For SF Giants’ Farhan Zaidi, MLB postseason has been a nightmare

Forgive Farhan Zaidi if the MLB playoffs are causing him to experience an existential crisis.

Amid another down year, the fallout from firing Gabe Kapler, working on hiring a new manager and calls for his job that just keep gaining volume, you’d think the Giants’ president of baseball operations would have enough to worry about this winter. But if the Giants’ current state is that of a dumpster fire, the playoffs are only adding fuel to it.

Every team that’s still standing (as of this writing) has something that’s going to enrage the Giants’ fan base even further, since they’re all things the team has moved away from over the past few years.

They can be broken into the following categories:

Old-school managers: Put the Astros and Rangers in this category, with the added benefit of both teams’ managers being ex-Giants.

Big spenders: The Rangers, Phillies, Dodgers, Astros and Braves all have top-10 payrolls, with both the Rangers and the Phillies spending enormous amounts of money the past two offseasons while the Giants, uh, didn’t.

Young, fast, athletic: This was a goal of the Giants the last winter, and while they did become younger, they certainly failed on the other two. The D-backs are everything the Giants want to be.

The Dodgers: Kind of goes without saying, no?

Are these fair, rational reasons to be upset with Zaidi and the Giants? Well, yes and no.

Both Dusty Baker and Bruce Bochy are “old school,” and even though that term has taken on a negative connotation, each is incredibly successful. Neither one seems like the type of manager who would roll with a platoon-heavy, matchup-based roster that needed constant tinkering to succeed, which is the blueprint the Giants have come to embrace. And while Dusty is far enough removed from his Giants tenure that his success doesn’t really sting, Bochy’s seems to be resonating with Giants fans in more than a “we’re really happy for him” way. To say he’s missed is an understatement.

But there’s a narrative that’s taken hold — and amplified on the national stage by Fox analyst Alex Rodriguez — saying that Bochy was “pushed out” of San Francisco by Zaidi because of the manager’s resistance to analytics. That makes for a good story, but it’s more of A-Rod talking out of his ass than anything else. 2019 can seem like a lifetime ago, but when Bochy stepped down, his teams were coming off a long stretch where they looked stale and old. That wasn’t all on him, given the rosters he had to work with, but the Giants were ripe for a change.

That’s what makes the notion that he was forced out so perplexing. It’s fair to think his philosophy didn’t mesh with Zaidi’s, but it’s not like the Giants were setting the world on fire those last three years. It’s more than likely Bochy saw the writing on the wall and voluntarily stepped away to both recharge his batteries and give Zaidi the chance to pick his own guy. Is that the same as being “forced” out? If he was, it stands to reason he wouldn’t have taken three years to find another job, since a manager with his resume would have his pick. It doesn’t make sense to hold Bochy’s success in Texas against the Giants, but the fog of back-to-back lousy seasons and a fired manager is thick.

It does make sense to hold their feet to the fire for their free agency decisions over the past few years, though it’s fair to debate if Zaidi or ownership should get most of the blame. Considering the market they play in, and the money they make, the Giants should be a top-10 payroll team every year. That doesn’t mean they have to blow by the competitive balance tax, but they certainly can come closer than where they are now (12th in baseball). But for various reasons — not wanting to block prospects with veterans on big contracts, not wanting to commit big money/years to starting pitchers, scary medical reports — the Giants have stayed on the margins of free agency the past few years, giving short-term deals to players of questionable talent levels and/or health issues.

Correa, Corey Seager, Marcus Semien, Nick Castellanos, Kyle Schwarber, Zack Wheeler — all players the Giants could have bid on (and did, in Correa’s case), and all of them performing on the biggest stage. Would the Giants have been a playoff team with two of those players? Would any of them have blocked Luis Matos or Marco Luciano from debuting this year? The front office’s reasoning made sense at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, it looks like poor planning. Even if one of those contracts had gone bad, the Giants would have been well-positioned financially to absorb it. And now, after Zaidi has publicly stated a willingness to go after more free agents, they find themselves with one of the weakest crops of players in years to choose from.

That certainly won’t help the stated goal of getting faster and more athletic. In one of the last series of the season, the D-backs ran circles around the Giants and made them look inept and decrepit. They’re doing the same thing to the Dodgers in the NLDS, and it certainly doesn’t help that the Giants share a division with them. And speaking of the Dodgers, if they’re the model Zaidi is hoping to emulate — homegrown prospects enhanced by big free agent/trade acquisitions — it’s clear the Giants have a long way to go.

Zaidi and the Giants are in a tough position. No matter who wins the World Series, fans will throw barbs their way, asking why they don’t do things more like the champs. “Why don’t you hire an old-school manager?” “Why don’t you spend more money?” “Why don’t you get more athletic?” All have their own levels of validity, some more than others, and fans will want answers.

And the Giants must provide those answers this winter. They can’t afford to keep going about business as usual if they want to engage an apathetic fan base that has stopped showing up to the ballpark. Recently on KNBR, Mike Krukow casually mentioned the Giants had an internal goal of drawing 2.7 million fans this season. That’s a shockingly low number for a team that has consistently drawn over 3 million when things were going well, which would lead one to believe they knew what kind of team they were putting on the field, lightbulb comments be damned. And they didn’t even get 2.7 million to come to Oracle Park this year, falling a few hundred thousand fans short. Disastrous.

Are the playoffs a nightmare for the Giants? Yes, but they should also be a wake-up call.