Sneaky Bad Season

Didn’t expect it.

I cried once during the 2023 Giants season.

It wasn’t after any of the losses during their downward spiral away from playoff contention and toward .500. It wasn’t when Gabe Kapler got fired. It wasn’t related to Brandon Crawford.

It was when all Mike Yastrzemski needed was a medium-deep fly ball to win the game, and instead he launched a ball deep into the night and deep into McCovey Cove. It’s the only time I’ve cried happy tears over baseball in my entire life.

I felt on top of the world in that moment. It was the Giants’ eighth win in a row, and it improved their record to 40-32 just two months after they started the season 6-13. In those two months, they had a .642 winning percentage, which is a 104-win pace throughout a full season. They were two games up on a playoff spot, and they would keep climbing, as they won their ninth and tenth games in a row the next two days.

Yastrzemski splash hits are usually associated with great vibes. His first ever splash hit was a walk-off to win the sixth game of the 2020 season (interestingly also off a Padres lefty), back when we were all over the moon that we had baseball after a four-month delay. And of course he had that splash hit go-ahead grand slam in 2021, which resulted in one of my favorite calls all time from Jon Miller.

Speaking of 2021, I spent a lot of the Giants’ 2022 season searching for “2021 vibes.” They’d pop up in quick flashes, like Joc Pederson’s three-homer game or Yastrzemski hitting the Giants’ first walk-off grand slam in nearly five decades, but they never really lasted more than a couple games at a time.

As the Giants rebounded from that 6-13 start, though, I started feeling the 2021 vibes a lot. And then I stopped. Not because the Giants stopped playing well, but because they were playing so well that I didn’t feel the need to look back on a past season. The 2023 Giants were creating their own magical vibes. Instead of being led by old guys having career resurgences through platoons, the rookies were stepping up for once, giving us a glimpse of who the Giants would hopefully be for years to come.

The newfound “2023 vibes” continued for about another month. The Giants lost four in a row to the Mets and Mariners, but soon after won seven in a row, capped off with a doubleheader sweep in Cincinnati. The second game was an insane, back-and-forth 11-10 win in which many “we’re so back”s and “it’s so over”s were said. The Giants improved to 54-41. If you can do basic math, you’d know that that’s 13 games over .500. What you might not know is that it’s the most games over .500 the Giants would be all season.

Right after this game, the Giants dropped six in a row, which encompassed the remainder of the Reds series, a three-game series in Washington (yikes!), and a makeup game in Detroit. They then swept the A’s in a two-game series and won a series vs. the Red Sox on back-to-back walk-offs. After winning the next series, a four-gamer against their Wild Card competitors the Diamondbacks to get to 12 games over .500, most Giants fans (except the perpetual #FireFarhan crowd) weren’t worried and just chalked it up to being streaky. The warning signs were there, though.

Here’s how many runs the Giants scored in every game mentioned in that last paragraph: 2, 1, 3, 1, 1, 1, 2, 8 (against the A’s), 2, 3, 4, 3, 4, 4, 1. That ain’t good!

The Giants followed up that stretch with getting swept in a two-game series on the other side of the Bay Bridge. After the second game, Alex Cobb delivered a quote that encapsulated something I had been worried about all year.

https://x.com/DannyEmerman/status/1688343501212356608?s=20

That A’s series kicked off a stretch of seven consecutive series losses that I have dubbed the “Happy Flight Stretch.” It seemed like in most of these series losses, the Giants would drop the first two, which always prompted everyone (including me) to say “get the happy flight!” And the Giants usually did do that. With the exception of the two-gamer in Oakland, none of these series losses were sweeps.

I’m generally a pretty optimistic fan, so throughout this stretch, I was ignoring all the bright red flags and staying content in the fact that the Giants still had a playoff spot. I don’t know if this was optimism or delusion, but it obviously didn’t last.

So far, most of this article has been written during and after the game on September 21, a night that I certainly do not want to remember. Tonight, after a loss to the Dodgers that never felt that close, the Giants fell below .500 for the first time in three and a half months.

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They got back to .500 the next day, but fell below for the final time the day after, and finished with a record of 79-83, their worst since 2019, the first year of Zaidi and the last of Bochy.

I’m not going to pretend to understand why the Giants suddenly became historically bad at hitting the ball after that doubleheader in Cincinnati. I’m also not in the business of making broad “Fire Farhan” or “ownership needs to be held accountable” claims without elaborating. So, what else can I say about the 2023 Giants?

Expectation vs. Reality

I was pretty high on the Giants going into this season, i.e. high-80s wins and a Wild Card berth. The way I saw it, these Giants were better on paper than the 2022 team, and if you’re better than .500, you’ve got a good shot of being in the playoffs with the current format. So, where did I go wrong?

One of my bold predictions was that Michael Conforto and Mitch Haniger would combine for 60+ home runs. In other words, at least one of them would break the Giants’ 30-homer drought that goes back to Barry Bonds’ 45 in 2004. And why not? Both of them had 30-homer seasons in the recent past, and the Giants were notorious for getting the very best out of their free agent signings.

Maybe I was a little too high on Conforto after he missed an entire season, and as much as my brain doesn’t understand it, 2019 (his 30-homer season) was four years ago. I still stand by my Haniger prediction, in a way. This has been by far the worst offensive season of his career, but that’s not entirely his fault. Say what you will about his oblique and being injury prone, but it’s a lot to ask for a guy to produce immediately after signing with a brand-new team for the first time in five years, especially after he missed most of spring training and April. And then right when he seemed to be figuring it out, he got hit in the arm with a pitch and had to miss two and a half months. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that that isn’t being injury prone.

I realized early on when Taylor Rogers, Ross Stripling, and Sean Manaea were really getting shelled that I was taking the Giants’ free agent track record for granted. Around that time, Grant Brisbee wrote a characteristically fantastic article about how the Giants had been really good at getting the most out of free agents and how that probably wasn’t going to last, and it kind of changed my perception of the team. Hitting on free agents had become so commonplace in the Zaidi Era that eventually I just took it as something that will always happen, and that’s just not realistic. And with how horrible this offseason’s free agent class is (insert Ohtani joke), barring an absolutely shocking signing or trade, I’m not as high on the Giants as I was before this season.

Gabe’s Gone

Despite the title of this article being a reference to a Gabe Kapler quote, I didn’t intend to spend much time talking about him in this article. Like I said, I started writing this article on September 21, eight days before my heart stopped because of a Bleacher Report notification. Because of that, I really didn’t plan out a spot in this article to write about him, so I’m just throwing it in at the end.

I was completely blindsided and hurt by Kapler’s firing. I was blindsided because I believed Greg Johnson’s pledge to keep him through the end of his contract, and probably deserve to be ridiculed for doing so. I was hurt mostly because the delusional part of me still thought that the 2021 vibes could return, and firing Kapler cemented that they couldn’t return because the manager of that team wouldn’t return.

Part of me really believed that the Zaidi-Kapler duo deserved at least one more season to see if they could recapture the 2021 magic, but I guess the Giants higher-ups didn’t have that same kind of patience. At the same time, the other part of me was kind of put off by Kapler’s inability to motivate the team when it mattered the most. Overall, I will remember his time in San Francisco very fondly, I wish him the very best, and I know he will succeed with whichever team he lands with.

To use the same analogy, part of me thinks there aren’t any good managers out there, while the other part remembers how much nobody wanted Kapler in 2019 and the season he turned in two years later. We’ll see how it ends up.

What’s in Store for ’24?

Last year, I got my hopes way up when Farhan said that the Giants were going to go out and pursue long-term contracts. We all know how that turned out, but I think we can find a silver lining in the Carlos Correa event. It proved that the Giants are, in fact, willing and able to go well into the hundreds of millions to sign a superstar. They just…didn’t due to unprecedented circumstances. (By the way, if you still hold it against Farhan for backing out of that deal when Steve freakin’ Cohen did the same and Correa put up a .711 OPS playing in the AL Central, there’s no hope for you.) Even so, when Farhan said the exact same thing a few days ago, I had a much more “I’ll believe it when I see it” attitude. As I said before, there are not a lot of options in free agency this year. I guess we all need to pray to whichever supreme beings we believe in that Farhan performs with the urgency of someone who knows his job is at stake, whether that’s in the form of free agent signing or trade. A man can dream.

But what about the guys the Giants already have? I don’t think it’s out of line to be excited about what young bucks like Kyle Harrison, Patrick Bailey, Luis Matos, and Marco Luciano can do after an offseason of rest and development.

The bottom line, though, is I just don’t think the Giants can succeed if they run it back with a few decent acquisitions like they did last offseason. I’m not one of those fans who curses the very name of platoons and think they should be eradicated of this Earth, but I don’t think the Giants can succeed by relying on them. They need solid, dependable, everyday players who are supplemented by platooning the lower spots in the lineup. I just don’t think I can put my full trust into the Giants going out and getting those everyday players.

As someone who was a Giants fan in 2016, maybe I shouldn’t have gotten as excited as I did when the Giants were running the table in early July. But at least the 2016 Giants made the playoffs. The 2023 Giants’ collapse into a below-.500 team was one of the darkest times of my Giants fandom, but I’m sure I’ll get way too excited again when the 2024 Giants are on pace for 108 wins at the All-Star Break.