Buster Posey Can’t Stop Making His Bad SF Giants Bets Even Worse

I don’t like to mention my Giants fandom if I can help it, mainly because the articles I write aren’t about me. I try to be an observer of all things and comment accordingly. But sometimes it’s impossible. I’m a Giants fan. My family had subscriptions for 35 years. I scheduled important life events around the baseball calendar. I’ve lived and died with this team for longer than I’d like to admit.

And as a Giants fan, not a columnist, I can say I’ve never been more confident about the direction this team is heading.

Buster Posey, Zack Minasian and Tony Vitello took the stage Tuesday for the Giants’ annual post-mortem, coming off a season in which the team lost the fourth-most games in franchise history, dating back to 1883. If anyone expected the trio to announce big changes to the coaching staff, roster or organizational philosophy, they were disappointed.

Coaches? Minimum turnover, if so. List? Apparently not – Posey still believes in that core. Organizational philosophy? In all honesty, no one really knows what it is.

I could hardly believe my ears when Posey, asked if he thought the Giants could contend next year, responded: “The way I see it is with our group of position players. There’s still a lot of belief. … If you’re asking, I guess, do you think we can contend next year? I do. I believe we can.”

I respect Posey enormously. I have argued that he was the greatest San Francisco Giant of all time, given the unprecedented success the team enjoyed once he arrived. But really, what was he talking about? This group just finished a 97-loss season. They were dead and buried in the rankings long before the rash of injuries hit the list. And this is the core he believes in? There is no room for change or any accountability, no room to perhaps move away from players who have underperformed so little? None of this made much sense.

And then there is the staff. Aside from Ron Washington and Gary Pettis, it was difficult to point to a positive impact on the team’s performance. Vitello is safe, which means we’re going to have longer answers, peppered with non-sequiturs and occasional pop culture references. GOOD. But how about surrounding him with a few more veteran coaches who can help him get through a 162-game season? Maybe someone who can help with proofreading challenges. Or someone who can convince him not to discuss a meaningless failure and get kicked out of the last game of the year.

I had high hopes that Posey would buck the tendency for superstar players to become terrible leaders, that he would be more Mario Lemieux than Derek Jeter or Michael Jordan, but those hopes are dwindling. He did a good job making the trade deadline and greatly improved the farm system, but his decisions at the major league level are becoming increasingly difficult to defend. He made a lot of bad bets, which would be more acceptable if he was willing to abandon them once it became clear they weren’t working. Instead, he doubles down.

Fans don’t want to hear how much you believe in a core of players and coaches who just suck, metaphorically speaking. They want fire. They want passion. They want to hear that this is unacceptable and that changes are coming. They didn’t hear any of this.

And it’s a common theme that speaks to the pall that has settled over 24 Willie Mays Plaza. A sense of hopelessness has been building for years and finally broke out this season. The Giants found themselves embroiled in one off-field controversy after another, repeatedly displaying their inability to move on without making things worse. The product on the field was putrid from the first series. And they continue to charge high prices for the privilege of watching it.

During the press conference, Posey was asked about the Giants’ ability to attract 2.85 million fans this year. “It’s hard to express the gratitude, you know,” he said, “the season we had and they continued to show up… just the loyalty of the fans.”

This begs the question: Did Posey watch any home games in September? He can be forgiven for tuning out, but the stands were largely empty during the week and filled with Padres and Dodgers fans on the weekend. The fact that Dodgers fans flooded the stadium during Mike Krukow’s farewell day should be an unforgivable embarrassment for an organization that just spent the afternoon patting itself on the back for its fan loyalty.

It should also tell them that things need to change if they want to maintain that loyalty. They’ll get a boost in ticket sales by selling access to the 2028 MLB All-Star Game, but that can only go so far. Lower ticket prices would help, as would making fans feel like they’re getting their money’s worth with overpriced concessions rather than skimping on things like chicken deals. So would lowering beer prices instead of offering a token discount for a weekday game at a handful of stands.

Playing winning baseball would help the most, but it’s hard to see how they’ll accomplish that anytime soon. They’re stuck in a mushy environment, not good enough to be real contenders, but just good enough on paper to convince themselves they can challenge for a Wild Card if things go well. And that’s the most frustrating part: they don’t seem particularly eager to get out of this environment, even though it’s becoming increasingly clear that it’s not enough.

In my season preview, I wrote that it would be better for the Giants to lose 90+ games than finish around .500 again, because that would force them to recognize that a new direction and philosophy was needed. Well, they lost over 90 games. And one way or another, they always insist on going in the same direction, with the same philosophy, and selling us beliefs. It’s like we’ve walked into a fun mirror version of Brian Sabean’s famous “silly” press conference 30 years ago. Only this time, the Giants seem to think it’s the idiots in the stands.

Maybe yes. Maybe they’re counting on a lockout-shortened season to get them back into contention. After all, crazy things can happen in a shortened season, like Mike Yastrzemski getting a lot of MVP votes. Maybe they think they can just bury their heads in the sand, wait for everything to happen, and hope that everything will be okay. It’s hard to imagine a better description of how they’ve handled their off-field issues this year.

Clare Boothe Luce once wrote: “There are no hopeless situations; it is only men who have become desperate. » The Giants’ situation may not be hopeless. But after watching this organization stumble through another lost season with no real plans to change anything, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to believe otherwise.

I feel it as a columnist. I feel it even more as a Giants fan. And I would be shocked if I was alone.