Buster Posey's words come back to bite him as SF Giants dig their own grave

About a week ago on KNBR, SF Giants president of baseball operations Buster Posey gave an incredibly defensive answer when asked why the team didn’t sign a legitimate closer in the offseason. That answer looks even worse as the Giants have blown yet another save and continue to find borderline impressive ways to lose.

It looked like the Giants did pretty much everything right on Friday night. There were some fundamental errors on defense but offensively they were hitting sacrifice flies and doing the little things right.

Going into the ninth inning, it added up to a 6-3 advantage over the Colorado Rockies. Giants fans are too smart to think a lead like that is safe in Coors Field but in case anyone needed a reminder of just how quickly things can flip in that park they got one in the form of a three-run homer to tie the game and a two-run homer to walk it off just a few batters later.

San Francisco’s two best relievers this season, Keaton Winn and Caleb Kilian, each gave up homers in the eighth and ninth inning respectively so manager Tony Vitello went with his best options and still got burned which shows he was set up to fail by the lack of meaningful bullpen additions. 

Posey got grilled on KNBR recently and when asked about the team’s closer situation, he basically built a straw man argument against radio host Brian Murphy by saying: “I guess Murph you probably wanted us to sign Edwin Diaz, then you’d probably ask me why I signed Edwin Diaz because he’s on the IL. Every decision we made you could play arm chair quarterback on it and say it was good or bad. We’ve got some guys in the bullpen doing some really good stuff.”

Giants really needed to do more to beef up the bullpen in the offseason

The notion that the team’s two options in the offseason were to roll the dice on Ryan Walker or sign Edwin Diaz just isn’t true. There were other options out there and while Posey could have given a more defensible answer about how free agent closers are always risky (he himself saw how the Mark Melancon signing panned out) it just looks so bad that he gave such a defensive answer and the bullpen imploded yet again.

He of anyone should know how important it is to have a strong bullpen. He caught the “Core Four” for years and the Giants don’t win those three World Series titles without the contributions of Sergio Romo, Jeremy Affeldt, Javier Lopez, and Santiago Casilla.

This latest loss is just another instance of this team being unable to put all the pieces together consistently. On nights when the offense is good, it seems like the pitching blows it. When the pitching is good, the offense goes stagnant.

In the NFL many coaches talk about playing “complementary football.” They basically mean the offense taking advantage when the defense forces a turnover or the defense stepping up if the offense messes up.

The Giants have given us all a masterclass in whatever the opposite of “complementary baseball” looks like. 

It would be nice to think the only way the Giants can go from here is up, but we all know that’s not true. The Giants can sink much, much lower this season and one can pretty safely bet on more blown saves the rest of the way after Posey and the front office neglected to address the bullpen.

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