The Oracle Park lights malfunctioned Monday night, leaving the field dark and the Giants’ game with the Padres delayed for 40 minutes.
I wish the lights would have remained off until October.
This Giants season will only be remembered for the pain it inflicted on those who have watched it unfold. So while there is still a little more than a month left on the schedule, the lights going down in the city was the perfect cap to the Giants’ 2022.
This season has been devoid of meaning for weeks and value for months. Let’s just call it over and pretend it never happened.
The Giants’ organization, meanwhile, can’t forget so easily. It’s on ownership, baseball operations, and the team’s ever-expanding coaching staff needs to make sure a season like this never happens again.
The story of the 2022 San Francisco Giants is really the story of the 2021 Giants.
It’s been 100-plus games of the same question, asked over and over again:
How did in the name of Bonds, Bochy, and Buster did the Giants win 107 games last year?
With every game these Giants played, San Francisco’s 2021 season became more baffling.
Yes, there were some changes to the roster year-over-year, but many of the same characters who led the Giants to that improbable division title last season remain. The names on the lineup card are where the similarities end between the 2021 and 2022 Giants.
With every bullpen blowup, feeble attempt at offense, defensive miscue, or over-managed moment, this 2022 team proved that it was the definition of mediocre. The games, on the whole, are devoid of flow, rhythm, or energy. This is a team that is neither athletic nor fundamentally sound. It was a brutal combination of two things I once believed were mutually exclusive, and it turned Giants games into rote exercises in arbitrage.
The 2022 Giants played a charmless brand of baseball that perfectly epitomizes this, the worst era in the modern history of the game.
So I view the fact that we no longer have to pay serious attention to them as a cause for celebration.
It’s been suggested to me that this 2022 campaign is a karmic balance for 2021 — everything that went right for the Giants last season has been countered by bad luck this season. As if the sport of baseball hasn’t become macro enough, it’s also been suggested that I need to look at multiple years of baseball to determine the course of this team.
I would say such a concept is comical, but this 2022 Giants team has removed even the possibility of laughter from my life, such is their joy-zapping power.
Forget the fluke. The Giants’ 2022 campaign has proven that the organization needs to change course. These Giants are going nowhere, and they’re doing it one walk at a time.
To maintain this formula would be lunacy.
Even if the dice in the board game that is Giants baseball were, indeed, lucky in 2021, the intoxicating elixir that is winning covered up the team’s true nature. The ends justified the means for last year’s Giants.
This year, they didn’t come close.
And they won’t come close again.
So what’s next?
The good news is that no one works the bottom of a roster as well as Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi. He has shown, beyond a doubt, that he can fill roster spots 15-25 with quality players that provide excess value to the Giants in relation to their salaries. (Ownership loves that.)
Only a few teams in baseball can do what the Giants do with fringe players. The other teams that do it are the best squads in the game — the teams competing for World Series titles.
The Giants, clearly, aren’t in that class. That’s because they don’t have any foundational pieces on their roster — guys you are certain will still be around in three years, much less five, six, or seven.
Maybe Logan Webb falls into the category. Maybe not. Pitchers are fickle.
The Giants have the second-oldest lineup in baseball, and every player in it — including Joey Bart — should be considered expendable.
Yes, the Giants could turn over their entire position-player roster for next season (and perhaps they should try something like that), and there would be no outcry from the fans that the 2023 team was tanking the season.
And until those foundational pieces are found, there’s no reason to believe anything like 2021 will happen again.
Where will the Giants find those players?
Perhaps in-house, though their farm system is middle-of-the-pack and the best players in it are still a ways away from helping the big league club.
Maybe they can find those core players in free agency. That would, of course, require the Giants to spend money and offer actual terms to players instead of the one-year mercenary deals they signed Joc Pederson and Carlos Rodón to last season.
But until such foundational, count-on-them-every-day players are found, the Giants will try to win on the margins, and there’s not much to be found there these days.
Yes, the Giants’ current reality — a team that can’t seem to shake that .500 feeling — will become a permanent predicament unless they change the paradigm around the roster.
Does the organization have any interest in avoiding such a fate?
We’ll find out this offseason, which can’t come soon enough.
