Snow Way This is Spring

"The Giants have spent every year of essentially the last five trying to rally the troops and squeeze one more title out of the Bumgarner/Posey/manager Bruce Bochy crew. Well, this is Bochy’s final season, and with Bumgarner a free agent after this year and a new sheriff in the front office, this is all there probably is left. Zaidi didn’t dismantle the team in the offseason, so he’s giving them one last chance. If the Giants get off to a slow start, the dismantling might begin early. But if they can hang around the postseason chase, maybe Zaidi decides to add rather than subtract. It’d sure be nice to send Bochy out a winner."

-- Will Leitch, " 20 questions that will define the NL West", 2/27/2019, at  https://www.mlb.com/giants/news/2019-nl-west-preview

It's always nice to find agreement out there. This is the same message we've been sending out since the disastrous 2017 campaign. The Giants have, for the last two years and this one, committed themselves to one more shot at the brass ring with the "core"-- essentially Buster, Bum, and Crawford-- before any serious rebuild will be considered. 

Team ownership and management know that getting to the postseason is the key-- that, as Billy Beane has long maintained, the playoffs are a crapshoot and any team can get hot and win. The Giants are proof positive, especially the 2014 team. The 2010 team, such a great outfit in retrospect, only got to the postseason because San Diego collapsed down the stretch and the Giants took advantage. The 2012 team was the best of the three, and the only one of them that could legitimately claim to be the best in baseball that year. The difference between the 2014 team, which went all the way, and the 2016 team, which didn't, was one game: 88-74 versus 87-75. And until the ninth inning of Game 4 of the NLDS, it sure seemed like the 2016 Giants had every chance of doing what the 2014 team had done.   

A lot of the weeping and wailing that has accompanied this chilly offseason has been overly influenced by September of last year, when the Giants essentially took the month off, trading or inactivating every effective position player and fielding a Triple-A team for 30 days, which went 5-21.  We forget the Giants, with Gorkys Hernandez, Steven Duggar, Austin Slater, and a declining Hunter Pence at two of the three outfield positions, were 68-68 on August 31. That's a 15-game improvement over the pestilential 2017 team, which was 53-83 at the same point and lost 98 games.

By comparison, take a look at the 2013 Giants. They were 60-75 on August 31, 2013, eight games worse than last year's team. They finished 76-86, just three games ahead of last year's team. They won the world championship the next season. And they got older, not younger. That's what Farhan Zaidi and Larry Baer and Brian Sabean are looking at right now. It's a thin line when five teams qualify for the postseason and a .500 record in July means you're a contender. They don't just know this intellectually; they've seen it played out, with this team.

Contrary to revisionist claims, the Giants did not get younger each year they won the World Series. In fact, they generally got a little older. In 2010 the big contributions were from veterans-- Aubrey Huff, Pat Burrell, Cody Ross, Juan Uribe-- plus the Rookie of the Year, Buster Posey.

In 2012, Marco Scutaro, Hunter Pence, and the healthy Angel Pagan, veterans all, balanced out against the youth of the Brandons, Belt and Crawford, and MVP Posey. 

In 2014, Joe Panik was the lone youngster added to a veteran group with a bunch of part-timers-- Mike Morse, Gregor Blanco, Juan Perez, Travis Ishikawa-- at two of the outfield positions. Sound familiar?

And while the Giants' best pitchers in 2010 were younger than the overall team age, it was the same crew in 2012, except they were two years older and 34-year-old Ryan Vogelsong had replaced then-29-year-old Jonathan Sanchez. And the whole pitching staff, starters and "Core Four", added veterans and was much older in 2014. 

So there is no recent precedent for an "influx of youth" transforming the San Francisco Giants from losers to winners overnight. There is ample precedent for an influx of veterans doing it, though.

An influx of youth means a rebuild. Houston, Atlanta, Boston, and Philadelphia know all about it. And in San Francisco, the rebuild is coming, but not yet. A year ago we had figured on 2021, but with Zaidi's arrival the timetable has moved up. It will be next year, no matter what happens this year. Except for Buster Posey, probably Brandon Crawford, and perhaps Madison Bumgarner, every position player, and every pitcher over 29 years of age, will be tradeable next winter. And the selling will begin this summer if the Giants are below .500 the last week of July.

So don't give up the ship just yet. She's getting one more chance to circle the globe.