When you win 107 games going into a season where just about every prognosticator had you missing the playoffs, you earn some benefit of the doubt.
But the “lunatic fringe” has a short memory, especially when the team that knocked you out of the postseason — the hated Dodgers — have retooled in typical fashion this offseason, adding yet another former MVP to the roster in Freddie Freeman.
Also true to fashion, the Giants haven’t done anything like that. They made the first splash of the offseason in signing Carlos Rodón, but that strengthened a rotation that was already in good shape. The lineup is relatively unchanged, save for the major losses of Buster Posey and Kris Bryant.
It has some fans scratching their heads and others sweating bullets. Sure Zaidi has proven that he knows what he’s doing when it comes to roster construction, but is there a tipping point in the value strategy when your rivals’ lineup resembles an NL All-Star team?
Zaidi was asked about the criticisms of what has been a seemingly conservative offseason when he joined Murph & Mac on Friday. Unsurprisingly, he’s not concerned, and believes the Giants have players already on their roster that can contribute significantly. Here’s his answer in full:
I think if you look at those individual moves and the kind of ‘losses’ that we had, we had sort of independent rationales for each of them. You lose a guy like Buster Posey, there’s no replacing him, but we’ve had a stud prospect in waiting in Joey Bart. We were never going to go out and acquire a catcher and play him over Joey. Joey’s earned this opportunity. There’s always some risk when you’re putting a young player in a position to play everyday, but it didn’t make sense for us to go out and try to bring in a veteran player over him.
As far as Kris Bryant, he was a nice boost to us in the second half, but as we’ve talked about some, we’ve got guys like Thairo Estrada, Steven Duggar, guys that we saw be really productive for us and I think fans enjoy seeing out there. It’s tough when you’re in the offseason and everybody wants to see how the team looks on paper, and it’s harder to do the math on saying ‘Kris Bryant is now a Colorado Rocky, how are we going to replace him? And our answer is we are going to replace him with more at-bats for these three or four guys. So it’s not an easy translation to see, but I think giving a few of those guys more opportunities is maybe going to work out really well for us.
I think with each move we try to come up with a rationale, make sure things make sense for us on the roster. It may not always lead to the splashy headline, although like you said Rodon is really the perfect fit for us in the rotation, and the pitching staff I’m really excited how that’s worked out.
We still like how the roster looks on the position player side of things. It gives more players opportunities, there’s a lot of flexibility for [Gabe Kapler] and obviously we’ve seen the offense start clicking here the last few days so looking forward to seeing more of that.
Speaking of Bart, Zaidi denied that the Giants are looking to add another veteran catcher to supplant the youngster, at least for the time being. Others have reported that San Francisco is poking around, but Zaidi assured Giants fans that Bart will be in the squat on Opening Day.
We trust that Farhan knows what he’s doing, but it’s hard for Giants fans to look at these projected batting orders and not see a huge discrepancy.
The counterargument? The Dodgers batting order was much better on paper last year and the Giants’ team OPS was better than LA’s through 162 games (.769 vs. .759).
Zaidi clearly believes the magic of 2021 can be replicated.
Listen to the full interview below. You can listen to every KNBR interview on our podcast page at knbr.com/podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Catch Murph & Mac weekdays from 6 – 10 a.m. on KNBR 104.5 / 680 and streaming live on KNBR.com.