SAN FRANCISCO — The Giants closed September on a tear, winning 10 of their final 11 games of the month and providing a bit of positivity to cap a season that has seen far too little of it.
Ultimately, it was an up-and-down team that will miss the postseason and finish with roughly 25 fewer wins than last season.
But I fear that the Giants organization will use this late-season push (against teams like the Rockies and Diamondbacks) to ignore the first 140-something games of the season and stick with the status quo in 2023.
Good players are expensive. Delusion is free.
And lately, we know which way the Giants lean.
In a division with two of baseball’s most talented and aggressive teams, the Giants never felt like contenders his season. To avoid the same fate next season, this team needs to make significant changes this upcoming winter.
You can’t run it back with a team that can’t run.
The Giants somehow outsmarted all of baseball to win 107 games in 2021, but it can’t outsmart itself heading into 2023. The status quo for a team that boasts only three position players that can reasonably be considered “must-keeps” this winter — Wilmer Flores, Thairo Estrada, and Joey Bart, for reference — isn’t worth much.
Yes, this team needs an overhaul. It needs to replace a lineup of flawed and quadruple-A players with serious athleticism, aggression, and flair. After that, new arms must be found for a beleaguered bullpen and the back end of the rotation.
If the Giants continue to try to win in the margins and spend like a mid-sized market team, it’ll be guaranteed the same fate that belied them in 2022.
The rest of baseball is doing the same bean-counting as the Giants — the advantages there become more marginal by the day.
And if the organization claims the 2022 finish gives it momentum into 2023, or worse, that a small portion of September was somehow indicative of the quality of the 2022 Giants than the five-and-a-half months that proceeded it, it’s setting itself up for a third-place finish, at best, in the ruthlessly competitive National League West.
Of course, that groundwork is being set by Gabe Kapler, who will return as manager in 2023.
He even caught himself from comparing the 2022 team to the 107-win 2021 team.
“I think it’s just a signal of competitiveness more than anything else,” Kapler said Sunday of the late-September surge. “It’s a very competitive group, a very driven group, a very resilient group similar to… just the characteristics are there to finish strong.”
“We’ve talked a lot about September and now last couple of days of the season in October being an opportunity to build a foundation for ’23 we take that responsibility seriously, trying to field the best possible team every day down the stretch. [We want to] have guys finish strong and healthy because we feel like that’s the foundation to success.”
That’s nice, but a real foundation would be eight or nine quality position players in the lineup on Opening Day 2023, with Logan Webb (or Carlos Rodón) on the mound and a great bullpen behind him.
This Giants team doesn’t need an Aaron Judge or a Trea Turner — the two biggest free agents on the market this winter — though both would be justifiably welcomed with open arms and centuries of wealth.
What the Giants need is a full Major League squad — a lineup that’s less quadruple-A and more everyday.
Those players won’t come easy. In most cases, they won’t come cheap, either.
But they must come.
A few meaningless wins in September doesn’t change that.
