Bob Melvin Is A Good Hire But It Won't Make Much Difference If The Giants Don't Spend Big To Upgrade The Roster

An sparsely-attended Giants game at Oracle Park during the 2023 season. Photo by Wendy Thurm

The Giants introduced Bob Melvin as their new manager on Wednesday. But that wasn’t the biggest Giants news that day.

At the introductory press conference, Managing General Partner Greg Johnson said two things that will make a much greater impact on the success of the Giants in 2024 and beyond.

• Johnson announced that the Giants had extended the contract of President of Baseball Operations Farhan Zaidi to the end of the 2026 season, to run coterminous with Melvin’s contract.

• Johnson said, in response to a reporter’s question, that he would consider surpassing the Competitive Balance Tax for a season but not on a consistent basis. Johnson also said that the goal for Giants ownership is to “somewhat break even” financially and he remarked on how teams that spent a lot of money on payroll for the 2023 season “didn’t get the results they were looking for.”

Taken on its own, the Melvin hiring makes sense. Melvin is an experienced manager with a good reputation for blending analytics with “old-school” baseball strategy (which, by the way, always depended on numbers) and developing solid relationships with the players on his teams. Logan Webb told NBCSports Bay Area that he’s heard nothing but positive things about Melvin and is excited about the hire.

There’s something disquieting, though, about the way his short tenure in San Diego played out. The Athletic published an article on September 19 detailing the “toxic” situation that “lacked consistency” from the top of the Padres organization down to the players. The article firmly casts blame on Padres GM A.J. Preller but noted that Preller’s broken relationship with Melvin negatively affected the players.

I’m confident Zaidi, Buster Posey, and others involved in interviewing Melvin for the manager’s job discussed the San Diego situation with Melvin at length. And we have to trust that Melvin was forthright and that the Giants’ team was satisfied with his answers.

But none of that was shared at the press conference nor is it likely to be shared in the future, leaving fans to wonder if Melvin was part of the problem in San Diego or just stuck in a bad situation. At the least, he either failed to do his own due diligence before joining the Padres or was willing to work in a “toxic” situation created by Preller.

When I first heard that Melvin had become the front runner for the Giants in their managerial search, I thought he’d be fine as a caretaker manager while Zaidi remained on the hot seat. Zaidi’s contract was set to expire at the end of the 2024 season.

At the press conference, Melvin said that he wouldn’t have signed a contract longer than Zaidi’s deal. As much as I wanted Zaidi to stay on the hot seat, Melvin didn’t want to work under those conditions. After coming from a volatile situation in San Diego, Melvin’s position makes sense.

But it means at least 3 more seasons of Zaidi-ball—compiling a roster of platoon advantages that make improvements around the edges but contain few if any star players. Especially if Giants ownership continues to tug tightly on the purse strings.

Frankly, there’s no other conclusion we can reach after hearing Greg Johnson’s comments at the press conference. A team that is only willing to go over the Competitive Balance Tax for one season is not a team that is serious about signing Shohei Ohtani or trading for an established star and signing him to a long-term deal. It might be a team serious about signing free agent starters Blake Snell or Aaron Nola, but those guys aren’t going to put butts in the seats at Oracle Park next season.

To hear a billionaire owner of one of the most valuable sports franchises in the world, in one of the biggest and well-off markets in the U.S., say that the goal is for the owners to “break even” is such a slap in the face to fans who packed the ballpark at 24 Wille Mays Plaza for years and bought tens of millions of dollars worth of Giants merchandise.

Giants CEO Larry Baer famously says that Giants fans wouldn’t put up with a complete rebuild. What ownership has given us is worse: a mediocre team that is running in place.

A team can be boring and win. A team can be young, athletic, exciting and fall short. But a team that is boring and falls short? That is a deadly combination and it perfectly describes the 2023 Giants.

Ownership saw how fans reacted to that kind of team. Attendance at Oracle Park reached only 2,500,143, a very slight increase from the 2,482,868 tickets sold in 2022. But most teams in the league far outpaced that tiny attendance bump. MLB as a whole saw attendance increase nearly 10% over 2022.

Some days I am left to feel like the only way things will get better for the Giants franchise is if Buster Posey increases his ownership stake and becomes the Managing General Partner. I don’t even know if Posey desires such a thing or whether he’s in a position financially to make it happen.

What I do know is that Posey has a brilliant baseball mind and he knows how to win. Two attributes the Giants really need right now.

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