State of the Giants: Bobby Evans Fired!

Yesterday, what had been rumored for several days became official:  GM Bobby Evans became the main scapegoat for a team that collapsed for the second straight year.  Other shoes may drop in coming days, but Evans was apparently the guy most responsible for the Giants current roster which is expensive, bad and mostly locked in place.

Gotta say I have mixed feelings about Evans tenure.  Since taking over the role at the start of the 2015 season, I thought his processes were mostly good, though admittedly on the risky side.  Those risks turned up snake-eyes time after time and ultimately cost him his job.

Evans first offseason and chance to put his stamp on the team came after the 2015 season.  The Giants had a relatively young core of Buster Posey, Madison Bumgarner, Brandon Crawford and Brandon Belt along with Hunter Pence.  Tim Lincecum's Giants career was ending and Matt Cain's was in a steep decline.  The Giants needed to bolster their starting pitching and needed a CF who could also lead off.  All eyes were on Evans at the winter meetings when he addressed these needs with big signings of Johnny Cueto and Jeff Samardzija followed by Denard Span.  There were questions about the bullpen but Bruce Bochy had always been able to build a bullpen on the fly.

The plan got off to a tremendous start as the Giants went into the All-Star break with the best record in baseball.  Then the bullpen collapsed!  Evans traded Matt Duffy and a prospect to the Rays for lefty Matt Moore who was inconsistent but pitched some great games down the stretch, but the bullpen continued to struggle.  The Giants 2016 season fittingly ended with a bullpen collapse in the Wild Card playoff game.

Evans again aggressively addressed the bullpen by handing out a 4 year/$60 M contract to Mark Melancon in the offseason, which might be the move that ultimately sealed his fate as GM.  Melancon showed up hurt out of the gate in 2017 and the wheels came off when Madison Bumgarner injured his shoulder in an ill-considered mountain bike accident while Hunter Pence and Denard Span's legs turned to rubber and series of injuries ended the seasons of several young players just as they seemed to be getting some traction.  Matt Moore's pitching career collapsed.

Evans now faced a seemingly impossible task of addressing multiple holes in the roster while staying under the CBT threshold so the Giants could reset on their CBT penalty.  His response was again aggressive but risky.  He sent a couple of prospects to Texas to get them to take on Matt Moore's contract.  He traded for Andrew McCutchen who had one year left on a reasonable contract to play RF.  He shipped Denard Span to the Rays along with another couple of prospects for Evan Longoria, whose contract still fit into the CBT limit but also had another 4 years on it.

It didn't look terrible on paper, but the risk bit back hard as injuries poured down like a rain in a winter storm in an El Nino year.  Bumgarner broke his hand in his final pre-season start, Jeff Samardzija started the season on the DL with a shoulder strain which never got better and Johnny Cueto, who pitched great for a few starts, went out with TJ surgery.  Melancon's arm was still not right.  Add in injuries to Longoria, Mac Williamson, Brandon Crawford, Brandon Belt and Buster Posey.  The Giants hung onto the edges of the postseason race until near the end of July and even mid-August but they finally threw in the towel on August 31 by trading McCutchen to the Yankees for a couple of aging prospects.

The Giants now face an aging roster, a bloated payroll and fixed obligations that severely restrict roster options for at least the next 3 seasons when the core contracts start coming off the books.  The Giants farm system under Evans got younger and more athletic but that left a "donut hole" of talent in the mid-upper minors, so help does not appear to be on the way from the farm system within the next year or two.

In the end, Bobby Evans takes the blame for this mess even though the longterm obligations had to have been decided as a group.  If they weren't, and he was the sole decision-maker, that is an organizational flaw that goes back to Larry Baer and Brian Sabean, which reminds me of the line in Neil Young's Powderfinger:  "....so the powers that be left me here to do the thinkin'........".  I thought his process was about as good as it could be given the organizational business model of competing every year and the homegrown core that was already in place.  He took risks and those risks all broke in the wrong direction.

The new GM, whoever that is, now faces a daunting task.  Almost any analytics minded person will take one look and tell ownership that the only way out is a teardown and rebuild with an aim to compete again in the next decade.  Baer and Sabean have said over and over that is not an option.  Personally, I am not convinced that an "analytics" person who thinks like every other GM in  MLB is necessarily the answer here, but I will admit that the organization seems to be very ossified in its thinking and it's time for a new perspective.