The Giants fanbase, from the view of The Athletic's comment pages for the Giants, are in an uproar about Farhan Zaidi's stewardship of the Good Championship Giants. The Zaidi Haters complaints include but are not limited to:
- Five years is enough to rebuild a farm system and the team
- 2023 season was a disaster
- The farm system has not made any progress
- They are not as good as Texas, LAD, Atlanta, etc.
- Zaidi is in love with platoons and openers
- Zaidi can't sign the best free agents; there's no stars
- What's the plan?
ogc thoughts
Okay, I'm going to tackle the complaint about Zaidi being in love with platoons and openers.
Lacking Talent
Zaidi inherited a team that was lacking in talent, as well as lacking in good prospects. Bart, Ramos, and Luciano were the best prospects, and we know now how Bart turned out and how Ramos has struggled. Before the 2019 season, Bart was on the Top 100 list for Baseball America (29), MLB.com (22), and Baseball Prospectus (41), and Ramos was on the Top 100 list for MLB.com (92) and BP (87). Bart was the only prospect valued highly, but in my experience, it's the Top 20 who are the most likely to fulfill their potential, 21-50, not as much, and 51-100, pretty long shots.
It was a team that struggled to a 77-85 record, but had an expected Pythagorean of 71-91, and Bochy managed the hell out of the team for a career high 22 games above .500 of 38-16. Moving that 22 game swing by converting 11 of those wins to losses, would have pushed their record to 66-96. 2019 would have been a hell of a sh!t show if not for Bochy’s managerial brilliance. And shows how little talent was on the team that Zaidi inherited, as without his improvement via one-run games, 66-96 is basically a repeat of the record the Giants had in 2017.
Platooning Is a Great Way to Improve Offense
Platooning has likely been around for most of baseball history. One of its most famous practitioners is HOF manager Earl Weaver. It allows a team that has hitters who are great against the opposite hand, but just too poor against their own hand pitcher, to get good hitting out of a position, get value out of that hitter.
This is especially important when your team is talent poor. This allows you to pick up players who get dumped by other teams because they can't hit against the same hand, pair them together, and, Frank Viola, you now have good hitting in one spot in your lineup. It also allows you to find value in prospects like Austin Slater, who otherwise would not get much playing time, since he is not good enough to start full time.
Openers Is a Modern Way of Platooning Pitchers
Openers became a recent tactic for teams when teams realized that, much like how platooning hitters enable teams to field a more productive lineup, openers enable teams to get more batter faced from pitcher who are not good enough to be starters who can push past the lineup twice.
Openers work best with a few key factors. The opener ideally is good enough to be set up guy, and especially good against same handed hitters. That's why the Rays used Sergio Romo in that role a lot when they first started using this tactic, as he was still good in set up, and especially good against RHH. So they would use the Romo to open games when the other team has a lineup of mostly or all RHH atop their lineup.
The bulk/feature reliever are those starters who cannot figure out how to get out hitters a third time through the lineup, after 18 batters faced. Studies have shown that some pitchers have that difficulty, for they just were lacking the repertoire to enable them to last deep into games. That's why Rich Hill would last 18-19-20 batters when Dave Roberts come out and take him out, even when he has a shutout going on. Which is why I was against openers for a long time, I was aghast that a pitcher doing well was just taken out when he could have gotten a few more outs.
But I see the value now. If you have a good set-up type pitcher come in and take out the first 5-6 hitters, then when the former starter, now feature reliever, comes in, he starts facing the bottom of the order. And after getting through the 18 batters to reach the third time around, he is now facing the bottom of the order for the third time first. Depending on how well he pitches, and how much of rope the manager gives him, the pitcher can now pitch to at least 3 more hitters (assuming he can get outs from them) and perhaps add another inning pitched or more. Thus, starting pitchers who could not reach 5 IP (20-25 batter, depending), and would end up around 3-4 inning pitched, become featured relievers who could get that up to 4-6 inning pitched, depending on how well he performs.
Zaidi Had to Do This For the Giants to Win
Farhan Zaidi is not stupid, as many seem to think. He would LOVE to have a set lineup, full of hitting stars who he wouldn't have to platoon. Funny enough, it is very hard to cobble together such a lineup, whether through the draft, trades, waiver wire pick ups, and free agent. Harder still when both good free agent hitters, Haniger and Conforto, were mostly busts most of the season. They were supposed to be full time starters.
Also, fans seem to need a big margin of offense to feel safe and confident about their team, more than is necessary. For example, as bad as this lineup performed in 2023, as I demonstrated in my post on Ohtani, I found that adding a version of Ohtani from the past three year would have gotten the Giants into playoff range or into the playoffs. So the team does not need to have the best hitter in the planet to have a chance for the playoffs next season, but they do need at least a couple more average and above hitters to lengthen out the lineup, and make it that much more productive.
I don't think the Giants necessarily need an Ohtani or Bellinger to be competitive, though that would be ideal. Meaning it's not the end of hope for 2024 if we don't sign one of them. I think Luciano should be able to improve SS offense, and that's why I'm hoping that they sign Matt Chapman quickly, to ensure some improvement to the team defensively and offensively on the left side of the infield. Then adding another okay hitter who is good defensively in CF, like Jung Hoo Lee or Kevin Kiermaier, that lengthens the lineup, and then Haniger, Conforto, Yastrzemski, and Slater can rotate/share LF, RF, and DH, depending on the situation.
Similarly for the starting rotation, he would love a rotation full of Webb's but that's hard to do, period. If he was so in love with openers, he could have used that tactic a lot more extensively from 2020-2022. But he didn't need to because his portfolio theory management style of the starting rotation, which was developed and honed when he was with the Dodgers, worked during that period but failed him spectacularly in 2023, when all of his options beyond Webb and Cobb either got injured (which is how he was able to sign some of them, knowing that they will be out 5-15 starts per season) or had a horrible start to the season.
It was a total perfect storm. Wood, Stripling, DeSclafini, and Manaea all had one issue or another relegating them to the IL or to Featured Reliever role. Even Kyle Harrison fell to this bad luck, he had been healthy during his career, but basically right when the Giants were about to call him up mid-season, he pulled a hamstring, which required an IL stint, then he needed to get rehab to get ready to start in MLB games. Plus the other pitching prospects weren't ready either. And Cobb was battling hip problems, which pushed back some of his starts, until he had his no-hitter going, and the team allowed him to go for it, but pushing him to that many pitches finally did in his hip, and he was soon ILed for the rest of the season (much like Cain' Perfecto effectively ended his ability to pitch well regularly).
I think 2024 looks like it can be good again. The pitching staff was 2nd/3rd in xFIP and SIERA, showing their overall skill. That's why I want the Giants to focus on getting Sonny Gray signed quickly, then can focus on signing one of Yamamoto or Snell or Montgomery to be the ace. A rotation of FA ace, Webb, Gray, Harrison, plus guys rotating in and out depending on performance and using a five or six man rotation (DeSclafini, Stripling, Winn, Beck) is pretty good to start with, then Cobb will probably join the team between mid-May to mid-June, and hopefully the vets pitched well enough that they are tradeable for a low end prospect or better, by mid-season.
Zaidi and the Giants could have just thrown in the towel in 2023, and just played someone who really should be platooned or opened for, and blow up a lot of games, and look like one of the worse teams in the majors, but he didn't. And his moves worked early on, when they were six games under .500, and they got up to and stayed around ten games above .500 until they hit August. Without platoons or openers, the Giants probably would have had another horrendous season. Instead, they still have some plausibility in pitching their team to the top free agents as a team needing that one key free agent to be playoff contenders regularly. Adding Chapman and Gray quickly would only add greatly to that plausibility.
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