4 mistakes that have cost the SF Giants dearly this season

After things were looking pretty promising for the San Francisco Giants heading into the trade deadline, the month of August has not been kind. With last night's loss to the Braves, they have now lost five straight series during this brutal stretch of their schedule and have gone from firmly a wild card team to having to make up a 1.5 game deficit to even make it to the playoffs.

Some of the credit has to go to the teams the Giants are competing against as those last five series against Texas, Tampa, Atlanta (2x), and Philadelphia are against some really good baseball teams. Plus, other teams in the wild card race like the Cubs and Diamondbacks have been playing really good baseball of late. However, there is no denying that the Giants have played poorly lately and much of that can be traced to missteps the team has made throughout the 2023 season.

Here are 4 mistakes that have cost the SF Giants dearly this season

There are certainly different types of mistakes a team can make. Sometimes, a decision looks great in the moment and can turn into a disaster with the benefit of hindsight. In other cases, mistakes can come from failures to evaluate talent both on and off the roster correctly which is tough to get right at times. There are also the decisions that have been total head-scratchers from the moment they happened and are still hard to understand even now. The Giants have had all of the above happen in 2023 and the team has been lesser for it.

Let's take a look at 4 major mistakes the Giants have made this season that have been very costly in 2023.

Failing to add a superstar last offseason has really hurt the SF Giants

This one is hard to blame on the team or the front office. Going into the offseason, the organization knew that they needed to add some top flight offensive talent. While the Giants' roster was interesting and had some exciting young players in the minor league pipeline, it was pretty clear that hoping that the lineup was better than the sum of their parts wasn't a realistic strategy.

So, the Giants tried their damnedest to sign a superstar last offseason. Their courtship of Aaron Judge was very public, but it became clear that Judge was just using San Francisco's interest as leverage in his talks with the Yankees. The Giants very nearly signed Carlos Correa before his physical caused that deal to thankfully fall through. If nothing else, one can't say that the Giants didn't try to go for it.

However, baseball is a results-oriented business and the Giants failed to deliver on a key team need. Sure, they signed Michael Conforto which was kinda nice, but he hasn't moved the needle much this season and he just hit the injured list with a hamstring injury. All in all, not adding one of the big name free agents from last offseason has really hurt their chances in 2023.

The Giants very clearly overestimated the strength of their starting rotation

While the Giants' pursuit of a big time bat was well documented last offseason, it was somewhat surprising that they didn't look harder at adding some better starting pitching depth especially Carlos Rodon leaving town. Before anyone asks, no: signing Ross Stripling doesn't count.

This one feels like a problem in evaluating the organization's strength at starting pitcher. Logan Webb is legitimately awesome and no one should argue otherwise. However, the rest of the rotation even before Anthony DeSclafani hit the injured list wasn't particularly inspiring. It is possible that the Giants thought that Kyle Harrison would be ready sooner than he was, but banking on a pitching prospect going into a season where the team very clearly wanted to go for it seems like an unwise choice.