Giants fans should be mad. But why are they absolutely livid?

Not officially, of course. They’re three games back in the wild-card loss column with 11 games to play as of this writing. There are still permutations that get them into the postseason. I’m old enough to remember when a much worse loss in Arizona put the Giants four games back of the wild card with 11 games to play, but the Giants won nine of their next 10, and they forced a one-game playoff. In which Mark Gardner grooved an 0-2 fastball to Gary Gaetti. Not that I still think about these things.

It’s still possible that you’ll care about Giants baseball on the final day of the season.

It’s possible that Logan Webb will throw a no-hitter in his final start of the season. It’s possible that Shohei Ohtani signs with the Giants over the winter. It’s possible that Wednesday’s Powerball numbers will be 22, 24, 25, 28, 44, 55, and you’ll win and give me $10 million as a thanks for reminding you to play. Heck, lots of things are possible. Lightning strikes might have turned ammonia, methane and water vapor into amino acids. Then a trillion quadrillion other things happened over 4.5 billion years and now we have Martin Scorsese and microwavable popcorn. Think big!

In a much more down-to-earth sense, the Giants are cooked.

Alex Cobb probably won’t pitch again this season, and any thoughts of the Giants advancing even a single round of the postseason hinged on the Giants having two reliable starting pitchers who could flummox an opponent on any given night. Now they would likely have just one of those pitchers, in Webb. Except they’re 14-17 in his starts this season. This is all funny math, and none of it adds up. They’re cooked, and they weren’t thrown into a scorching hot wok and done in a few seconds. They’re more like a pork shoulder cooked sous vide for 36 hours. They were cooked low and slow, and now they’re falling apart before your eyes. The 2023 Giants just fall right off the bone. Cooked.

However, there’s something about this team that I can’t put my finger on, and I’m going to need your help with it. This is less me coming up with a hot take or a grand theory, and more looking for an answer I’m not sure I’ll find.

Why are people so incredibly angry about this team?

I’m not saying it’s right or wrong to be angry about the 2023 Giants. I’m not here to berate you for overreacting, and I’m not here to spray kerosene on the anger. It’s just that I’ve followed a lot of teams that are cooked. I’ve followed Giants teams in the ’80s that were cooked before Huey Lewis sang the National Anthem on Opening Day. I’ve covered Giants teams that never had a chance, and teams that screwed up their best chance at the worst possible moment. I followed the Golden State Warriors when they went 16 seasons without an All-Star. I followed the San Francisco 49ers when fans were desperate for David Carr for some reason. And while I’m not going to suggest this is the angriest fan base I’ve been immersed with, it’s close. It’s probably on the Mount Rushmore of scowling fans and livid tweets.

Why?

Considering that the Giants were .500 last season and close to .500 this season, it won’t surprise you that they’re right in the middle of the pack for wins over the last two seasons. There are hopeless teams below them, but there were plenty of hopeful teams, too. You’ll notice that I don’t even have to appeal to the 2021 Giants to make this point. It’s unusual to be this mad about mediocrity. This kind of anger is usually saved for disasters and embarrassments.

Of course, you can’t just ignore 2021. It was an outlier season, sure, but even if you lop off 10 or 15 wins because of good fortune or luck or whatever, it was still a wildly successful season by any measure. The angriest Giants fans like to wave it away, as if it didn’t exist, which is like saying, “Other than the five movies he was in, John Cazale didn’t have much of an impact on American cinema.” No, it counts. It happened. And if you take the win-loss record over the last three seasons, only seven teams have won more than the Giants.

I was wondering if I missed something about the timeline, so I scrolled back through The Athletic articles over the last few years to see what the expectations were since the beginning of the Farhan Zaidi era as team president of baseball operations. It was a journey.

Look at the words after the headline. They read like they were written before color television. And in the comments from Zaidi’s initial hiring through the first month of 2023, there was a fair amount of agreement. The Giants had no shot until 2022 or 2023, if not even later. The Giants were rebuilding, full stop, even if they weren’t doing it by giving their veterans away. The farm system’s best prospects were mostly teenagers, and other than a possible frontline starting catcher drafted out of college in the first round, they weren’t likely to get help from rookies soon. It was going to take time.

The teenagers are now in their 20s and getting called up. The Giants have a frontline starting catcher who was drafted out of college in the first round. They aren’t losing 89 games, like they did in the last season of Bobby Evans’ GM tenure. There’s been measurable progress, at least in a way that aligns with those expectations from a few years ago.

Don’t misconstrue this; I’m not saying that everything is fine, and Zaidi and manager Gabe Kapler are geniuses, you’re too stupid to see their vision, blah blah blah. Not in the slightest. I’m just comparing the current state of the team with the expectations from 2019, 2020 and the start of 2021. Show a winning percentage close to .500 and a team that’s festooned with rookies to Giants fans back then, and it will make perfect sense. Yeah, that’s the plan, alright. Wow, they’re .500 already? Bully for them.

You don’t get a lot of “bully for them”s these days.

I have some theories as to why the goalposts have seemingly changed.

The Dodgers will never be bad again

The main one. Look over there, at the Giants’ hated rival. They might win 100 games again. They’ll win 100 games next year, even if half their rotation falls in a wheat thresher. They’ll win 100 games the year after that, even if manager Dave Roberts gets bored and starts telling all of his right-handed hitters to bat lefty, and vice-versa.

And here come the Giants, the take-a-penny/leave-a-penny tray of the National League, consistently unable to get out of their own way. The differences are striking. And they’ll make fans very, very angry. Understandably so.

The empty free-agent promises

There was about a week when it was possible that the Giants were going to get Giancarlo Stanton and Shohei Ohtani. According to Baseball Reference, though, it never happened. They finished second for Bryce Harper. They finished second for Aaron Judge. They finished first for Carlos Correa, and then they bailed.

The Giants haven’t promised a superstar to love, but they’ve done everything a franchise can do short of promising. You’ll note that it’s a good thing that Stanton isn’t on the Giants. While Correa would have been an improvement on the Giants’ shortstop production this year, it’s hard to be too wistful for him. Ohtani, Harper and Judge are still electric and thrilling, though, and you’re still waiting.

The heightened expectations of 2021

Another biggie. They had arrived. They were the smartest people in the room, and they could turn water into wine, straw into gold and Shaun Anderson into Late Night LaMonte. They were going to wrassle with the Dodgers for years. They were cheated out of proper closure because of a terrible call on a check swing, but they’d be back.

Instead, they’ve been frustrating and dull. Every season is like opening a pack of Topps cards and getting nothing but commons, over and over again.

The Giants are boring

This ties into the free-agent point above, but that’s not the only factor. It’s just a dull team. Watching Corbin Carroll and Alek Thomas zip around the outfield and bases in Arizona is depressing. The Giants strike out a lot. They aren’t making spectacular defensive plays on the regular, and they’re not making routine plays as often as they should.

Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci wrote about this recently, and while there are some points I disagree with that I’ll get to, he’s not wrong about the boring part. No homers and no contact and no speed and no defense makes Jack a dull boy, even if the Giants aren’t exactly an awful team.

The Giants are too reliant on analytics

I reject the premise, for the most part. Almost every team relies on analytics as much as the Giants. If they don’t, they’re the Oakland A’s. Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. The scouts lost. My advice is to do what the previous A’s front office did: rely on analytics, sir.

Verducci has a zinger early on in his article, where he writes, “if this is the future of baseball, I want no part of it,” but I don’t think this is supposed to be the future of baseball. It’s the Giants trying to improve every spot on the roster, one player at a time, with some very visible successes and failures, and it’s how you arrive at the flailing, boring, not-exactly-awful-but-certainly-not-good team before you. They’re not trying to outsmart the world; they’re trying to triage.

Except I also get why this team’s specific brand of analytics is so irritating. The decisions are so, so omnipresent in what is, to you, an escape or a hobby. It’s Duke Ellington stopping every five seconds and saying, “Now I’m going to play a C7#9” before he actually plays it. You just want to hear the danged song. And you want your hitters to smack the ol’ horsehide into the outfield, even if he’s a left-handed hitter facing a left-handed pitcher. When Kapler pinch hits for Joc Pederson in the fifth inning, or when he’s using an opener yet again instead of just letting Sean Manaea take the danged ball, it’s like he’s looking directly into the camera and whispering “analytics” before winking.

Pretty sure that’s not the intent, though! It’s a philosophy of “upgrade every spot on the 40-man roster” combined with “maximize the positive skills of every player” that just happens to have led to this messy roster because you don’t want this guy to face a lefty, this guy to face a righty, this guy to be in the field if you can help it, this guy to go a third time through the order, et cetera. By focusing on what players can do well, they’ve ignored too much of what they can’t do well, and that’s a problem. But that’s not because the Giants are too numbers-oriented. It’s because they have a roster that needs very specific numbers-oriented strategies to work even as well as it has. And it’s very visible and in your face.

You might be tired of it. And you’re not wrong.

Again, though, these are only theories. Maybe it’s one of them more than the others. Maybe it’s a combination of all of them. All I know is that Giants fans are mad. So mad. Hopping mad. Jumping livid. The ratios under every tweet from the main Giants account aren’t filled with “you’ll get ’em next time” sentiments.

It’s not my place to tell you whether that’s right or wrong. It’s just fascinating for a team that’s not that awful and isn’t too far off from where most people hoped they would be just a few years ago.

The floor is open.

Why?

(Top photo of Alex Wood: Matt York / Associated Press)

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Kelle Repass

Update: 2024-06-05

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