The last top-of-the-line free agent the San Francisco Giants signed was Barry Bonds.
He signed in 1992.
In the 31 years since, the Giants have won three World Series, four pennants, and six division titles. And the second-best out-of-house free agent signed during that time was Johnny Cueto, in 2016.
The history is clear: The Giants are not a free-agent destination. Never have been; probably never will be.
And yet for the past few offseasons, Giants fans — led on by the organization itself — have been adamant that the team should — and will — bring in the best free agents money can buy.
And yet again, the Giants have failed.
The Los Angeles Dodgers have spent more than a billion dollars to sign the two players atop the Giants’ free agency wish list this December.
If that’s not a wake-up call to the Giants’ organization and the fan base, I don’t know what is.
The message is clear, too: The Giants are a second-tier franchise.
It’s a harsh truth. It’s one that defies logic, in many senses. The Giants have a great history, great ballpark, great fan base, great city and region, and big-time money.
But it’s not debatable anymore. Blame crime, the ballpark, taxes, or director of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi if you want, but for a myriad of reasons, the fact remains that the Giants aren’t on the Dodgers’ level. They’re not on the Yankees, Mets, or Phillies’ level, either.
To be successful in this modern game, every team needs to draft and develop players.
But amid that, there are three tiers of MLB teams.
The first are teams like the Pirates and Rays. These teams at the bottom end can still put winning teams on the field, thanks to their minor-league systems and development programs. But they’re not going to sign anyone for eight figures and they’re probably not going to re-sign the good players they’ve developed once they hit free agency.
At the top end of the tier are the aforementioned spenders.
They, like everyone else, need to develop their own talent, but these teams can also attract free agents to be the centerpieces of their roster. The in-house talent augments those stars.
These are baseball destinations, and there are few of them.
(I’d have included the World Series champion Rangers in this camp, but they’re out of money now.)
And then there’s the meaty middle — the second tier of teams:
These teams’ success will, again, be predicated on developing their own stars, but unlike the bottom-tier teams, they can keep those stars (if they choose) once they reach free agency. Plus, they can afford to spend to fill out the bottom end of the roster.
This second tier is clearly where the Giants fit in the hierarchy of baseball. They’ve been there for decades. The team won three titles in five years understanding that this was the team’s path to victory.
And until the organization embraces that fact again, they’ll leave fans disappointed year after year.
Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto went to Los Angeles because the money and the environment was right. Not only did they want to be paid — the Giants were reportedly willing to match both offers — but they wanted to win.
The Giants cannot provide that foundation to top-flight free agents, and they can’t buy it on the open market, either.
And while there are second-tier free agents — tons of them — the Giants must be judicious in signing them moving forward, lest there be another Haniger-Conforto debacle.
Whereas for top-tier teams the prospects and in-system players fill holes around the top-dollar talent, for second-tier squads, it is those kind of mid-money free agents that are asked to patch roster holes.
The problem is that those can be terribly expensive patches, and what the Giants really need is a new hull That might take a while to build. And patience is not something this market or this ownership group is prepared to provide. That’s understandable.
But patience is necessary.
There’s only one thing that will put butts in the seats at Oracle Park: winning.
And contrary to popular belief in the winter, no one cares how much anyone on the field is paid if the product is entertaining and the team wins more than it loses.
Offseason buzz fades. Ask the Yankees, Mets, and Padres — they’ve been off-season champions and they have nothing to show for it. In fact, they might be worse off for doing it.
Postseason buzz, however, lingers.
It’s not so bad to be a second-tier team.
And these Giants are lucky — this is an era where you only need to win 85-or-so regular season games to be considered a World Series contender. The Dodgers might win 120 games this upcoming regular season, but they’ll be 0-0 come October and the five-game National League Division series.
And in this sport, no team is undeniable. Many teams crack under the pressure of needing to win to justify everyone’s salary.
San Francisco is also well -quipped to win in this era, even though no big-time free agent of serious worth wants anything to do with the Giants.
Zaidi built a 107-win team out of a roster of guys who have been forgotten by now. They were arguably a checked swing away from taking down the vaunted Dodgers in the 2021 NLDS.
And now add manager Bob Melvin — someone with a track record of turning young talent into top players — and you have a nice 1-2 punch that can make the most of the team’s station and maybe outperform offseason expectations, all while continuing to firm up the organization’s foundation.
The worst thing the Giants can do amid another delusional free-agency heartbreak is chase good money with bad money. Overpaying a lesser player because, “well, we need to sign someone” is a guarantee to tread water.
Let Zaidi and Melvin do what they do — let them sign some low-cost, high-reward free agents, make a few deft trades for players needing a change of scenery, and let’s see if they can develop the young players of today into the stars of tomorrow.
And if they can do that, let’s see if the Giants can keep them.
This is a big-picture, macro process. It’s one that has been derailed in recent years by ownership’s demand to land flashy free agents, all so they can win the offseason.
After Bonds signed in 1992, the Giants didn’t win a pennant for a decade. They went to the playoffs twice before that.
Ohtani might be the best player since Bonds, but he’s played a grand total of zero playoff games in his career.
Now Bonds saved baseball in San Francisco — there’s no debating that — but as great as he was, he wasn’t a one-man panacea to the organization’s shortcomings. Ohtani might have sold a lot of season tickets, but would adding him have made these Giants a surefire playoff team?
And if Ohtani couldn’t do it, why would Cody Bellinger or Matt Chapman?
Talk about expensive patches.
Remember, it wasn’t until the Giants decided to build their own stars — instead of buying someone else’s — that they won the World Series.
It’s time for the Giants to embrace holistic baseball once again.
Because the sooner the Giants’ brass admits they’re not the big-market, big-money destination spot they want to be, the sooner they can get back to building the best team – and organization — possible.