SAN FRANCISCO — What do you do after your baseball team loses 97 games and misses the playoffs for the ninth time in a decade?
You run it back, baby!
The three most important people on the baseball side of the Giants’ operation took to a dais at Oracle Park on Tuesday — the day baseball’s postseason began elsewhere — to speak about the recent past, the future, their belief in each other, their belief in the players (and groundskeepers) and their belief that next year will, somehow, be better.
Because president of baseball operations Buster Posey, general manager Zack Minasian and manager Tony Vitello believe in their collective process, even if they could not (or would not) articulate what it is, exactly.
They flooded the zone Tuesday in a way that their pitchers simply could not this past season.
They took free passes from the media with zeal in a way Giants batters refused to all campaign.
And their collective message can be boiled down quite simply:
Things need to change.
How will they change?
Standard operating procedure.
It’s all enough to make you wish for a long, long lockout.
Yes, there were plenty of words and very few answers Tuesday.
Coaching changes?
“I don’t think there will be a ton of changes,” Posey said.
Shifts of established players, like, for instance, Posey signee Willy Adames, baseball’s worst defensive shortstop this season?
“I see his future as a shortstop.”
As for bringing in better players for 2027 (whenever that begins) and beyond?
“We’ll look at free agents, who’s available. We’ll have trade discussions, and we’ll weigh internal options.”
Groundbreaking stuff, there.
What’s the colloquial definition of insanity, again?
Of course, no one expected Posey — who is guarded in casual conversation and Fort Knox with the media — to turn Tuesday’s media availability into an episode of “The Apprentice,” barking “You’re fired” to the man on either his right or his left.
After all, if he did, who would replace either one? There was not a long line of interested parties for the GM job when Posey took over the front office before the 2025 season, and I imagine that list is even shorter these days.
As for Vitello, it was always going to be a multiyear project for the trailblazing manager. As Vitello — to his credit — noted countless times Tuesday, he is still learning the difference between being a college coach handling a moderate-sized staff with a fixed roster and managing a big-league operation.
“I think the word ‘manager’ is a specific title and an appropriate one for a reason,” Vitello said. “It took me a while to just get to know everybody.”
Posey and kinda-sorta-company (Minasian answered one question) did want to talk about some of the positive momentum the team built at the end of the season — namely, that the kids they played down the stretch showed promise.
Indeed they did, but perhaps the combination of basement-level expectations and a beat-down desperation for anything positive created an environment where that promise was a bit overstated.
After all, the Giants went 8-16 in September, finished the season without a single winning month, and had only one 30-day stretch in which they played above .500 (June 23 to July 22).
I’ll say this, though: The men in charge of the 2026 Giants did not play victims of bad luck, weird bounces or injury witchcraft.
They admitted the Giants were a bad baseball team, even if they spent the next half-hour talking as if they were not; even if they wanted to discuss anything other than the final scores.
It all became so detached Tuesday that Posey, near the end of the news conference, seemed to dissociate, stepping out of the spin cycle for a moment and delivering a sobering truth:
“I was just sitting here thinking about it, and I guess this is more for our fans than anything else: As excited as we were about how well some of our young guys played … we don’t have blinders on that the wins and losses were still not there with that group.”
Then it was right back to the so-called positives and the sales pitch that next year will, somehow, be better.
It is funny to recall the context of how Posey found himself sitting at that table. The entire premise of firing former president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi was to bring in someone who “understood” the Giants organization and would stop treating 40-man roster spots like scratch-off tickets.
Instead of an exhaustive industry search for that leader — a tour across baseball to talk to the sharpest minds in the game — the Giants chose Posey. Why?
Because the franchise icon said he wanted the job, despite having zero front-office experience.
Well, he has some experience now.
And the Giants, through a brutal combination of flawed planning, wretched play and, yes, rotten luck, ran through 71 players this season — tied for the most in Major League Baseball history.
The lineup could not score without an engraved invitation from opposing pitchers. The bullpen was an arsonists’ convention. Starters’ elbows puffed up while their ERAs ballooned.
Posey inherited a mess at both the major-league and minor-league levels. While his regime has fortified the farm system, the product on the field in San Francisco is worse now than it was at any point under Zaidi.
The most sensible approach for 2027 would be to treat it as a gap year — another 162-game slog — with the hope that it pays off in 2028, when a wave of elite prospects might finally graduate to the majors.
It is a tough pill to sell, but then again, the Giants managed to sell the 2026 campaign.
Posey and Vitello, however, would not hear of it:
“If you’re asking, ‘Do you think that we can contend next year?’: I do. I do believe we can contend,” Posey said.
“Do we have enough in that locker room to win (any given) game? The answer is yes, if we play good baseball,” Vitello said. “So then you do it again the next day, and if you do that successfully enough, then you find yourself in a position where we’re talking about (contending) at the end of the year.”
Ah yes, the colloquial definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result
There will always be fans willing to lap up anything wrapped in orange and black, but on the whole, Giants fans are not stupid. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
They have certainly been loyal over the past decade — I’d argue to a fault.
They keep coming to the ballpark. They keep buying the expensive beer. They look for reasons to cheer instead of boo, and they find ways to remember the prestige that interlocking SF once carried.
They also know bad baseball when they smell it, and the stench drifting out of Third and King this summer was such that you could feel it in your eyes.
On Tuesday, you could hear it.
Posey was supposed to be the savior who restored accountability and winning baseball. Perhaps accountability has arrived — that is up for debate — but winning certainly has not.
He’s not asking for forgiveness, but he is asking for more time. And because he’s Buster Posey — living Giants royalty — he will get it from the people who decided it was a good idea to hire him in the first place.
We are now two years into this strange, supposedly three-year experiment.
This roster is entirely Posey’s handiwork.
And since he can’t verbalize his big-picture concepts, we have to take the Giants’ product at face value.
But if this is what his vision looks like, there will not be another reservoir of patience waiting after 2027. By that point, the Giants will not need more time. They’ll need an intervention.