging interest in the the players with more problematic contracts like Willy Adames and Rafael Devers with some analysts believing those players are probably not tradable.
We, as fans, are disappointed and angry in the face of a complete breakdown by the team we love to root for. Some of us are saying "I told you so." Others of us were cautiously hopeful and now disappointed but not particularly surprised. We've seen reports that Buster Posey and the Giants front office were not only deeply disappointed in the team's performance last year but surprised, even shocked. Bob Melvin ended up being the scapegoat. At this point, Buster et al must be in a state of proverbial shell shock. I agree the team needs to be in full sell mode and start a rebuild from the bottom up, but there also needs to be a full on organizational evaluation starting with ownership control and decision making. Any residual denial needs to be stripped away.
When Buster Posey assumed the job of POBO, he indicated he gave himself a 3 year window to turn things around and at least implied if he couldn't, he would voluntarily steop down. It's now clear it's going to take a lot longer than that. I don't necessarily think that means Buster needs to resign but if he moves ahead with a full fire sale, the rest of ownership should move their timeline for a full organizational evaluation up to the All-Star break rather than waiting for the end of the season.
Key questions are what process was used in signing the Adames and Devers contracts? How did internal scouting evaluate these players? Did they support the signings or did Buster overrule the scouts and go with his gut feelings? On top of the big names, it's alos fair to ask about the Houser and Mahle signings as well as the failure to address the Closer role and bullpen. Has Buster learned anything about free agent evaluations from these bitter disappointments? How will he operate differently going forward?
This year's trade deadline and next offseason loom as maybe the most difficult and explosive in the history of the organization.
That penultimate paragraph sets out the key questions. Likely we’ll not get direct answers but perhaps we’ll be able to infer them from events in the coming months.
ReplyDeleteHonestly I never understood the signing of Adames. I get that he is a big name and was thought to have leadership skills. But for a GM who wanted old-fashioned pitching and defense, signing to a huge contract a free-swinging shortstop who’s defense was, charitably, mediocre seemed like getting off on the wrong foot.
Looking in hindsight, the signing of Adames and the trade for Devers do not make sense because they go againsts Buster's agenda of contact hitting, speed, and fundamentals. I was wondering how much AI was used in the decision making because I know they were using AI as a tool to profile fan's want list and use it as a tool to help boost attendance. Bill Schlough is the AI point man in the system and he is in charge with training all staff in AI literacy and enhancing the ballpark experience but I can't tell how much they are using the technology to make baseball decisions. Schlough was questioned about how much the organization was involved with AI and his answer was that the Giants are using it so much now that he said it was easier to describe where the Giants were NOT using it. When things don't make baseball sense, the reason might be caused by the use of AI. Hopefully, they use it as a tool and part of the decision making process and not using as the sole means of making baseball decisions.
ReplyDeleteAs stated above - I think the key question is the scouting dept. it’s been a mixed bag of good and bad evaluations/trades/ draft picks/ and FA signings. Mostly bad and some very bad (Kyle Harrison). I think they need to rebuild and be aggressive at the trade deadline but I don’t really trust their decision making.
ReplyDelete'Scouting department has been replenished but not with the traditional type of scout but they are more versed in analytics.
DeleteI'd like.to see the Giants get good at developing their young pitchers and helping their veteran pitchers. Spend $ to hire good veteran pitching coaches to work in their minor league system. Buster should go out and acquire good arms via trade and draft.. The Brewers and Guardians are good at developing their own pitching, they are smaller market then Giants, so no reason why the Giants can't go this route if they put their mind and resources to it..Going this route with McDonald, Whisenhunt and others might be more beneficial in the long run then spending $10 mil a year on #4 or #5 starters like Houser and Mahle.. and ownership has said they won't spend on high end pitching, which is ok,, despite letting go Gausman and Rodan in the past, so that's why I think Giants should go with their young pitching. The Brewers and Guardians let their young pitchers sink or swim in the majors, why can't the Giants be that way?
DeleteThe last time I read something this pessimistic about the Giants future was the team article in one of the Baseball Prospectus annuals, that article, like this, discussed the total front office failure and need for a complete teardown and multi-year rebuild. Of course that was the Prospectus annual that came out in the spring of 2010. We know how that turned out.
ReplyDeleteThere is a lot of panic based on a bad couple of months, my own personal take on this is that you have a group of coaches that show a lot of signs of inexperience, we have now seen how the hitting side has turned it around, do the pitching coaches have it in them to do something similar? I kind of doubt it. I like Jesse Chavez, but it feels like the closing failure has something to do with how they are prepared for that situation.
Trading Devers or Adames seems foolish to me, as this is the definition of selling low. Also considering those acquisitions a failure based on a half season is a failure too.
Looking at the team I see a top tier lineup, a couple of good starters several solid relievers and a well stocked farm system with solid performances all the way down.
There is some fixing to be done but there is not a full teardown level of fixing needed. This is exactly the kind of team that could turn around quickly.
For this season I would trade Ray and Haase, for hard throwing high minor relievers, Give Cavanaugh a shot to share catching duties with Susac, Give some or all of the lefty W's a chance in the rotation. Give Jonah Cox a more extended look in center, he may be the better/younger version of Bader. When Ramos comes back let him get his fulltime job back and Gilbert becomes the 4th outfielder, which is where his bat belongs.
A couple of bad months? Adames and Devers have now been so bad for so long in two different seasons they took the Giants out of contention making the 1 or 2 good months inconsequential. That's a lot more than a couple of bad months.
DeleteI think unfair to question Adames signing as "a free-swinging shortstop who’s defense was, charitably, mediocre." At the time, his defense rated well, and he had just had a clutch, high RBI season. The appropriate question was the LEMGTH of trhe contract for a SS entering his age 30 season
ReplyDeleteAt the time of the signing there was considerable discussion about whether Adames could return to league-average (mediocre) fielding after an off year fielding for the Brewers. It wasn’t a subtle point at the time, which is why it surprised.
DeleteI've been reading your blog for years, Doc. It has informed me and helped feed my interest in the Giants through thick and thin. But I found your post today to be the most incisive and concise review of the organization from top-to-bottom I've seen lately by any blogger, reporter or analyst. Perhaps this will turn out to be your most significant blog ever. Thank you for your continued coverage of the Giants.
ReplyDeleteThe Giants organization has essentially been in free-fall since they hired Farhan. He had no clue as to what he was doing and revamped the organization in his likeness. Unfortunately, as great a player as Posey was, he is proving to be the exact opposite as a baseball executive running a team. His hire of Tony Vitello is the ultimate red flag that he just doesn’t know what the heck he is doing. Why in the world do you bring in someone with ZERO professional baseball experience at ANY level to manage veteran professional players? He has zero credibility in the clubhouse and is so bereft of contacts that ownership had to hire his entire coaching staff. What exactly is he bringing to the table??? Sure, maybe 4-5 years down the road he could be a decent MLB manager, but what in the heck are you doing putting in charge of the dugout until he has proven that? No team that has any interest in actually winning anytime in the near future would make a ridiculous move like this. The decision is a symbolic of all that is wrong with this once proud, now pathetic organization……
ReplyDeleteThank you for the thoughtful writeup. I’ve come to much the same conclusion.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I’d call out is that this organization seems unwilling to take pre-season projections seriously. For most of the last decade, they’ve repeatedly assembled teams projected to be around .500, then largely achieved those results, only for the organization to act surprised and frustrated when they did. The outliers being 2021 and now 2026.
The larger pattern is that the organization consistently bets on beating the projections rather than building a roster that projects well in the first place. That is a loosing gamble, and after a decade of evidence, it is hard to argue it has been a successful one.
- Fan
I read the reports indicating that the Giants plan to be sellers . . . but won't trade Webb. That to me tells a lot about what is wrong with the front office (and/or ownership). They refuse to sell high on players when they are years away from competing.
ReplyDeleteBuster and the FO failed to trade Ray last year, which is looking very foolish now. In my mind, they need to trade Arreaz, Lee, and Webb to get some real value. No benefit in holding on to these players at this stage. If the Giants are lucky, they can find someone willing to take on Devers or Adames, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
It may be that there is a fundamental problem with ownership and the people they are putting in charge of running the organization. Sadly, if the is the case, things won't change until there is an ownership change.
-TK
Leadership saying they don’t want to move Webb but saying their sellers is a classic and well documented maneuver that really means: if you make an offer for Webb, it better be a haul. For a durable, controllable starter on a reasonable contract with #2 potential on a major contender, trading Webb for some top prospects with ETAs around 2028-2030 should not be off the table for a rebuild timeline. Now, whether the giants know how to scout the right prospects is an entirely different question.
ReplyDeleteAndy in OC
What were the other options that Buster had available to him over the last few years? What could he have done differently aside from rebuild 2 years ago? Farhan got rid of many of our scouts and the player development department might have always been average at best but he didn’t improve it and in my opinion made it worse. Buster has at least tried to improve this team by bringing in players that should have performed much better than they have. It hasn’t worked and if he is able to pull off a rebuild then ai give him credit for recognizing that it wasn’t working and convincing ownership to rebuild when they never would have before. So in a roundabout way, Buster has accomplished something that seemed impossible a tear or two ago and if he can get rid of these contracts and if we can have some patience I think things could turn around in 3-4 years!
ReplyDelete"....bringing in players that should have performed much better than they have." Not everybody agrees with this statement. I have a friend who is a Red Sox fan and he tells me the Sox fans were very happy to see Devers traded and the Red Sox get out from under his awful contract. There were also voices out there who thought they could see signs that Adames was already starting the downside of his career. Yes, it is now hindsight but when a disaster like this occurs it behooves and organization to figure out how and why it happened so as to not keep on making the same mistakes.
DeleteI’ve asked the question before but nobody has been able to give a good answer or avoid answering it altogether. What else could Buster have done differently? What other better options were there?
DeleteThis is a disingenuous question because I just answered it for you in my reply above. He could have not sunk a $ Billion in players who were already on the edge of the downside of their careers. I would say Devers was the worst and most unnecessary move. He had a perfectly good bridge to Bryce Eldridge at 1B/DH in Dom Smith. Instead, he overpayed for a player the Red Sox couldn't wait to get rid of and forced a situation where his top prospect was either blocked or has to share a position for the duration of that prospect's pre-free agency career. Buster could have invested more on the pitching side and could have paid more attention to the bullpen/Closer situation.
Delete...and back to my original post. We don't know much about the process in those decisions except that Buster engineered FZ's ouster and took over as the POBO. Did the Giants internal scouting have a different opinion on those players than the media skeptics? How much did Buster rely on internal scouting in his decision making and how much did he rely on his own experience as a former player? We will probably never know the answers to that. My point is in the complete collapse of Buster's plan, ownership needs to be asking those questions and getting straight answers about how it's going to be different moving forward.
DeleteI agree with you and think the scouting and evaluation need to be scrutinized and changes likely need to be made. Dom Smith would have been the wise choice in hindsight but what other pitchers could they have invested in and at best they would still be a 500 team. That’s really my point here, there is nothing Posey could have done to either avoid being a 500 team yet again or rebuild. With the epic failure this year he effectively has been forced into a rebuild which was the only way out of mediocrity. Had he tried this 2 years ago he would have been met with the same vitriol as he is receiving now. Had he fielded another 500 team this year same deal. He had to go through the failure of this season to force ownership to accept a rebuild.
DeleteI hope you aren't one of those people who are trying to spin this that Buster did this intentionally to force a full rebuild. That is absurd! While pointing to exact moves Buster could have made to improve the team is out of the scope of this discussion, I believe there were opportunities available including rolling with Dom Smith rather than acquiring Devers, doing more with starting pitching and paying more attention to the bullpen/Closer situation. It gets back to player evaluation. No organization is perfect at it but some do it better than others and those are the organizations who field perennial postseason teams.
DeleteSome will never stop Farhan bashing without analyzing the fact that FZ took a B-A-D team and made it average plus the bonus of the 2021 season.
ReplyDeleteWith short contracts (Lee notwithstanding) he did not restore a consistent better than .500 team so was dumped after a fair chance.
Posey took a different approach bringing in expensive talent while extending Chapman most likely beyond his effectiveness, but struck out on securing reliable pitching.
While Zaidi left a very average albeit not expensive platform, his successor's attempt to push average to successful with crippling contracts has unquestionably failed.
No one has any idea where the heck they go from here: there's no free lunch. Most likely they will have to hope the 4 bad contracts representing almost half the non-penalty level will perform or throw expensive money (penalty levels) to complete a winning team: average performance but expensive or competitive with Ownership taking the money hit.
I mostly agree with this take. Farhan's main problem seemed to be a very short attention span so never seemed to have a plan that went beyond one season at a time.
DeleteGood post Doc, little pessimistic but on point. I'll try to keep my disappointment to a minimum. As you know it bothered me to hear ownership say they won't spend on high end pitching saying they're high on their young pitching in their system. I Still wonder who they were talking about. It sounds like a lame excuse not to spend is it baseball ops decision or ownership? Landon Roupp is developing into a good mid rotation starter, hopefully Trevor McDonald can do the same. Do they mean they won't spend on closers too? They are expensive. I'm hoping they acquire a couple of young power arms in trades. As for signing Houser and Mahle that happend because they failed to develop enough young pitching in their system.. I'm good if they can trade Adames, but he has a full no trade clause and a ton on $ left. Who would play SS if Adames is traded..it wouldn't be right for me to criticize Devers trade now since I backed it when made. But did Buster have to agree to take on entire contract? I wonder how much $ is ownership willing to pay down in any potentiall Adames or Devers trade?
ReplyDeleteI can understand not wanting to spend on high-end pitching, and the cost of any free agent pitching is exorbitant. If you look at the universe of high end pitching, very few of those contracts end up in the black for the team, and most teams are not going to afford the deep depth of the Dodgers to sustain them through the IL stints. It's just the Giants are now finding out the hard way that high-end contracts for positional players are no panacea and a whole lot of them don't end up as positive for the team either. It all comes back to scouting, player evaluation and development. Teams that do it better have a huge advantage but it's incredibly hard to do it better.
DeleteI know, Doc, you’re probably tired of me making this point, but bad contracts only matter if ownership decides they matter.
DeleteThe Giants are one of the most valuable franchises in baseball and can afford a much higher payroll than they currently carry. That means the consequences of a bad contract are largely a choice. Ownership can decide to absorb the loss and keep investing in the roster, or it can treat that contract as a reason to limit future spending.
That’s why the Giants’ approach perplexes me. They seemed to accept that they would have to overpay position players to come to San Francisco. Fine. That’s the cost of doing business. But then they appear to have treated those same contracts as a reason to pull back spending elsewhere.
You can’t have it both ways. If attracting talent requires paying a premium, that premium has to be built into the plan. Otherwise you’re not just overpaying for players, you’re overpaying for players and then handicapping the roster afterward by operating under a payroll ceiling that’s lower than what the franchise can actually afford.
It’s also why I’ve criticized Posey for some of the negative ROI deals. Not because every contract needs to be a winner, but because ownership doesn’t seem willing to spend enough to comfortably absorb the extra cost. If you’re going to run a relatively tight payroll, you need to be selective about handing out risky contracts. If you’re going to spend like a big-market team, then a few bad deals are simply the cost of acquiring talent. What doesn’t make sense is trying to split the difference.
- Fan
Sigh.....For at least the 117'th time, the Giant problem is not, and has never been, that they don't spend enough money. They do not have a spending deficit. They have a baseball decision making deficit.
DeleteUntil the Doller$ get old and broken down and stop printing money (hopefully sometime before the sun goes supernova) it is unrealistic for the Giants to make big moves at the major league level to try to catch them. Now is the time to work on the foundation of the organization- their farm system- not only from a player personnel standpoint but also the coaching and scouting standpoint. It seems the Giants are making progress with the players, signing promising talent from Latin America and hopefully further tapping into the market in Korea and the rest of Asia. With two first round picks and a strong draft class it is imperative they draft well this year. The stated focus of the organization on contact hitting and defense is diametrically opposed to what we are seeing from many of the key players at the big league level, but these are all players from outside the organization who have been added at the major league level. The vision of the organization for the offense, defense and pitching has to be ingrained starting from the foundation and continuing all the way to the majors. It’s too late to change what we have in the majors right now- we just have to make whatever changes we can to the current ML roster, ride it out, and trust in the current regime to eventually see their plan play out. We just have to be patient- as a long suffering Giants fan for 50+ years I have had a lot of experience in that!
ReplyDeleteIf you don't like it that the Giants' ownership doesn't want to spend more, that they don't want to double pay when a team goes over the luxury tax threshold, then you're probably going to want one of the teams that has no regard about what they spend, but be careful, note that the Mets owner does care how much he spends and they aren't much better than the Giants.
ReplyDeleteGiants ownership has been willing to spend but it mostly hasn't worked for them
If Adames could recognize what is a strike and what is not, the Giants would have a better offense and not have so many LOB, with some opportune runs resulting.
ReplyDeleteThat could mean they might have a better record but probably not nearly enough.
It is frustrating to watch Adames leave runners on base SO often.
While Adames has always had K rates that hover between 25-30%, he's also walked at higher than 10% until this year when his walk rate plummeted to 5.7%. He's not the only player whose walk rate is lower this season. The Giants are dead last in MLB in walks. So the blame may not be on Adames as much as a shift in organizational philosophy to try to cut down on strikeouts. They have improved their team K rate but Adames K rate is still over 25% so he may be having more trouble adapting to the new philosophy.
DeleteIt seems that as soon as he gets 2 strikes, he swings at everything! Pitchers should never give him a hittable pitch once he has 2 strikes.
Delete