A straightforward and fulfilling series of blog posts might involve looking at the top 5 moments from a given season, but this is McCovey Chronicles and I’m me, so, let’s look at the top 5 stories from this dreadful series. Whereas a moment encapsulates a series of events — or a single event! — and its commensurate emotion(s), a story is a range of events and a host of emotions that creates a narrative. The San Francisco Giants wanted to tell a certain story in 2026 but instead let’s look at the one they actually told.

We’ll start with the aspect of the roster that heralded the 2026 team’s downfall. That area of the roster that was the “key offseason target” last year netted a group that included Tyler Mahler and Adrian Houser for the rotation and, um, some guys for the bullpen: Sam Hentges, Jason Foley, Reiver Sanmartin, Caleb Kilian, Rowan Wick, and Ryan Borucki. For some, this list might be uninspiring. For the Giants, it was basically a perfectly executed plan:

“We’re most definitely open to trying to add some arms that we think are going to help us on the starting side and the bullpen side.”

Now, why did the Giants think that this group would help? Well, add it all up, and Mahler and Houser were basically worth 4 WAR combined. Hentges and Foley were both ~1.5-WAR relievers at their peaks (2023) — adding those into the mix basically put a possible floor at where the pitching staff ended 2025 (+15.8 fWAR), and then it would be a matter of younger players taking a step forward.

That this group wound up amounted to just about 2 WAR total (3.5-WAR gap) is a good reason why the staff finished at just 9.8 fWAR in value after the season. The other, of course, is that a lot of players failed to develop or simply slid into disaster territory (Ryan Walker). Logan Webb missing time with injury and missing his projected WAR by maybe 1.5 is another factor, along with all those other injuries, but the point is: the Giants thought they had a good plan that just didn’t work out.

It’s not exactly arrogance, but it does smack of something personality-driven. It was pretty clear from the outside looking in that their offseason decisions signaled some sort of shrug or fingers crossed theme or simply being comfortable with the results of a Lotto scratcher, but it does seem like the Giants — led by Buster Posey, of course — seems to be constructing a front office pitching philosophy from first principles. Maybe it’s the hubris of thinking that all the collective knowledge from the Moneyball era is bunk or maybe it’s the result of really coming to underst and that “baseball is hard,” but if a dumb, worthless pile of loser blogger nonsense like me could see that Tyler Mahle, Adrian Houser, and some TJ recovery guys weren’t going to bolster a pitching staff and that relying on development success was a risky proposition in the face of a decade of relative non-success and that expecting things to improve significantly under the direction of a neophyte major league coaching staff was a bad idea, then I can only draw the conclusion that they didn’t see something I didn’t, they thought something different about their own decision-making.

Could I have been wrong, too? Well, sure, I often am; but, all I was doing was looking at numbers and some basic context and not imagining that the floor was something different from what was plainly obvious. And, I think Buster Posey’s comments about this offseason suggest that I am more right for viewing the situation this way all along than I was wrong. Andrew Baggarly wrote up the team’s approach to the offseason from the pitching-side of the equation (a serendipitous discovery this morning as I was working on this piece) and put this quote from Posey in his article for The Athletic:

“So with the way the game’s changed, to me, we have to make an effort to increase stuff in our system and get it to the big-league level.

Again, this feels like constructing a pitching staff from first principles.

Perhaps this is just a necessary evil or built-in aspect of a first-time org leader, but, yeah. Pitchers have been throwing harder for a while now. Logan Webb has stood out as an exception to that, which is why he’s always been remarkable. But, yeah, Carlos Rodon, Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto — why else would the Giants be extremely interested in them? Hard-throwing strikeout guys.

Baggarly’s piece does verify something that was easy to suspect while watching the team pitch this season: confusion and discoordination when it came to messaging and emphasis.

It took weeks of discussions in October to identify deeper issues that included a muddled hierarchy among the pitching coaches under a manager, Vitello, who was navigating a 162-game season for the first time.

“When we sat back and analyzed the way the group operated this year, we all felt there needed to be a clearer chain of command,” Posey said. “That’s where we’re going to start: It’s going to flow through Meccage and we need these guys to work as a team. […] if we have to sit and meet as a group for 15 or 20 minutes each day to get everybody on the same page, and they can argue through everything there is to argue, that’s what we’re gonna do. That was not done daily last year.

So, the Giants had part of a plan. It’s hard not to imagine that this disorganization and limited imagination on the pitching side stayed in that group, and that’s why this was one of the key storylines of the season. Of course, the biggest incident of the season involved the pitching staff, too, so, between that and Posey’s comments in The Athletic piece and the simple matter of their dreadful on-field performance (eighth-worst team ERA and sixth-worst WAR total of the Oracle Park era).

The thing about “stuff” is that it’s expensive if you don’t develop it internally. The Giants’ 7.58 K/9 (the easiest marker of stuff) ranks 17th out of 27 seasons at Oracle Park, right between 2017 (7.65) and 2014 (7.52), right between the eras where you couldn’t have a bunch of groundballers (2017) and you could (2014). The 3.75 BB/9 is the third-worst of the Oracle Park era, after only 2008 (4.07) and 2000 (3.88). And their player development seemed to be focused on producing more Logan Webbs than strikeout guys, and so course-correcting seems like a really tall task, especially in a single offseason.