It’s not that Conforto and Mitch Haniger are bad players they’re not. It’s been far, far too long since the last wave of homegrown players established themselves with the Giants, and man cannot live on Logan Webb alone. The prospects have to become major leaguers. If the Giants want their fans to calm down, and they most assuredly do, they’ll have only one weird trick at their disposal: It’s not enough to sign the next Barry Zito, so to speak. No, it’s not enough to win a few more games than expected. A Giants roster that makes the postseason is a roster that’s likely to have multiple holes that offseason, and it would likely be a roster that an Ohtani or Manny Machado miracle won’t be enough to salvage. But strong contributions from them would make it likely that they’d opt out of their contracts, which would put the front office back in quantity-over-quality mode. It’ll almost certainly have meant that the Giants got strong contributions from their free agents, like Michael Conforto and Manaea. Assuming the Giants don’t sign Shohei Ohtani to a 13-year, $600 million deal - a safe assumption - it’s not like you’ll be impressed by, say, Ian Happ and Tyler Mahle.Ī combination of the two could work, in theory, but let’s imagine a scenario in which the Giants make the postseason. “Yeah, yeah, that’s great, but you should always do that.” And that’s if there’s a big-name free agent at all, which isn’t always the case. It morphed into a folded-arms kind of angry, like that of a parent whose kid gets a B+ on a test instead of the usual C. We kinda thought that would work entering this offseason, but we got a week of data after the Correa almost-signing, and the anger didn’t quite go away. The Giants making it to the NLCS might be enough, for a while, but that seems more than a little implausible. Squeaking into the wild-card round won’t be enough. There’s a chance that they’ll make the expanded postseason in 2023, and it’s a better chance than the angrier fans think, but the only kind of season that will calm people down is a repeat of 2021, which is the least repeatable season in baseball history. Not the kind of winning the Giants are capable of, anyway. So let’s talk about the only way they’ll stop being angry. It doesn’t matter that the last time the Giants signed the top international prospect, his greatest contribution to team lore turned out to be barfing on the field while wearing another team’s uniform. It doesn’t matter that the work to sign these players starts years earlier, when there isn’t a Baseball America or MLB Pipeline list to cross-reference. It doesn’t matter that those rankings are a wildly inexact science. People were angry that the Giants didn’t get the any of the top-rated prospects. It should be impossible to have an opinion stronger than, “Hope this works out,” but that’s not now fandom works. If the Giants are lucky, you might be thinking about one or two of those teenagers in 2028, but it’s more likely that you’ll never think about most of them again. Andrew Baggarly wrote about the international signing class, which is a group of teenagers that you’ll probably never see in a Giants uniform. If you’re looking for evidence for the claim that Giants fans are angry, look in the comment sections of articles that should be uncontroversial. Carlos Rodón, and you’d better believe that’ll make folks even angrier. The pitching matchup for the second game might be Sean Manaea vs. Giants fans will be angry when the team makes quick outs in the first inning on Opening Day, and then they’ll be angrier in the bottom half of the inning, when Aaron Judge gets a standing ovation that lasts a full minute.
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