Do Buster Posey and the SF Giants brass think their fans are idiots?
· Yahoo Sports
I don't like to mention my Giants fandom if I can help it, mainly because the columns I write aren't about me. I try to be an observer of all things and comment accordingly. But sometimes, it's impossible. I'm a Giants fan. My family had season tickets for 35 years. I've scheduled important life events around the baseball schedule. I've lived and died with this team for longer than I'd like to admit.
And as a Giants fan, not a columnist, I can say that I've never been less confident in where this team is headed.
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Buster Posey, Zack Minasian and Tony Vitello took the dais Tuesday for the Giants' annual postmortem, following a season in which the team lost the fourth-most games in franchise history, which goes back to 1883. If anyone was expecting the trio to announce big changes to the coaching staff, roster or organizational philosophy, they were left disappointed.
Coaches? Minimal turnover, if that. Roster? Apparently not - Posey still believes in this core. Organizational philosophy? Well in fairness, nobody really knows what that is.
I could hardly believe my ears when Posey, who had been asked if he thought the Giants could contend next year, said, "The way I look at it is with our position player group. There's still a ton of belief. … If you're, I guess, asking do you think that we can contend next year? I do. I do believe that we can."
I respect Posey immensely. I've argued that he's the greatest San Francisco Giant of all time, considering the unprecedented success the team enjoyed once he arrived. But really, what the hell was he talking about? This group just finished a 97-loss season. They were dead and buried in the standings long before the rash of injuries hit the roster. And this is the core he believes in? There's no room for change or any accountability, no room to perhaps move on from players who so badly underperformed? None of it made much sense.
And then there's the staff. Aside from Ron Washington and Gary Pettis, it was hard to point to much of a positive impact on the team's performance. Vitello is safe, which means we're in for more long-winded answers peppered with non sequiturs and the occasional pop culture reference. Fine. But how about surrounding him with a few more veteran coaches who can help him navigate a 162-game season? Maybe someone who can help with replay challenges. Or someone who can convince him not to argue a meaningless check swing and get himself tossed from the final game of the year.
I had high hopes that Posey would buck the trend of superstar players turning into terrible executives, that he'd be more Mario Lemieux than Derek Jeter or Michael Jordan, but those hopes are dwindling. He did a nice job navigating the trade deadline and has greatly improved the farm system, but his decisions at the major league level are becoming increasingly difficult to defend. He's made a lot of bad bets, which would be more palatable if he were willing to move on from them once it became clear they weren't working. Instead, he's doubling down.
Fans don't want to hear how much you believe in a core of players and coaches that just s-t the bed, metaphorically speaking. They want fire. They want passion. They want to hear that this was unacceptable and that changes are coming. They didn't hear any of that.
And it's a common theme that speaks to the pall that has settled over 24 Willie Mays Plaza. A sense of despair has been building for years, and it finally boiled over this season. The Giants found themselves embroiled in one off-field controversy after another, repeatedly displaying an inability to navigate their way out of them without making things worse. The on-field product was putrid from the first series. And they continue to charge premium prices for the privilege of watching it.
During the press conference, Posey was asked about the Giants still managing to draw 2.85 million fans this year. "It's hard to express the gratitude, you know," he said, "the season that we had and they continued to show up … just the loyalty of the fan base."
It begs the question: Did Posey watch any September home games? He can be forgiven if he tuned out, but the stands were largely empty on weekdays and filled up by Padres and Dodgers fans on weekends. The fact that Dodgers fans took over the ballpark on Mike Krukow's farewell day should be an unforgivable embarrassment for an organization that just spent the afternoon congratulating itself on the loyalty of its fan base.
Mookie Betts of the Los Angeles Dodgers slaps hands with Shohei Ohtani after hitting a home run during the third inning of a game against the San Francisco Giants on Sept. 26, 2026, at Oracle Park in San Francisco. (Matthew Huang/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)It should also tell them that things need to change if they want to keep that loyalty. They'll get a bump in ticket sales by selling access to the 2028 MLB All-Star Game, but that can only go so far. Lower ticket prices would help, as would making fans feel like they're getting their money's worth on overpriced concessions rather than skimping on things like chicken tenders. So would actually dropping beer prices instead of offering a token discount for one weekday game at a handful of stands.
Playing winning baseball would help the most, but it's hard to see how they get there anytime soon. They're stuck in the mushy middle, not good enough to be a true contender but just good enough on paper to convince themselves that they can contend for a Wild Card if things break right. And that's the most frustrating part: They don't seem particularly eager to get out of that middle, even though it's become increasingly clear that it isn't good enough.
In my season preview, I wrote that it would be better for the Giants to lose 90-plus games than finish around .500 again because it would force them to acknowledge that a new direction and a new philosophy were needed. Well, they lost those 90-plus games. And somehow, they're still insisting on heading in the same direction, with the same philosophy, and selling us on belief. It's like we've stepped into a funhouse mirror version of Brian Sabean's infamous "idiot" press conference 30 years ago. Only this time, the Giants seem to think the idiots are the ones in the stands.
Maybe they do. Maybe they're counting on a lockout-shortened season to bring them back into contention. After all, crazy things can happen in a shortened season, like Mike Yastrzemski getting a lot of MVP votes. Maybe they figure they can just hide their heads in the sand, wait for everything to blow over and hope things will be fine. It's hard to think of a better description of how they've handled their off-field troubles this year.
Clare Boothe Luce once wrote, "There are no hopeless situations; there are only men who have grown hopeless about them." Perhaps the Giants' situation isn't hopeless. But after watching this organization stumble through another lost season with no real plans to change anything, it's getting harder and harder to believe otherwise.
I feel it as a columnist. I feel it even more as a Giants fan. And I'd be shocked if I were alone.
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This article originally published at Do Buster Posey and the SF Giants brass think their fans are idiots?.