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\u2019m me, so, let\u2019s look at the top 5 stories from this dreadful series. Whereas a moment encapsulates a series of events \u2014 or a single event! \u2014 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\u2019s look at the one they actually told.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll start with the aspect of the roster that heralded the 2026 team\u2019s downfall. That area of the roster that was the \u201ckey offseason target<\/a>\u201d 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:<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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) \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, but the point is: the Giants thought they had a good plan that just didn\u2019t work out.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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 \u2014 led by Buster Posey, of course \u2014 seems to be constructing a front office pitching philosophy from first principles. Maybe it\u2019s the hubris of thinking that all the collective knowledge from the Moneyball era is bunk or maybe it\u2019s the result of really coming to underst and that \u201cbaseball is hard,\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019t see something I didn\u2019t, they thought something different about their own decision-making.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cSo with the way the game\u2019s changed, to me, we have to make an effort to increase stuff in our system and get it to the big-league level.<\/p>\n Again, this feels like constructing a pitching staff from first principles.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s always been remarkable. But, yeah, Carlos Rodon, Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto \u2014 why else would the Giants be extremely interested in them? Hard-throwing strikeout guys.<\/p>\n Baggarly\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we sat back and analyzed the way the group operated this year, we all felt there needed to be a clearer chain of command,\u201d Posey said. \u201cThat\u2019s where we\u2019re going to start: It\u2019s going to flow through Meccage and we need these guys to work as a team. [\u2026] 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\u2019s what we\u2019re gonna do. That was not done daily last year.<\/p>\n