San Francisco Giants: Setting Expectations For the Offseason

Now that the San Francisco Giants have hired a president of baseball operations, we can begin to gauge what their offseason will look like.

Chances are, it won’t look like offseasons in the past for the San Francisco Giants.

During the Brian Sabean and Bobby Evans era, offseason predictions were almost a running joke amongst Giants fans. It seemed like signing pretty boring players, usually veterans, to fill in at a position for a few years was the norm.

With a new sheriff in town in the form of Farhan Zaidi, it looks like a new formula will be put in place. Whether that means going after big name free agents like Bryce Harper with everything they’ve got, something Sabean and Evans seemed fairly reluctant to do, or trying to make nifty little trades, something Sabean and Evans were very fond of, it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Will Zaidi and whoever is brought in as the new GM even think going big this offseason is worth it? Or will they opt to instead trade off some talent to better position themselves for the future?

Who knows? In offseasons past, I think it would have been a pretty safe bet to say the Giants would re-sign Derek Holland and maybe make a push for someone like A.J. Pollock and call it an offseason, leaving fans somewhat disappointed.

With holes all over the place, from the rotation, to left and right field, possibly first base, and one could even argue second base, the Giants may feel they’d be wiser to trade off talent and get young prospects they feel they could develop into starters or maybe even guys who are already established starters and could fill a hole for a few years.

There are many different roads the Giants can take this off-season. One could argue it’s an obvious rebuild situation while another could argue that given Brandon Crawford, Joe Panik, Madison Bumgarner, and Brandon Belt all stay healthy and return to form they aren’t far away from winning.

I’m more inclined to agree with the former instead of the latter opinion just because all of those players are getting a year older and it’s unlikely that they’re all going to stay healthy and have career years in 2019.

Since there aren’t a ton of rumors out there just yet, all we can do is wait and speculate. Like I wrote in my last article, Farhan Zaidi doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who just wants to wait around. He seems like the kind of guy who wants to win ASAP.

The question is: is 2019 the soonest the Giants can win or is it 2020 or even 2021 when prospects such as Joey Bart and Heliot Ramos might be big-league ready? Only time will tell.