The San Francisco Giants don’t need another off-season selling their new, expensive shortcut to October.

No, they need to look in the mirror, look at the roster currently occupying Oracle Park, and admit the truth: This is a rebuilding team.

It’s bizarre, it’s backward, and it defies everything this big-market franchise wants to sell.

But it’s real. And it’s a good thing.

The Giants stumbled into an identity over the last month. Call it a happy accident. And if they don’t bottle its energy and drag it kicking and screaming into 2027, they’ll spend another October in Hawaii while paid mouthpieces try to explain away this organization’s failures.

The big, cosmic joke with the 2026 Giants is this: They have roughly a half-billion dollars tied up in veteran star power, yet they only started looking like a functional, entertaining baseball club once half the payroll landed on the 60-day injured list.

Since Willy Adames played his last game on Aug. 23, the Giants are — and I didn’t believe this until I checked three times — 12-11.

That’s not a juggernaut. That won’t get you a parade down Market Street.

But better-than-.500 baseball over a 23 game stretch is such an outlier for this team that it might just be a building block.

Because this little run of competence represents a team that isn’t rolling over and playing dead. They’re finally, mercifully playing an irritating brand of baseball (complimentary), which sure beats their prior brand: comatose.

Tony Vitello looked miserable for four months trying to navigate big-league egos and big-market expectation. You could see him walking on eggshells day-in, day-out.

But over the last few weeks, Vitello has found his backbone, and now surrounded by a young roster, the rookie skipper suddenly looks right at home.

Vitello is a teacher. Put him in a dugout full of anxious kids fighting for their baseball lives, and he actually knows which levers to pull.

And in that process, the Giants are finding some players that can help them for years to come.

Take Jonah Cox. When the Giants dragged Cox up to the majors, straight from Double-A, it looked like sheer desperation. And for a while, it was just another inexplicable Buster Posey move.

But since mid-August, when he’s actually been a lineup staple because of necessity, you can’t help but think that he’s a keeper.

Over his last 29 games as an everyday fixture, Cox is hitting .303 with 10 stolen bases and a sneaky amount of pop. His on-base percentage is .354 and he’s slugging .438.

Sure, his strikeout rate is hovering around 33 percent over that stretch and his batting average on balls in play is living in fantasy land. But this is the kind of guy who drops a bunt down against Mason Miller’s 101-mph heat and will steal third seemingly any chance he gets — he’s a tone-setter. The Giants need more of those, no?

Pair him with Bryce Eldridge and Rafael Devers at the top of the lineup next season, and you might just have a sneaky great 1-2-3 next season and beyond.

This Giants roster is already saddled with mega-contracts. Only one of those high-priced bets actually carried his weight this year. Devers hit 37 home runs, drove in 98 runs, posted an .865 OPS, and played through agony before shutting it down for abdominal surgery. And that was all after a brutally slow start.

The rest of the high-end payroll was either broken or ineffective. And yes, I include Logan Webb in that camp.

Those underperforming veterans set the tone for the Giants for the first, miserable four-and-a-half months of the campaign.

Now the cheap labor is creating a new tone.

That creates an awkward winter, beyond the obvious concerns for the sport itself amid an impending lockout. But when Matt Chapman and Adames return from the shelf next spring (or summer), do they, like Devers, adopt the kids’ relentless scrap, or does the club slide back into the veteran way?

I hope it’s the former.

And I hope that’s because it’s an organizational mandate.

The Giants’ front-office would be well-served to spend the off-season – whenever and whatever that might be — trying to find ways to augment the only thing that has seemed to work for the team this season: youthful zeal.

Call it ignorance if you must, but again, it’s preferable to the alternative.

The money is tied up, now it’s time to bootstrap this thing like one of the small-market teams that, coincidentally, are doing pretty well right now — the Brewers, the Rays, the Guardians. Looking at this farm system, they might just be able to do it, too.

Of course, none of this late-stage positivity guarantees a thing for 2027. Rebuilds — or whatever you want to call this — are messy, baseball is merciless, and hope from a nice September is, unquestionably, a cheap commodity.

But what else can the Giants call a foothold right now?

The C-suite doesn’t have to like this process, but it’s nevertheless a noble endeavor and a chance to build something truly worthwhile. There are no get-rich-quick schemes in baseball, even if Posey thought he could spin one upon taking the top baseball job before 2024.

Now, with that having failed, this organization is at a crossroads.

If they fight the reality staring them right in the face — embrace the kids and, in turn, Vitello — they’ll waste another year pretending to be something they’re not.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired of that charade.