The impossibly slow start from almost everyone in the Giants\u2019 lineup is just One of Those Baseball Things. The organization thought they knew how baseball was going to work, and the baseball had other plans. Sometimes you plan for rain and the wind tears through your umbrella.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s probably too late for the Giants to recover, although a reverse-2016 kind of experience would certainly make for a fun season. Let\u2019s assume they\u2019re cooked, even if they\u2019re more than welcome to make us all look silly. In the above telling, it\u2019s hard to get too mad at the players involved. And it\u2019s not the fault of a single hitting coach or a rogue quant named Billy who hasn\u2019t been able to connect to the Oracle Park WiFi for years but is too embarrassed to tell anyone. It was an organizational failure. Everyone shares the blame, from the hitters to the coaches to the suits. The unexpected happened, and it wasn\u2019t pretty.<\/p>\n
So let\u2019s talk about the expected. The Giants had two or three rotation slots to fill this offseason, and they made a conscious decision to go for quantity over quality. Neither Adrian Houser nor Tyler Mahle were among baseball\u2019s top 50 free agents last offseason<\/a>, with more than a dozen pitchers ahead of them. There were so many options \u2014 that\u2019s before getting to the trade market, too \u2014 that it was possible for a team to suffer from analysis paralysis. If they liked a broad swath of free-agent options, they risked losing their fallback options because they were too confident in their fallback-to-the-fallback options.<\/p>\n \n Ranger Su\u00e1rez looked like a perfect fit for the Giants this offseason, but he signed with Boston and is thriving there instead. (Paul Rutherford \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n We\u2019ll never know what the Giants\u2019 offseason wishlist really looked like, whether Houser and Mahle were at the top of a short list, or if they were the last couple of chairs available as the music stopped, but the early returns have been dreadful. Houser has gone deeper into games recently, but he\u2019s been completely unable to miss bats, even more so than usual. Mahle was alternating strong starts with iffy starts, but he\u2019s been more focused on the latter recently.<\/p>\n After Andrew Baggarly reported this offseason that the Giants were unlikely to shop at the top of the free-agent market<\/a>, I wrote a column that was the equivalent of a deep sigh and a long eye-roll<\/a>.<\/p>\n Left-hander Patrick Corbin probably isn\u2019t the Giants\u2019 main free-agent target, but let\u2019s use him as a stand-in for the class of free-agent starter that Giants fans should apparently get familiar with. Before defining that kind of starting pitcher, though, we should remember the prime directive of the Giants\u2019 pitching pursuit this offseason, which is this:<\/p>\n They can\u2019t screw it up.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve brought this up several times already, possibly while linking to the same Far Side cartoon<\/a> that pops into my head every time. The Giants aren\u2019t off to an all-time lousy start solely because of their pitching decisions, but this is where the best told-you-sos and April-morning quarterbacking are stored. They screwed it up.<\/p>\n MLB free agent SP through 5\/20\/26<\/p>\n The Giants didn\u2019t pick the worst options. Chris Paddack has already been released by the team that signed him, and other pitchers have made a (bad) start or two before going on the IL. The Brewers spent their entire offseason kitty on retaining Brandon Woodruff, who is already having shoulder issues.<\/p>\n But the Giants certainly picked some of the worst options, at least through the middle of May. Seasons can turn around, certainly, but the early returns are about as bad as anyone could have feared. The Giants\u2019 biggest job this offseason was rebuilding the rotation, and they\u2019re 10 games under .500 at least partially because they screwed that job up.<\/p>\n If you were feeling sorry for the Brewers spending their limited funds, don\u2019t. The Red Sox pulled a Lucy and tossed the Giants\u2019 version of a Joe Shlabotnik card in the trash<\/a>, allowing the Brewers to weaponize Kyle Harrison and feel awfully smug about it. Harrison struck out 11 Cubs over seven innings on Wednesday, dropping his ERA to 1.77. He might not just make the All-Star Game at this pace; he might start it.<\/p>\n The current mood around baseball is to blame the Red Sox more than the Giants for this turn of events, and rightfully so. The Giants felt like Harrison had to be in the Devers trade, otherwise it might all fall apart. The Red Sox said, \u201cHey, how\u2019d you get here?\u201d over the offseason and traded him for Caleb Durbin, who is somehow hitting worse than anybody in baseball. One team made a tough decision that they might regret; the other team made a nonsensical decision that they already do.<\/p>\n Still, it\u2019s important to remember that the Giants thought of Harrison as a pitcher they could replace. They have been very wrong about that this season. When you combine his development with the struggling, newly signed free agents in the rotation, it\u2019s not only fair to wonder if the Giants can evaluate and develop pitching: It\u2019s required at this point. It\u2019s an incredibly bad look for, say, Ranger Su\u00e1rez \u2014 the perfect fit, and not in hindsight<\/a> \u2014 to be thriving as the Giants are struggling with their thread-the-needle, quantity-over-quantity picks for the rotation.<\/p>\n Instead, the Giants bet on their ability to evaluate the market and out-clever the other teams. It\u2019s still May, but the bet is getting paid off in earned runs and regret, and there aren\u2019t a lot of signs that this is a team that knows how to make pitchers better. Landen Roupp is becoming one of the better stories of the season, and Trevor McDonald has been more effective than either of the free agents, but none of it will be enough to build confidence in the whole operation.<\/p>\n If this doesn\u2019t get fixed, there\u2019s a franchise up there that\u2019s a good cautionary tale for the Giants. The Orioles had the best minor-league system in baseball for a long time, stuffed with top-10 prospects, but it was a system that was heavily weighted towards their position player prospects. They still have an enviable young core, so they\u2019re not absolutely buried, but they were always just a few pitchers away from busting out. Now they\u2019re one of the teams from the opening paragraphs having a Giants-like season of disappointment. Sometimes an organization never really figures out how to prevent runs, even when almost everything else is going right.<\/p>\n This is what should scare Giants fans a lot more than the respective OPSes, salaries and ages of players like Jung Hoo Lee, Willy Adames, Rafael Devers and Matt Chapman. Those hitters will either come around, or they won\u2019t, and it won\u2019t affect the team\u2019s desire (or yours) for the next exciting free agent looking to get overpaid in exchange for immediate help. They\u2019ll still trade for the next Devers when the opportunity arises, if only because \u201cadding All-Star hitters to a would-be contender\u201d isn\u2019t a strategy that will ever go out of favor. But if they can\u2019t figure out how to keep runs off the board \u2014 and how to find the same kind of short-term successes that the last front office did \u2014 none of it will matter.<\/p>\n The Giants\u2019 bats will likely warm up with the weather, regressing to the mean in the best sense. There are no guarantees when it comes to the run prevention, though. It\u2019s possible that the season ends with Houser\u2019s and Mahle\u2019s numbers looking like their career lines, Carson Whisenhunt throwing strikes in the majors and ol\u2019 Tugboat <\/a>becoming a fan favorite on the order of Sergio Romo. If the Giants\u2019 front office shows an ability to develop homegrown pitchers like Roupp, they won\u2019t need to have a 100-percent success rate with their free agents.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also possible that the season ends with the Giants needing to rebuild a rotation again, which means we could be back here in 365 days, yapping about the same problem. Here\u2019s the most important pivot point for the franchise going forward. The early returns aren\u2019t exactly conclusive, but it\u2019s perfectly reasonable to be alarmed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s not just the Giants. This doesn\u2019t make you feel better, but it sure doesn\u2019t make you feel…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":686013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,5157,85],"class_list":["post-686012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-mlb","tag-san-francisco-giants","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/686013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Ranger](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/GettyImages-2276298262-scaled.jpg\")
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