Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow joined Murph & Mac on Tuesday morning and gave a synopsis on what went wrong for the club in 2017 and what general manager Bobby Evans needs to do in the offseason to turn things around in 2018. Krukow said that while San Francisco needs to improve drastically in a handful of areas, this team is not far enough off to require a full-on rebuild.
“It’s not going to be an easy rebuild, but I don’t think it has to be something completely just rebuild it — just blow it up,” Krukow said. “I mean you look at what happened with the D’Backs last year, injuries. Same thing that happened to the Giants this year, happened to them last year and guess what they’re going to the playoffs. Minnesota they had 102 losses last year and now they’re in the playoffs.
“So I think that the Giants can turn this thing around. I think they need to turn their defense around dramatically in the outfield. I think that they need to have a cornerstone, credible, established guy — whether it be at third base or left field — I think they need that offense. Offensively this year, this team sucked and they need to get a whole lot better. I think that a lot of guys on that team are guys that are chameleons. If you bring in somebody that can give them a year hitting .285 and hits 25 or 30 home runs, the chameleons are going to rise to that level. They’re going to get better because of that one guy. That’s what I think has to happen with this club. I don’t think they’re far off, but I do think they need to bring in some established stars.”
Part of the reason Krukow doesn’t believe a complete rebuild is necessary, is because he attributes much of the Giants’ struggles to injuries to key players throughout the season.
“I don’t ever think it’s ever going to be a completely new era when you have your backbone be the big three and it’s (Buster) Posey, (Madison) Bumgarner and (Brandon) Crawford,” Krukow said. “As long as you have those there, you’re going to have an umbilical chord to those great championships. So I don’t think of this as a completely new generation, a new direction or a rebuild in any way shape or form.
“I think that you can explain a lot of what happened to this team because of injury. I think there were a lot of guys who didn’t have good years early, a lot of guys just were awful early and it just really set this team back. There were times early in the season when I thought this team didn’t have a chance to win when I went to the ballpark, after Bumgarner went down and just guys not playing well. You look at a team’s season, what energizes a team? Well, winning does. Winning gives you life, it gives you energy and they had a real hard time manufacturing that energy, and every time they did get a little something going somebody would go down. Posey would go down with a concussion, Bumgarner missed 75 games, you had Span and Pence go through some injuries, Belt injury. I mean there were some big injuries to this club. Panik he was in concussion rehab. They just could not recover.
“Does that be you completely rebuild and gut it out and trade some of your nucleus? I don’t know, I mean those are questions that Bobby Evans is going to have to figure out.”
Listen to the full interview below. To hear Kruk’s comments on the state of the Giants, skip to 7:25.