Shohei Ohtani was everything the Giants needed.
He was a middle-of-the-lineup bat with the kind of pop that could tame the right-field winds of Oracle Park.
He was a top-of-the-rotation arm (in 2024, at least) who could pair with Logan Webb to give San Francisco the best 1-2 punch in the National League.
He would have brought MVP credentials to a roster seeking respect and legitimacy. And man, would he have brought people out to the corner of Third and King.
But Ohtani is going to sign with the Dodgers, pending a physical (we know how those can go), and the Giants are still looking for all of those things.
It’s just another offseason letdown for Giants fans. And worse yet, with this free agent of all free agents, the Giants didn’t seem to be serious contenders for his services.
I hear the cries for “spread the $700 million around” from the true believers.
That’s a good idea in theory, but a terrible idea in reality.
This is how you end up with Michael Conforto, Mitch Haniger, and a trade that sends Bryan Reynolds to Pittsburgh for Andrew McCutchen.
That’s not budgeting — that’s spending because it’s payday.
That’s how you live paycheck to paycheck — or, in the Giants’ case, year to year.
Unless the Giants can land the second-best free agent in this year’s class, Japanese starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto (as broken down by my new colleague Danny Emerman) they should skip signing a big-money free agent.
Yes, I’m suggesting that the Giants — who have a massive capacity for spending but a moderate big-market payroll — hold onto their money. I’m giving them permission to break even.
The fact of the matter is that there is no middle class in baseball.
The free agency system has been broken for decades, but neither the league nor the player’s association wants to fix it.
And what it leaves us is offseason after offseason of one or two worthy players landing massive, record deals, and bevy of others — typically on the downslope of their careers — landing their one big payday by riding that wake.
In short, good money (Ohtani, Aaron Judge, Bryce Harper, Gerrit Cole) is only spent by one team. The rest of the league (or at least the half of the league that spends money in free agency) chases with bad money, overpaying for players who will be under contract for their decline years.
This season is the perfect example.
After the two Japanese stars, there are big names, sure.
But there’s no one worthy of a nine-figure deal. Yes, you can quote me on that.
Two players stand out: Matt Chapman and Cody Bellinger.
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These guys are tied to the Giants by every insider in the game.
But the Giants signing either player would be a textbook case of chasing with bad money — again.
Let’s start with Bellinger, because that’s the most frightening outcome. He, like Ohtani, carries an MVP pedigree, having won the award in 2019, and his counting stats from last season indicate that he has bounced back from the three-year slump that followed that MVP win.
But while Bellinger was, indeed, better last season for the Cubs, he’s still miles away from the player he was in 2019.
That 2019 Bellinger is the player the Giants need, not the current edition.
The case against Bellinger is simple: He doesn’t hit the ball hard enough.
Last year, Bellinger was 186th in baseball in barrels per batted ball event. He was 200th in average exit velocity. He was in the bottom 10 percent of baseball in hitting the ball hard.
That’s a massive dropoff from 2019, when he was in the 86th percentile.
When you’re a power hitter, that’s a big red flag.
When you’re a lefty at Oracle Park, it’s death. MLB’s Statcast website says he would have only hit 16 home runs last season if every game was in San Francisco. (Compare that to the 30 he’d have hit with 162 games in Cincinnati.)
The Giants cannot sign Bellinger. Whether the contract is one year or 10, it’ll be an albatross deal, weighing down the entire operation.
It’s bad money.
And what would be even more concerning about such a deal, were it to happen, is that we would know that the Giants are chasing a headline. If I can see that Bellinger provides false promise, you’d think Farhan Zaidi’s army of quants would, too. Signing Bellinger despite that would indicate an organization that is misaligned and doing things for all the wrong reasons.
Which brings us to Chapman.
The former A’s third baseman does hit the ball hard. Harder than just about anyone in the game.
His issue is that he doesn’t hit it as frequently as he used to, and he didn’t have much room for error.
The highs are spectacular — three or four-week benders where he hits 10 homers and laces the ball to every field.
The lows are low indeed. He might as well be at the plate with a chopstick.
But he’s clearly a player in decline.
At one point, you could count on him to be the best third baseman in the game. He’s still excellent, but he’s lost something in the field, too.
He’s 30. He has played seven years of ball. It’s all pretty typical.
If the Giants were to land Chapman, they would be buying one or two good seasons — at best — but likely paying for more.
Yes, it might seem like a positive to sign a player you can count on to be in the lineup every day for the next half-decade, but the new-car smell will wear off, and like with a car, depreciation on these kinds of baseball players comes fast.
Will you still feel good about the purchase three years from now, when it’s in the shop — again — and it’s showing more wear and tear than it should?
Is it a pessimistic viewpoint? Yes, but the world is a bummer sometimes.
Free agency might work for teams at the high end (it certainly works for the players). It works for teams at the low end of money, term, or both.
Unless Yamamoto is coming to the Bay, the Giants have already lost.
And spending what was budgeted for the Japanese stars on the “next-best” players would only worsen the situation.
