2024 Wasn't Farhan Zaidi's Fault. He'll Probably Be Gone Next Year Anyways

Surprisingly, though the Giants are likely going to be missing October baseball again for the third straight year, this season's woes are not necessarily Zaidi's fault. It won't be enough to save him.

I’ll make a bold prediction. Short of the Giants storming through the playoffs and coming ever-so-close to the World Series (a heartbreaking Game 7 NLCS loss) or a World Series victory or defeat, 2025’s President of Baseball Operations in San Francisco will not be Farhan Zaidi.

(This has nothing to do with this article, but I’ll come back to it later if they hire Kim Ng, my personal favorite choice for this role).

And yet, when you take a step back and look at this team, you realize that the Giants’ mediocrity isn’t really Farhan’s fault. Not this year, anyway. We can have (and may inevitably have) more discussions about how the Giants should not have gone the “bring the band back together” route after their magical 2021 season (see: extensions for Alex Wood and Anthony Desclafani and one-year deals for Joe Pederson and Carlos Rodon).

But here’s the thing. Entering 2024, I’m not sure Farhan Zaidi could have done much more. You can plan, and plan, and plan, and sure, were there mistakes along the way? Absolutely. The Cleveland Guardians or the Philadelphia Phillies could tell you as much, and they’ll cruise to the playoffs this year. Every GM and front office president makes mistakes. But they have a plan in place. Farhan Zaidi’s plan, given everything that happened, was actually quite sound.

This is, of course, given that they would not sign Shohei Ohtani. I suspect (with no insider knowledge) that even if the Giants threw another $300 million on top to make him the first $1 billion dollar MLB athlete, it may not have mattered. Yoshinobu Yamamoto could have been persuaded with $25 more million to get him to $350 million. The thing is, though, he hasn’t pitched in a month and may not for a little longer, so it’s almost a moot point for this year either way.

What they did instead was pivot, and pivot hard. What they ended up with was Matt Chapman, Jorge Soler, and Blake Snell. At the time, all three of these signings were incredibly justifiable. Even Jorge Soler’s contract, because here’s the thing—the Giants needed a middle-of-the-order threat, and when, two months into a 3-year contract, Soler began to show signs of discomfort of playing night games at Oracle Park, what was there that Zaidi could do?

You could argue that they could have vetted him better and asked him if he liked or disliked the conditions of Oracle Park. But what hitter is going to tell you they don’t like hitting at the park when the team is dangling a third year of salary? Alternatively, every hitter has the right to say they think hitting at Oracle Park is a bit more difficult than others. Because it is—but no one would have predicted the degree to which Soler would have a power outage. Besides, there was a counterexample named Barry Bonds who smacked 70+ home runs while playing half his games at Oracle Park. Also see: Aaron Judge when he came to San Francisco this year. He had no problems making this park look small.

No one’s blaming Soler, least of all me. If he’s more comfortable in the heat and humidity, more power to him (no pun intended). But I’m not going to blame Zaidi either.

As for the other two: Matt Chapman started the year slowly, yes. But he’s picked it up tremendously. At the end of the day, totals are totals, and his OPS is hovering around .790 or .800, and he’s hitting for power, running with speed, and playing stellar defense. FanGraphs lists him as a top 10 player in the National League by fWAR. That signing was an absolute win. The problem? When he wasn’t hitting, no one else was, which makes his struggles even more pronounced. There was a period in his season when his OPS was in the high .600s. Totals don’t paint the whole picture—Zaidi couldn’t have predicted that.

Blake Snell is much the same. He may well end up with an ERA in the low 3.00’s with a K/9 over 10. He threw a no-hitter. He’s been elite in the second half. The problem? The first half. He was injured, and then he was bad, and then he was injured. Sure, there could have been ways around it—perhaps Zaidi and Snell could have worked out a better ramp-up. Has that helped Jordan Montgomery, who did take a minor league assignment after also signing very late? Not particularly.

The point is: the difference between the Giants being in a Wild Card position with the DBacks and the Padres is a healthy, even mediocre first-half Blake Snell and a Matt Chapman who consistently had a .800 OPS instead of being streaky hot or streaky cold (which, in fairness, he has been prone to in his career). But it didn’t happen. Farhan Zaidi couldn’t have forseen that. He couldn’t have foreseen having one-and-a-half starting pitchers in late July. In the best-case scenario, the Giants were cruising to 90 wins.

Now the underlying problem is that by this point in Zaidi’s tenure, they shouldn’t be in this position to be a “best-case scenario Wild Card contender”. They should be, at best, contending with the Dodgers, and, at worst, securely in a Wild Card spot.

The problem is that things should have gone according to plan and the Giants should be in a Wild Card spot, but they’re not, and things didn’t go according to plan. The foundation was shaky, and Zaidi did what he could to throw a Hail Mary. It could have worked. But maybe it’s for the best that it didn’t. If Zaidi leaves, he leaves behind a promising core of budding youngsters in Kyle Harrison, Patrick Bailey, Tyler Fitzgerald, Jung Hoo Lee, and Heliot Ramos, with other potential contributors in Luis Matos, Marco Luciano, Hayden Birdsong, Brett Wisely, and Casey Schmitt waiting in the wings. All led by their late-20s ace, Logan Webb. It’s a solid foundation, espeically considering that Bryce Eldridge could be here as early as late next year, and Carson Wisenhunt and Reggie Crawford may even get a crack at the end of this year.

But it may not be Zaidi’s vision to see through. Because it took too long to get here. This should have been happening arguably 2 years ago, and 2024 should have been the opening of a true contending window.

Instead, we’ll have to wait a while and hope that next year, everything goes according to plan.