The Giants' Grim Outlook Goes Well Beyond This Season

Here’s how bad it’s gotten for the Giants: In the race for fourth place in the National League West, I think I’d rather be the Rockies.

In some ways, that seems impossible. The Giants are a storied franchise, the team of Willie Mays and Barry Bonds. They won three titles in five years early last decade. They have resided in the top third of payrolls nearly every one of the last 15 seasons.

The Rockies lost 119 games last year.

And yet … would you rather be starting from Ground Zero, as the Rockies are, or still digging your way down, as the Giants are?

Colorado spent the last several years as the laughingstock of the sport and didn’t immediately shed that reputation this winter when it hired Paul DePodesta, who had been out of baseball for the past decade, to run things. But he has attracted a collection of people—staffers and players alike—who are intrigued by the challenges of playing baseball a mile above sea level. They are turning the whole thing into one big science experiment, tinkering with pitch mix but also with recovery, in an attempt to solve what pitching coach Gabe Ribas calls “the most interesting puzzle in baseball.” And expectations seem to be aligned with reality: The idea is not to go from bad to great, a few people explained this spring. It’s to improve to merely good and then go from there.

Meanwhile, Giants president of baseball operations Buster Posey has spoken of his “expectation to win.” San Francisco has not done much of that this year—its 17–24 record is just a game better than that of the Rockies, and 7 1/2 games out of first place—but appears to be doubling down on its strategy. The Giants have whiffed on recruiting big-name free agents in recent years, watching as Aaron Judge chose the Yankees and Shohei Ohtani picked the Dodgers, so Posey’s strategy has been to try to add stars in trades and second-tier players in free agency.

That has left them on the hook for a lot of money to a lot of players who are not earning it right now. The Giants currently owe more than half a billion dollars to three players who have combined for an OPS of .617. (That’s 29-year-old first baseman Rafael Devers, making $238.5 million through 2033; 30-year-old shortstop Willy Adames, making $150 million through ’31; and 33-year-old third baseman Matt Chapman, making $125 million through ’30.) And don’t forget the more than $10 million in manager fees alone (that’s $4 million for the final year of fired skipper Bob Melvin’s deal, $3 million for his replacement, Tony Vitello, and another $3 million to buy out Vitello’s contract with Tennessee).

Those contracts are close to untradeable, which means that when Posey wants to shake up the roster, he has to deal around the edges, as he did this weekend, sending catcher Patrick Bailey to the Guardians for Double A pitcher Matt “Tugboat” Wilson and a first-round draft pick. The Giants brought in Farhan Zaidi before the 2019 season in part to help them transform from a team weighed down by heavy contracts into a lithe one stocked with young talent. His ’21 club won 107 games, but otherwise his teams never broke through; the team fired him in ’24 and replaced him with Posey, who had joined the ownership group after retiring as the best catcher in franchise history. Now they are basically back where they were in ’18, trying to navigate an aging, expensive roster.

The Rockies are not blameless when it comes to bad contracts: They have $81 million remaining on the deal of 34-year-old multiposition player Kris Bryant, who has averaged 40 games a season since he signed in 2022 for seven years and $182 million, but otherwise, their books are basically clear. Their only other commitments past this season are $55 million to 24-year-old shortstop Ezequiel Tovar and $7 million to 29-year-old second baseman Willi Castro. Neither are playing well right now, but at those prices, you can cut bait if you need to. And owner Dick Monfort has shown a willingness to spend in the right circumstances. The upcoming free agent class is light, but the Rockies might be able to restock the roster for 2028.

They can also fire DePodesta if they decide his plan is not working. Can San Francisco do the same to Posey, perhaps the most beloved Giant since Mays? This season seems lost for both teams. Beyond that, perhaps the Giants will turn things around and give the Dodgers a fight. But I’d bet on the Rockies to do that first.

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