The one thing SF Giants fans should be hoping for in 2025 season

The offseason is not done for the SF Giants, but the shape of the 2025 team is becoming more clear as we embark upon the new year. While fans are eager for a playoff team, there is a more realistic expectation for fans to hope for.

When Buster Posey was announced as the new president of baseball operations after the end of the disappointing 2024 season, he made a point of emphasizing that the Giants are ultimately in the memory-making business.

More cynical fans could argue that the Giants have been in the business of providing bad memories over the past few years, but Posey is right that Giants baseball at its best can serve as a connective tissue between generations, bringing people together who might otherwise not have much reason to share a moment of connection.

SF Giants can get back in the memory-making business in 2025

This may all sound like mushy talk to a fanbase starved for a winning baseball team which is more than fair. It is not a coincidence that the most indelible memories Giants fans have of the team involve the three World Series championship runs in the 2010's. Winning championships and providing memorable moments in October is what fans will remember most, but that is not the only way to make memories.

Even in the down years in the 2010's, there were still memorable moments. Tim Lincecum's no-hitter in 2013 comes to mind. Lincecum was struggling and so was the team, but on one glorious night everything came together and The Freak recaptured some of his old self to deliver a magical performance.

There is a reason why that no-hitter is much more memorable that Blake Snell's no-hitter from 2024 ever will be. We as fans actually cared about Lincecum. He was not some hired gun, he was the embodiment of what it meant to be a Giant.

Making the playoffs in 2025 may be a tall ask for San Francisco. On paper, they are still the fourth-best team in a fairly stacked NL West. They only need a few things to break their way to make the postseason so it is far from impossible, but a more realistic goal would be for the team to foster a new generation of players that fans care about.

If the Giants get solid performances from young pitchers like Hayden Birdsong and Kyle Harrison, perhaps they could join staff ace Logan Webb as fan-favorite homegrown pitchers in the rotation. If 2024 breakout rookies like Tyler Fitzgerald and Heliot Ramos build upon what they did last year, they too could be homegrown players who fans latch themselves onto.

In short, the Giants have a chance in 2025 to build a foundation for what the team will look like for the rest of the decade. They have key pieces locked in like Webb, third baseman Matt Chapman who signed a large contract extension, and shortstop Willy Adames who signed the largest deal in franchise history.

If the Giants can add more building blocks to this solid foundation in 2025, ideally through their homegrown talent, it will go a long way towards crystallizing the identity of the Giants going forward and could end up providing those indelible memories that Posey has talked about.