Fractured Giants

 

The bottom line with this Giants team: you can really only name four guys who went the whole season without being demoted or getting hurt. Logan Webb, Ryan Walker, Matt Chapman, Tyler Rogers. One of those guys was a risk that paid off, and now gets to be a Giant for a while longer. Another one, y'know, staff ace, been incredible his whole career, very lucky to not get hurt.

But pretty much everybody else got hurt at some point. Mike Yastrzemski, Blake Snell, Patrick Bailey, Michael Conforto, LaMonte Wade, Kyle Harrison. All missed swaths of the season. Snell famously took a while to get back to his peak form, stayed there for a month and a half then fell off again. Then you have people who were healthy all-too-briefly, like Robbie Ray, Jung Hoo Lee and Keaton Winn. Huge pieces of this team, just not here for big parts of the season. And you can point to people like Heliot Ramos and Tyler Fitzgerald as people who saved the team, but they shouldn't have needed to. If this team had stayed healthy and productive all year, Bob Melvin should have been able to propel them pretty far. But instead, we had a very rickety and unreliable Giants team.

I think the biggest summation of this recent, post-Posey era Giants teams has been Michael Conforto. He was a big free agent signing, but he was past his prime and after a year's hiatus due to injury. The team was expecting him to be the same power OF bat he was with the Mets, but he's lost some dimension. Right now he's only hitting .227 with 16 homers and 57 RBIs. It's not a high tier offensive year for the guy, and it's only marginally better than last year. The Giants bank on people like that a lot and expect them to still have something left. Conforto, Haniger, Soler, Ray arguably. They sort of did it again by trading for Mark Canha, but at the very least he's hitting .270 with some of the same mildly amusing power stuff he was doing in Detroit before. 

What's gonna do the Giants better in the long run is relying on these younger guys that could carry the next stage of the franchise. Ramos and Fitzgerald, as well as people like Brett Wisely, Hayden Birdsong, Marco Luciano and Grant McCray, have been really crucial this year. Because they are young, versatile, and can fit into some positions where people are not as young...or sturdy. Luciano and Wisely have done a better job at 2nd than Thairo Estrada. Ramos has made the outfield even stronger, even with the knowledge that Jung Hoo Lee is gonna boost it again upon a healthy season next year. Birdsong is a rookie who's had some very elite moments this year. Upon a year where this team can play for outcomes like what they ran into in 2024, all of these players will likely be even more valuable.

The Giants have all the makings of a great team. All they need is a year where luck genuinely shines upon them. Hopefully that is coming.

Coming Tonight: A guy that can't stop nearly no-hitting people.