Psst. Come here. I want to make you mad about the Giants’ offseason. It pays the bills.
Earlier in the offseason, before the Giants had signed anyone, the good folks at FanGraphs released ZiPS projections for them. They were surprisingly optimistic, considering the work that still needed to be done. They even used the words “if ZiPS is correct, the Giants don’t need to put in a ton of work here” when referring to the lineup, which was a remarkable sequence of words at the time.
Then the Giants signed two everyday players and two starting pitchers for a combined $64.5 million. There are questions about all of them, but they should still combine to help the roster blow those earlier projections out of the water, right?
Not quite. Here’s a table that compares the projected WAR of the placeholders used by FanGraphs to the projected WAR of the players they actually signed.
In-house
WAR
Actual
WAR
2B
2.5
Luis Arraez
1.6
OF
1.3
Harrison Bader
1.4
No. 4 Starter
0.7
Adrian Houser
1.2
No. 5 Starter
0.7
Tyler Mahle
0.9
Total
5.2
Total
5.1
You’d better believe there’s necessary context that’s missing from that table, but we’ll stay on the surface for now. Because on the surface, it looks like the Giants committed $64.5 million to four players who don’t really “move the needle,” as they say. They’re gonna do what the other guys were gonna do, give or take, if you believe the projections. And that gets you mad, which pays my bills.
That’s only fun for a while, though, so here comes the context. The Giants aren’t replacing the number in the left column with the one in the right column. They’re snipping a little bit off the numbers in the left column and adding them to the right column. They’re still going to get the best parts of “Schmossgald,” as FanGraphs described the three-headed monster of Casey Schmitt, Christian Koss and Tyler Fitzgerald. They’re just going to get less of the worst parts, ostensibly, because they’re giving fewer plate appearances to whomever of the three is producing the least.
This is a wordier way of explaining the obvious downstream effects of paying for better players. The Giants didn’t just make the production better at second base; they improved the last player on the bench, too. They improved the first, second and third options in Sacramento. The surprisingly optimistic ZiPS projections didn’t go away. They just trickled down.
Making you feel better about the offseason also pays the bills, so while it’s hard to pretend this was the most dynamic or thrilling offseason available to the Giants, it’s even harder to ignore its effectiveness. The Giants needed two starters, some backup catching options, at least one outfielder and maybe a second baseman. They checked the list off, one by one, even if it took a while to finish. In doing so, they’re giving themselves a chance: FanGraphs’ most recent attempt to project the 2026 season has the Giants as the final wild card.
After several offseasons of high-risk, high-reward signings and (ultimately) successful swings at expensive franchise players, the Giants finally got to have something of a maintenance offseason, where they didn’t have to reinvent themselves. They invested in raising the floor more than the ceiling, and that’s less underwhelming than you might think. It’s perfectly whelming. The best teams avoid giving too many at-bats or innings to the worst players.
There have been plenty of zero-WAR players (or worse) to appear for the Giants over the years. None of the most plentiful seasons will surprise you:
PA and IP from players ≤ 0 WAR
Season
No. of hitters
Total PA
No. of pitchers
Total IP
2025
10
677
11
266
2024
16
1528
13
327
2023
20
1787
3
79.2
2022
18
884
9
149
2021
6
428
11
136.2
The columns are almost in conversation with each other. Here’s the year where the hitting stunk, but the pitching came through. Here’s the year where almost everything went right. Here’s the reason why a lot of folks think that pitching should have been the Giants’ biggest priority this offseason.
This is a quick-and-dirty look that has its limits, and there’s no reason rosters should get credit for the contributions of a 0.1-WAR player who gets plenty of at-bats, but it still explains plenty. When the Giants have to think change, they need to think a) Speedee Oil Change and b) “Oh, we’ll be fine.” The best Giants teams have always had contingency plans, and they weren’t counting on improbable contributions from unknown quantities. When they’ve gone into the season with players who are big ol’ question marks – such as Fitzgerald at second base last season, or Joey Bart and Blake Sabol behind the plate in 2023 – they’ve ended up finding out a lot more about their options behind those players.
Some additional context for the first table is that ZiPS traditionally has a lot more patience with younger players than I do. It’s a model that consumes historical numbers and spits out a projection. It hasn’t watched decades of young players and been driven mad in the process. Young players are like the love interests on “Seinfeld”, popping in with a cameo, creating some problems, making you laugh inappropriately, then disappearing forever. You want as few of them as possible.
This isn’t to disparage the future potential of any single individual young player. Any one of them could start a Hall of Fame career in 2026. In fact, I encourage them to. But this is the idea of young players as a general concept. The only ones you want around are the ones you know should be there.
The best example of both sides of this coin is Hayden Birdsong, who just a few months ago was one of the best reasons to be optimistic about the future of Giants pitching. When he made the Opening Day roster, it was because of his raw stuff and how major-league hitters looked against it. And if you’re seeing him for any other reason in 2026, something has gone terribly wrong. The entire offseason has been about avoiding that sort of situation. Not just with Birdsong or other young pitchers, but the entire roster.
The real point of the offseason can be explained in a couple of conjunctions. The Giants signed these players to get rid of the “ands” and replace them with “ors.” As in, the Giants want to feel comfortable relying on Schmitt, Koss or Fitzgerald. They want to see Birdsong, Carson Whisenhunt or Trevor McDonald make the most of an unexpected opportunity. Those are reasonable expectations. If you use “and” in those sentences, though, you start to become quite unreasonable, quite fast. The odds against all of them start stacking up exponentially.
The Giants didn’t exactly spend their offseason money on cost certainty – Bader and Mahle have been on the IL too much for that – but they spent it on raising the floor of the entire roster. They spent it on a better chance at the optimistic projections from FanGraphs, which were illustrated with a delightful graphic suggesting they could get contributions from all over the diamond.
It’ll still take only a couple of disappointments and miscalculations to screw it all up, but it’s hard to deny the practicality of the offseason. The Giants shouldn’t fall through the floor. It’s the ceiling they have to worry about now.