There are benefits to following a lousy team without any chance of near-term success. Please, I know you’re angry at how this season has gone, but I’m not talking about the 2022 Giants. I’m talking about the 100-loss teams with bottom-ranked farm systems. I’m talking about the teams with general managers who are inexplicably entrenched and/or the ones with payrolls forever under $100 million. A truly hopeless franchise doesn’t have to check all those boxes, but some of them do.
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When a team is that bad, one of the benefits is that the short-term strategy is elegantly simple: Just play the young players. Get the prospects and the Quad-A guys in the lineup, let them take their lumps and see who can be a part of the next winning team. Anyone can start a top prospect like Julio Rodríguez when he’s ready, but it takes a special kind of desperation to commit to the C-plus and C-minus prospects. It’s a perk of losing. The A’s aren’t exactly thriving, but at least they might come away from this season with an idea of how much, say, Dermis García might help them next season.
When the 2008 Giants were on their way to losing another 90-plus games, they decided to bring up a 21-year-old prospect who didn’t even make Baseball America’s top-30 list before he started the season in High-A San Jose. It wasn’t the original plan, but the dude kept hitting, even after a promotion to Double A. The Giants were so bad that season that they could afford to give Pablo Sandoval a chance. It worked out. Low expectations can be a warm, snuggly blanket with the right attitude.
Which brings us to the 2023 Giants, who should not be one of those teams. They should have starting pitchers who can prevent runs. They still might have a lineup that’s spookily close to the league average in almost every statistic. More than any of this, though, is they’ll have expectations. Giants fans tasted success just last season, and they liked it. They’ll ask for more. Even if there aren’t a ton of reasons to be ultra-optimistic about 2023, the expectation is that the roster will be better. This is not the time to throw players at the wall and see if they stick.
This is why you’ll spend the offseason thinking about Aaron Judge or Jacob deGrom, even if they’re unlikely to sign. It’s why you’ll scour the rosters of the worst teams and see if there’s a star or semi-star the Giants can poach in a trade. And it’s why you’re underwhelmed by suggestions to bring back the same players, whether it’s Wilmer Flores, Joc Pederson, Evan Longoria, Tyler Rogers, Brandon Crawford or Brandon Belt. (Note: All of those links go to stories about how those players might fit the 2023 Giants, not a generic player page.)
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The Giants are in a weird spot where they can’t act on hunches before next season. There’s no way they can stick with a low-cost strategy to experiment with possibly useful players. They can’t take a wild swing and commit to a prospect who isn’t a lock. They shouldn’t even be able to do the same thing with Mike Yastrzemski that they did in 2019, which is easily find at-bats for an unproven player. They’ll have to stick with the proven players and look to supplement them with more proven players. It’s why they re-signed Flores.
And while the merits of this strategy are debatable, I’m here to detail exactly who could be hosed by it.
Hold a positive thought for the not-quite-top prospects and could-be-good-not-sure players. They might have a miserable time getting playing time with the Giants next season, even if they deserve it.
We’re not talking about Kyle Harrison or Marco Luciano. They have obvious, uncommon talent, and if that translates to on-field success, room will be made for them. It won’t be a complicated decision.
We’re not talking about Cole Waites, R.J. Dabovich or any other fire-slinging reliever who just needs a little more command and control to thrive in the majors. There will always be room for pitchers like that. The Giants brought up Camilo Doval and his wildly inflated walk rate in the middle of a division-winning season because they liked his chances to succeed. They were right.
No, this is for the tweener prospects and young players, the ones who get described as “intriguing” or “interesting.” They’ll have scouting reports like, “Just might be an everyday player one day” or “Has a chance to be a fourth or fifth starter.” These are the players who get guaranteed roles in the offseasons and spring trainings of the truly awful teams. These are the players who won’t have that chance with the Giants.
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Take David Villar, as an obvious example. Here’s an excellent profile of him from The Athletic’s Andrew Baggarly. Villar is on his way to hitting more home runs in a season than anyone in the Giants organization since Barry Bonds in 2004. He hit .275/.404/.617 in Triple-A Sacramento. He’s made an adjustment to the league’s adjustment, and he’s slugging .520 in the majors in September. He’s an interesting player. Intriguing. He just might be an everyday player one day.
Dang it, there are those words again. The Giants are constantly rifling through the waiver wire for interesting/intriguing players, and Villar has more of a prospect pedigree than all of them, but they’re not going to pencil him in for 500 at-bats next season. They just re-signed Flores. They might pick up Longoria’s option as a way to hedge their bets. There are a lot of possible solutions for third base next season, and none of them involve trusting Villar. Not yet.
Or drink a nice, tall glass of optimism and think about what happens if Heliot Ramos rebounds next season and has the year he was expected to this season. He’s still young enough to get back on that path, and in this world, pretend he’s in Triple A, making contact, hitting bombs and playing a strong outfield. In this world, it would take an injury or a disappointing performance for Ramos to get at-bats in the majors, because you can be pretty danged sure the Giants are going to get some established outfielders this offseason. And if they’re in place, they’re playing. If they’re making a chunk of money, they’ll keep playing even if they’re as disappointing as Nick Castellanos has been for the Phillies this season.
This applies to just about any starting pitching prospect other than Kyle Harrison, too. If a switch flips or there’s an uptick in stuff from someone like Sean Hjelle, Tristan Beck, Ryan Murphy, Kai-Wei Teng or any of the other “interesting, intriguing pitchers,” it should be harder to find innings for him. It took an injury to Alex Wood to get Logan Webb in the opening-day rotation last season, and while nobody has ever gone broke betting on pitchers getting hurt, it won’t be easy for anyone who isn’t Harrison to force his way into the rotation.
None of this would be a problem for a team that could be extremely confident in its internal evaluations of its players, but that confidence has taken a hit this season. The Giants have gotten almost nothing out of their carousel of roster moves, and they’ve seen backsliding from a lot of returning players who were supposed to be known quantities. The Mariners’ 16th-best prospect, according to MLB.com, is Prelander Berroa, the guy they got for Donovan Walton, who has struggled mightily in the majors and minors this season. The Giants are re-evaluating their own evaluations, and it has to be a little humbling.
A team facing that reckoning can’t just plop in Villar and give him a starting job, even if it believes he might be ready. It can’t assume a starting pitching prospect will be effective, even if one of them should be. There are baseball games to win and three wild-card spots to compete for. There’s an entire offseason to attack these problems.
I’ll take a situation like that over being a hopeless 100-loss team, every time. Just know it’s far less complicated for those teams. For a team in the Giants’ position, it can’t afford to miss.
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But if the Giants can’t afford to miss, that might make them unable to hit. Figuratively and literally.
(Photo of Wilmer Flores, left, David Villar, center, and Lewis Brinson: Jayne Kamin-Oncea / USA Today)
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