There's a future out there that goes past mere metrics, and the Giants need to find it

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If the San Francisco Giants had it all to do again, they might have chosen to fire general manager Bobby Evans on Sunday rather than Monday. Not because a day would have made a difference in the team's future, but because the optics of camouflage are greatly underrated.
 
On Sunday, Tiger Woods rose back into heaven. Jimmy Garoppolo crumpled into 2019. The Raiders took the pipe again, the NFL had a full schedule of fevered narratives as it does every Sunday, Stanford was still reveling in its bizarre win over Oregon, and the NBA was pushing its way back onto center stage. It was a very crowded day for the average attention span, is what we’re saying, and the Giants, who have slid under the radar so convincingly with their play all year, could have used the cover one more time.
 
Optics matter, you see, especially for a team like the Giants, who have been so strategically devoted to them. People filling all the seats, costume hats, cartoon reactions in moments of triumph and stress -- it's all been part of the package at Third and King for nearly a decade now.
 
But now the optics kind of, well, stink. Monday's attendance figure of 35,428 (which we accept has some fudge to it because all attendance figures do) was one of the lowest in this decade, and quite reminiscent of the worst old days of the late 'Oughts. The sheets and screens of metrics that total and measure all baseball's daily inventory show the Giants routinely in the bottom third or worse.
 
They are, simply put, out of fashion in a radically changing sport, and firing Evans doesn’t alter that in any appreciable way. Neither does trying to catch up with today’s trends, and neither does blowing up the right field wall to make the park more bandboxy. The Giants are where the game has been and everyone knows where it is now, but the culture inside and outside the game demands to know where the game is going.
 
It’s why ultimately Brian Sabean’s hire here is the most important since manager Bruce Bochy ten years ago. The next general manager needs to be part scout and part seer, part pragmatist but mostly idealist. There’s a future out there that goes past mere metrics, and the Giants need to find it.
 
That is ultimately why the Giants are in the situation they're in today. They are not metrics-backward so much as they are vision-static. They promoted Evans to fix a perceived shortfall in metrics-based judgments and that was repaired, but the optics of the World Series parades led to the optics of rewarding those who got them there on the back end of their careers. It was a grand strategy that worked only as long as the Giants were winning three out of every five games, but those days are done, the essence of the game has moved faster than the strategy, and it is still moving now.
 
Therein lies the final and most enduring fact – the Giants have fallen victim to the optic of being caught behind as baseball lurches into entirely new modes of playing rendered the Giants the worst kind of losing team -- the one with money but not the flexibility to change in volatile times.
 
The game is currently the Three True Outcomes – walks, strikeouts and homers, and the Giants rank 25th in walks, 5th in strikeouts and 29th in homers. The game is all-day bullpens, and the Giants seriously lack that. The game is certainly top-down management, all the way down to the front office dictating lineups, bullpen usage daily tactics, and that has never been the Giants under Sabean. And more than ever, it is cheap, controllable players while the Giants’ main organizational goal was to stay under the tax line because it was so committed to so many players on the back ends of their careers.
 
By comparison, the A’s will be the first team in 30 years to make the playoffs with the lowest Opening Day payroll, and have dynamic young players coming out the earholes in their batting helmets; their problem is having the will to keep them awhile.
 
The Giants also lack young, vibrant players upon which to bestow the keys to the kingdom going into the Roaring Twenties. In 2010, there were plenty such players – Buster Posey and Tim Lincecum and Matt Cain and Pablo Sandoval and Madison Bumgarner and Brian Wilson. There are none of those now, unless you want to ride the benefit of the doubt with Dereck Rodriguez. There may be a roster core just about to accrete into a new era of glory, but nobody has been able to spot it yet, and this is a here-and-now business. The Giants’ here-and-now, by comparison, has been spent too much on extending the shelf lives of their back-in-the-days.
 
And this isn’t about just the attendance, which is down about 3,000 from the euphoria-soaked days of 2015. The Giants have much worse gate years than this one; in 2008, they drew more than 40,000 only 13 times all season. Plus, the optic of empty seats can be found a lot of places in baseball; baseball as a whole is on a three-year attendance decline, and this year’s is over 1,200 per game.
 
No, this is the Giants no longer being a compelling tale at a time when the A’s are in the ascendant, the Warriors straddle the globe imperiously, the Raiders are growing weirder, the 49ers are again intriguing . . . well, they were until Jimmy Garoppolo’s knee turned into corn chips, and even the Sharks have legitimate Stanley Cup aspirations.

Being inert in this atmosphere is a terrible local optic for a once-proud national brand, and that, more than not devoting enough organization time to the benefits of FRAA or wRC+ or WPA, is why the Giants fired Bobby Evans. The Giants need to be something other than what they are, and the time for that change is actually two years past due.

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