Extra Baggs: Giants turn to the future — but the messier their season ends, the less clear that future becomes (2024)

LOS ANGELES — The San Francisco Giants do not want to ponder their wasted past. The unwatchable present offers nothing beyond platitudes and naïve hope. The future it is, then.

Kyle Harrison on the mound. Marco Luciano at shortstop. Tyler Fitzgerald debuting in center field. Include catcher Blake Sabol and the Giants traced a rookie throughline from plate to outfield grass at Dodger Stadium Thursday night.

The lineup and pregame promotions of Luciano and Fitzgerald amounted to a full pivot toward future development and an unofficial concession speech for the season, even if manager Gabe Kapler, after a short pause at the end of his afternoon availability with reporters, felt compelled to append the session with boilerplate: how the Giants were putting the most competitive lineup on the field, how their postseason hopes are still alive, how winning remained the primary goal.

The Giants did not win the game. They continue to invent new ways to trudge back to a silent visiting clubhouse. This time their fatal flaw was as novel as it gets: Mike Yastrzemski, a consummate professional whose energy and effort have never been in question, who is one of the most intelligent players in the league, who is a paragon of perspicaciousness, lost track of the outs.

“Can’t remember the last time I did it. But it happened,” said Yastrzemski, who didn’t immediately throw home on a tiebreaking sacrifice fly in the sixth inning of the Dodgers’ eventual 7-2 victory. “An inexcusable, bad mistake that can’t happen.”

Mike Yastremski forgot how many outs there were and it led to Will Smith scoring the go-ahead run 😬 pic.twitter.com/cIsfw0tKWL

— Talkin’ Baseball (@TalkinBaseball_) September 22, 2023

This is where you might expect to read the updated wild-card standings, but why bother? It’s enough to know that the Giants dipped under .500 for the first time since June 5. Their 5-26 road record since July 19 is their worst stretch in any 32-game span in visiting togs since 1902, and they frittered away the rest of the game as if they were wide-eyed junior college players plucked from the stands. The bottom of the seventh inning included an error by third baseman J.D. Davis, a pitch clock violation by reliever Luke Jackson, and a pair of run-scoring wild pitches.

Their disarray is so total that opponents are wondering what the heck is going on in Kapler’s clubhouse.

“It was uncharacteristic from what I’ve seen when we play these guys,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “Yaz made a very uncharacteristic mental error. Really like the player and that was a surprise to everyone. The wild pitches gifting us some runs, certainly, we’ll take them. But uncharacteristic. I haven’t really followed them the last month. But when we play those guys, they usually don’t make those types of mistakes.”

The future it is, then. Except the messier this gets, the less clear that future becomes.

Giants chairman Greg Johnson left himself no rhetorical outs when he reiterated to the San Francisco Chronicle last week that Kapler and president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi “will both be here next year,” but the team’s free-fall from contention, with nine more chances to faceplant, will increase the pressure to backtrack and fashion justifications for doing so.

Even if Giants ownership remains committed to giving Zaidi an opportunity to turn things around in 2024, that opportunity could come with strings attached — or the demand that some strings be cut loose. Remember, after the 2019 season, it wasn’t former Phillies GM Matt Klentak who fired Kapler in Philadelphia. It was Phillies owner John Middleton who made the call and flew to California to deliver the news.

“Those September collapses,” said Middleton in a press conference announcing the firing, a reference to the Phillies’ 20-36 record in September during Kapler’s two seasons. “I kept bumping up against them. I couldn’t get comfortable or confident enough that if I brought him back, we wouldn’t run into other problems. Therefore I made the decision I did.”

The Giants’ current collapse — their playoff odds were better than 75 percent as recently as Aug. 3 — dwarfs anything that happened in Philadelphia.

Managers might be hired to be fired, but that hasn’t been the case in San Francisco. The last Giants manager who was relieved of duties before his contract expired was Jim Davenport, who was replaced by Roger Craig with 18 games to go in the 1985 season. Kapler has one year remaining on the extension he signed after the 2021 season, when the Giants won a franchise-record 107 regular-season games and he was the near-unanimous choice as National League Manager of the Year.

Kapler also had a year left on his contract when the Phillies let him go.

By all accounts public and private, Kapler has maintained good relationships with his players on an interpersonal basis. Even though pitchers Ross Stripling and Alex Wood complained about their roles this season, neither of them has voiced a grievance about Kapler. Both pitchers have said that they maintain positive relationships with the manager. Several other players, approached recently for an informal opinion, praised Kapler for remaining positive and supportive. There appears to be widespread acceptance within the clubhouse that game-level decisions, including the ones that some players have disagreed with, have been collaborative with coaches, the analytics staff and front office. The full buck didn’t stop at the manager’s office door. More like nickels and dimes.

But those same players also acknowledge there’s something wrong with the culture that isn’t being fixed.

Has Kapler done enough to rouse the troops and demand group accountability? When the Giants held a series of clubhouse meetings on their last homestand, several players mentioned Zaidi’s address in which he expressed belief in the club’s ability to finish strong. Yastrzemski, Wood and even the soft-spoken Thairo Estrada were among the players to demand more effort and accountability. The players even heard from former bench coach and special assistant Ron Wotus, who reminded them that they put in 10 months of work to get to September with a chance to make the playoffs, and no matter what happens, they’ll put in 10 more months of work to get back to this position again next year. So this is when you try your hardest.

It’s well established that Kapler seldom addresses groups. He prefers to communicate with players on an individual basis. He has held several private meetings in recent weeks with Yastrzemski and Wilmer Flores, who are viewed as two of the clubhouse’s primary leaders. But as Yastrzemski made clear Thursday night, the accountability still hasn’t happened and standards still haven’t been met.

“There’s so many guys in here that work so hard and to be continuously snakebit by little, stupid mistakes that are avoidable ….” Yastrzemski said. “We just need to hold each other to a higher standard and be accountable.”

What has happened in the second half, especially on the road? Yastrzemski said he didn’t have an answer but that “it’s probably going to have to be a reflecting point in the offseason.”

“It’s not like you can look at someone and say, ‘Hey, don’t make a mistake,'” he continued. “That’s not how people work. That’s not how we function. (But) I think there’s a way that we can play with a little bit more edge in every game. We’ve all seen it: There are games where we come out firing and things are going well. And then there’s times where we just come out flat. I think it’s just an attitude thing where we should take a little more pride in our work. I’ve got to look in the mirror and (look at) myself first more than anybody.

“But there’s times where we deserve to be embarrassed, kind of like we are right now. You just have to wear that for the next 10 hours till we get to play again.”

Although this season would mark the third time a Kapler-managed team disintegrated in September (make it four if you count losing the last three games in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, when the Giants missed the postseason based on a tiebreaker with the Milwaukee Brewers), there is always some amount of scapegoating involved when a disappointing team fires its manager. The teams with the most talent, along with a little luck avoiding injuries, comprise nearly all the teams that play in October. As the adage goes, managers get too much credit when their team wins and too much blame when their team loses.

But hypothetically, what would happen if Greg Johnson and the Giants’ executive board members demanded a managerial change? Well, it’s not as simple as hoping the San Diego Padres fire Bob Melvin so the Giants can scoop him up, as they did with Bruce Bochy prior to the 2007 season. For starters, no established manager is going to take a one-year contract. And it’s hard to imagine the Giants handing out a multiyear deal to a manager when their president of baseball operations might be entering a prove-it season.

No, the Giants would need to appoint someone on a glorified interim basis. That person likely would come from inside the organization, as Rob Thomson did when the Phillies elevated him from bench coach to replace veteran manager Joe Girardi last season. That someone ideally would have longstanding ties to the organization. Someone who has demonstrated loyalty. Someone who already knows the personnel. Someone who can speak to the room and demand accountability. Someone who could connect on a personal level with fans and reassure them that they weren’t watching an algorithm being played out over nine innings. Someone who would take a one-year contract. Maybe someone who is respected and eminently qualified to manage but never got the shot for whatever reason.

Someone like Ron Wotus, maybe?

It would be a far greater challenge for Zaidi to be in lockstep with a manager who might be more likely to go with the hot hand over the modeling software. But as we’ve seen, sometimes being in lockstep can be detrimental. Besides, when Bochy managed under Zaidi in 2019, both parties made it work better than either man anticipated. Perhaps it can become a strength when a manager balances his front office’s strategies instead of amplifying them.

It should be noted: A manager’s influence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The Giants’ frustration and, in Yastrzemski’s estimation, their insufficient pride in their work is more likely a byproduct of the losing than the cause of it. But when a team begins to drift, it’s the manager’s job to course correct. When fans feel disconnected from the product, it’s up to the manager, who meets twice a day with the media, to reestablish that connection and cultivate trust. None of that would have been easy for Kapler this season. It wouldn’t have been easy for anyone running the Giants when they received no help at the trade deadline and committed to developing rookies in the big leagues.

Those rookies continue to have bright moments. Fitzgerald, a fourth-round pick in 2019 from Louisville who posted his second consecutive 20-homer, 20-steal season in the minor leagues, collected his first career hit along with a bases-loaded walk and demonstrated eye-opening speed while nearly making a spectacular catch in right-center. Luciano, whose promotion coincided with all-time franchise shortstop Brandon Crawford being placed on the 10-day injured list with a right hamstring strain (and possibly reducing his tenure with the club to the Oct. 1 regular-season finale), also drew a walk and whistled a single that left the bat at 107 mph. Harrison, who reestablished his arm slot in a side session at the Giants’ minor-league complex over the weekend, overcame a 24-hour illness that included breaking out in hives and pitched credibly into the sixth inning against the best major-league lineup he’s faced to date.

The Giants could have been looking at their future Thursday night. Unless they were looking at a showcase.

There is a growing acknowledgment within the organization that the Giants must create more lineup continuity next season, not only to position themselves to win more games but to make the product more palatable for its consumers. The problem: The free-agent market for position players is paper thin after Shohei Ohtani, and all other meaningful roads — Cody Bellinger, Matt Chapman — go through Scott Boras.

The choices will be so limited that Giants officials are prepared for the eventuality that Michael Conforto will opt out of an $18 million salary in 2024 even though the 30-year-old outfielder has been a league-average hitter (101 OPS+) and, Thursday night’s wall-crashing catch in left field aside, has not graded out well defensively. It’s expected that teams with a need for left-handed hitting like the New York Yankees and perhaps the Dodgers will give Conforto a little grace, understanding the difficulty of coming back after missing all of 2022 because of shoulder surgery. If a 31-year-old Mitch Haniger can play in just 57 games and still command a three-year, $43.5 million contract, which is what the Giants gave him last winter, then it’s not difficult to imagine a similar or better deal for Conforto, a Boras client, this offseason.

The opportunity will be there for the Giants to jump the market and renegotiate an extension with Conforto, who has said that he’s enjoyed his time in San Francisco and values how the Giants have treated him and his family. But a Boras client seldom offers a pre-market discount. And besides, the Giants outfield in 2024 already would include Haniger, who is under contract, and likely Yastrzemski, who has two years of arbitration remaining and will turn 34 next season. If the Giants learned anything from this week’s boat races in Arizona, they’ll need to get younger and more athletic while creating more lineup continuity to compete in the NL West for the foreseeable future.

It’s becoming clear to the Giants’ top decision-makers that there might be just one way to do that: trading from what they view as a largesse of young pitching.

The Giants could be a match with the Cincinnati Reds, who have more breakthrough rookie position players than they know what to do with. (Harrison for Matt McLain, who says no?) The St. Louis Cardinals might be desperate enough for pitching that they would consider moving Jordan Walker or Lars Nootbaar. The New York Mets are in the same position with Pete Alonso that the Boston Red Sox were in with Mookie Betts four years ago — at a contract impasse with a superstar who has one year of arbitration before free agency — and while the Giants would be right to question the wisdom of a trade-and-sign deal for someone who would be a 39-year-old first baseman at the end of a 10-year contract, they’re also a sufficiently motivated and power-starved franchise that hasn’t had a 30-homer season in two decades (Barry Bonds, 2004) and has been turned aside again and again in an effort to lure someone capable of clearing that bar with ease (Giancarlo Stanton, Bryce Harper, Aaron Judge, etc.).

So the young talent on display at Dodger Stadium on Thursday might have been a glimpse into the Giants’ future core. Or their future trade chips.

When your season ends in such spectacular failure, when your clubhouse leaders are still calling for accountability long after playoff hopes have faded, and when your fans are demanding change, any change, performative or substantive, then all options have to be on the table.

As Wotus said in his clubhouse speech, everyone is about to work for the next 10 months to get to this position again. He left out this part: For many of them, that future won’t be in San Francisco.

(Top photo of J.D. Davis: Brian Rothmuller / Icon Sportswire via AP Images)

Andrew Baggarly is a senior writer for The Athletic and covers the San Francisco Giants. He has covered Major League Baseball for more than two decades, including the Giants since 2004 for the Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News and Comcast SportsNet Bay Area. He is the author of two books that document the most successful era in franchise history: “A Band of Misfits: Tales of the 2010 San Francisco Giants” and “Giant Splash: Bondsian Blasts, World Series Parades and Other Thrilling Moments By the Bay.” Follow Andrew on Twitter @extrabaggs