In 2021, the San Francisco Giants penned one of the most remarkable seasons in recent baseball history, culling a 107-win juggernaut from a roster of journeymen and unknown veterans. As the 2023 season begins, the Giants are merely a roster of journeymen and unheralded veterans.
As Brandon Crawford marks the Giants’ last game of earlier glory years, this is perhaps baseball’s most anonymous and mediocre team, a wasteland of mediocre veterans like Michael Conforto and Sean Manaea. At 27-25, they’re pretty much average on offense and defense. Aside from Crawford and top player Logan Webb, the Giants are essentially a faceless, shapeless entity designed to win exactly 85 games. So here are the three giants that the San Franciscans are already fed up with.
3.Brandon Crawford
Not even two years ago, Brandon Crawford was ranked fourth in National League MVP picks, hitting 24 homers and hitting an .895 OPS at the shortstop with a Gold Glove-caliber defense. Now he’s bad. He’s arguably the worst everyday player in the majors — if he’s still an everyday player at all. In 29 games (he missed a lot of time in May with a calf strain), he averaged .172 with an OPS of .575, which would be fourth-worst in the league if he had enough at-bats to qualify. Worse, this doesn’t really feel like a coincidence — it feels like Crawford’s new reality. Although Crawford is admittedly hampered by injuries, he’s also 36 and well past his prime.
Most significantly, Crawford achieves by far the highest performance of his career. This season, Crawford has hit in 33 percent of his plate appearances; his previous high (or low, I guess) was 24.4 percent in 2020. Likewise, Crawford is also having its worst fielding season. While 29 games isn’t big enough to really gauge a player’s fielding ability, it’s clear that Crawford lost a step at shortstop. Never the fastest or most agile player, Crawford has blossomed into an elite defender due to his strong arm and skillful positioning. However, since the shift was off-limits, Crawford’s limited range came into its own. Since Baseball Savant introduced Outs Above Average in 2017, Crawford has been one of Major League Baseball’s most consistent elite defensemen, never ranking below the 88th percentile from 2017-2022. Now he’s in the 24th percentile.
Certainly Brandon Crawford has built up too much goodwill for Giants fans to claim his head this early in the season; He is a four-time All-Star who has featured prominently on two World Series champion teams. However, if Crawford continues to struggle, it’s only a matter of time before the good memories can stop fans from wishing him a happy release.
2.Michael Comfort
After the Giants criticized Aaron Judge as a free agent and broke their agreement with Carlos Correa, their plans for a massive, spectacular addition to their offseason roster fell through. Rather than lure a well-paid All-Star to the Bay Area, the Giants chose Michael Conforto and signed the injury-prone outfielder to a two-year, $36 million deal in hopes he could regain the form he thrived on 88 homers with an .856 OPS from 2017–19 with the New York Mets.
In his first season with the Giants, Conforto did well; His .236 batting average is just below what the Giants were hoping for, but his 11 home runs are the most on the roster and his 116 OPS+ shows he’s a slightly above average hitter. Still, his performance doesn’t match his status as the second-highest-paid player on the team and is a far cry from what Aaron Judge (the Giants’ real target) is doing with the New York Yankees.
In addition, Conforto is a terrible defender. Confined to right field, Conforto doesn’t have the speed or instinct to make a positive impact in outfield. According to Baseball Savant, he ranks in the 29th percentile for sprint speed and 37th percentile in outfielder leap, putting him in the 19th percentile overall for Outs Above Average.
1. Sean Manaea
An all-starting pitcher for the first seven years of his career, Sean Manaea faced the Giants’ greatest humiliation: a demotion in the bullpen. During his previous stints at Oakland and San Diego, Manaea was never exactly an ace, but he was the kind of reliable, innings-guzzling starter that every good team needs. In San Francisco, his command was so scattered and his performance so poor that he was transformed into an overpaid, overqualified midfielder. Manaea’s overall stats (2-2, 6.61 ERA) are poor, but his performance as a starter was particularly annoying. In his six starts, Manaea has a 7.54 ERA and opposing batters have a .971 OPS against him; For reference, Sean Murphy has an OPS of .970, which is the sixth best in baseball. Luckily, Manaea has done well in his recent appearances outside of the pen, giving hope that he can still turn his season around.
Like Michael Conforto, Manaea was one of the Giants’ key offseason moves, signing a two-year, $25 million deal with the Giants. And like Conforto, Manaea wasn’t worth the investment.
