The 2023 SF Giants are absolutely finished. What now?

Where do the San Francisco Giants go from here?

After being outclassed by a faster, more athletic Diamondbacks team in a must-win, two-game series that virtually snuffed out what little hope they had of making the playoffs, the Giants sit at .500 for the year, three games out of a playoff spot and with a daunting schedule of games left against the Dodgers and Padres. Even Gabe Kapler admitted their chances are somewhere between slim and none, with slim having just caught the last bus out of town. The Giants seem destined for another .500-ish finish and an offseason of more questions.

Two of those questions have been answered: Kapler and Farhan Zaidi will return for at least another year, which is the right move despite what many seem to think. The duo running the team is not to blame for all of the Giants’ problems. They’re working well within what appears to have become the Giants’ philosophy since the end of 2018: short-term deals, matchup-based rosters, and don’t overextend the payroll more than you absolutely have to.

To their credit/dumb luck, this approach has had some success. The Giants have a division title in that time span, as well as three years of contention late into the summer. They seem to be doing well financially, and the third wild-card spot has made it so a team that hovers around .500 has a real chance of getting into the tournament, so why would they change anything?

That’s probably the ownership’s point of view, if I had to take an educated guess. But that doesn’t exactly energize ticket buyers, and the Giants are starting to see how years of this philosophical shift are affecting their fan base. Spoiler alert: It ain’t good.

The Giants have seen their attendance drop by a staggering 21% since 2018, which coincidentally marked the end of the dynasty era and the start of the Make More Money-ball era. In that same time frame, more than half of the league has seen an increase in attendance. This year, most of the league saw a year-over-year attendance boom, while the Giants’ ability to draw fans was about flat. You can argue about whether the Giants’ method of team-building is successful from a competitive standpoint, but it’s abundantly clear it hasn’t resonated with a majority of Giants fans.

The reasons why are simple enough. Fans don’t see a team that’s built for World Series contention but rather one that’s seemingly constructed to hover around the playoff picture all year and then hope for the best if it can get in. Short-term contracts and constant roster churn, which are features and not bugs, make it harder to get emotionally invested in any particular player. And the absence of a true superstar has made the Giants a bit player in a Bay Area sports landscape that is full of them. The Giants just don’t have anyone on the roster fans will go out of their way to see, regardless of how the team is performing. They’re a boring team, win or lose. As Tom Verducci amazingly put it in his brutally honest takedown of the Giants in Sports Illustrated: “The Giants are interesting in the way mutual funds are interesting. They are smart, efficient, and lackluster.” Ouch, and apt, as the Johnsons made their billions running a mutual fund run by plutocrat Charlie’s father.

One can only assume ownership is perfectly content with how the team’s roster is constructed. The contracts for Johnny Cueto and Jeff Samardzija still reverberate in the offices of 24 Willie Mays Plaza, and they caused the team to completely ignore high-dollar free agent pitchers and instead settle for reclamation projects and middle-of-the-road types. The Giants simply can’t attract free agent hitters of any pedigree, which, to be fair, isn’t a new problem, but it’s something that you wonder might be fixed by massively overpaying for a star or two. They had a golden opportunity to do just that last winter but came up short, for myriad reasons, and there really isn’t much reason to believe they’re going to suddenly change course for, say, Shohei Ohtani.

The end result is a rotation with one dominant starter followed by a bunch of question marks and an ever-changing lineup of platoon players with playing time based on matchups. Exciting? No. Effective? Kind of. Cost-effective? Definitely.  

The Giants’ payroll sits at around $187 million, which seems like a big number but isn’t even in the top 10 of MLB. You’d like to think that a team in this market, with no ballpark debt and the massive Mission Rock project coming to fruition, would spend at a higher level, but again, the Giants are in the business of Profit Margin ball. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle last month, ownership figurehead Greg Johnson mentioned the money from Mission Rock “may add a good second baseman in a year” and went out of his way to make it clear even that would happen only “if everything goes great.” Talk about energizing a fan base! (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms.) 

You would think that declining attendance and an apathetic public might propel the Giants into taking some kind of action, but I thought the same thing last winter, and the end result was Tyler Rogers’ twin brother, two outfielders who combined to play 57 games total the year before, and two “starting” pitchers who can’t start. What’s this winter going to bring? Attendance and apathy must not be having too big of an effect on their bottom line, but we’ll never know until they open up their books, and ha ha ha.

All of that leaves the Giants in a rather precarious position going into the offseason. Yes, there’s still the slimmest of chances they sneak into the playoffs and get hot at the right time, but that’s a pipe dream. They need to add offense and (not or) pitching, and the free agent market isn’t exactly brimming with a lot of help outside of Ohtani. Maybe they go crazy and offer Ohtani $600 million to come here, but that’s not realistic given their history.

A shockingly high number of rookies debuted this year, and the Giants will be counting on many of them to be important contributors in 2024. That could solve three problems — a lack of offense, a lack of rotation depth and a dearth of players/stars for fans to attach themselves to — but that’s putting a lot of pressure on guys who will be trying to find their footing. They’re going to need help, but chances are that help is going to come in the form of more short-term deals for platoon-type players.

That’s also why calls for regime change in the front office didn’t carry a lot of weight. A few mistakes aside, Farhan has proved adept at finding the kind of talent that excels in his roster-building model and the team’s payroll parameters. Kapler has done an admirable job of mixing and matching with the talent he has to work with. Could they do more with a higher payroll? We’ll probably never know, because in that same interview, Johnson made it clear that the Giants have an implied budget, saying, “I don’t think we’d ever see ourselves massively exceeding that (competitive balance tax) level in the luxury tax.” 

So any dreams of what Farhan may be able to do with a $290 million payroll are out the window. He and Kapler are perfect for what the Giants want to do: field a competitive team that doesn’t get too close to that tax line. Changing them out for a new regime that would be subject to the same restrictions isn’t going to satisfy anyone. Giants fans are rightfully angry, but focusing that anger on only the GM and manager is misplaced.

So, much to the chagrin of many Giants fans, the 2024 Giants are probably going to be built a lot like the 2023 Giants, only with a younger core and the possibility of a few of their prospects possibly breaking out. Expect more short contracts with options, more bullpen games, more platoon partners, more cost-efficient additions and more time spent hanging around the thick of the wild-card race in hopes of letting the chips fall in October. Maybe they’ll surprise us all, and we’ll all be sporting Ohtani jerseys next April, but we can only judge them on their recent history. And that history suggests their philosophy isn’t going to change, attendance and fan engagement be damned.

But hopefully, they’ll still be turning a profit. That’s most important, after all.