SAN FRANCISCO — Sometime around the seventh inning stretch at the San Francisco Giants’ waterfront ballpark, PR official Maverick Pallack will lean into a microphone in the press box and announce the paid attendance.
He does so with a particular affectation. He reads the total. He reads it again. Then he repeats it digit by digit. And he repeats that part again, too.
Because press box announcements are piped into the broadcast booths, you’ve probably heard Pallack’s protracted digital declaration alongside the dulcet tones of Jon Miller and Dave Flemming on KNBR. Or filling (interrupting?) a conversation break between Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow on NBC Sports Bay Area. When the New York Mets visited San Francisco in late April, their broadcasters were sufficiently distracted by Pallack’s auditory abacus that they pleaded with the Giants to announce the attendance in between innings. Ever since then, that’s what Pallack does.
But it’s a number that bears repeating. More than once. It might be the most important and revealing data point in an otherwise maddening season that has extinguished all but the slightest of postseason hopes with four weeks still to play.
Because people are showing up. People continue to watch Giants baseball. Paying customers have remained engaged with a team that otherwise, given the more than $400 million in offseason investments in this roster, represents a colossal underachievement. When you strip away the standings, which show the Giants at 68-70 and in fourth place in the National League West, when you turn off the grousing on social media and in the comments section, and when you reduce the vital signs to crowd size and fan engagement, then you wouldn’t assume that the Giants are a wayward organization or that their current leadership is untenable or that they are on the brink of a regime change.
Mike Yastrzemski rounds the bases after hitting a first-inning home run. (Darren Yamashita / USA Today)
On a holiday weekend when many people are traveling, on a resplendent afternoon in the Bay Area that offered a host of recreational possibilities, with the home team on the furthest outskirts of postseason relevance, and facing the Miami Marlins, who are one of the league’s least compelling opponents, the Giants drew a sellout crowd of 41,187. The Buster Hugs Funko Pop! figurine giveaway only had so much to do with it. (If you weren’t one of the first 15,000 fans, you were out of luck.)
This wasn’t a one-day phenomenon. Attendance is up. The Giants are averaging 33,279 fans this season. That’s an average gain of 2,406 over last season. It’s the seventh largest year-over-year increase among major-league teams. The Giants need to average just 17,000 paying customers over their last 12 home dates to draw their largest annual attendance since the pre-pandemic 2019 season. And that was back when the franchise enjoyed a much more robust season-ticket base. Filling the stands is a more complicated task these days.
Clearly, a lot of people in the ticket sales and marketing departments have performed well this season.
Probably better than the players have.
The Giants are fading fast. They dropped two of three to the Marlins after losing 7-5 on Sunday. Mike Yastrzemski led off the bottom of the first inning with his 100th career home run and Logan Webb was cruising with some of his best stuff all season before everything fell apart in the fifth inning. Webb fielded a comebacker, yanked a throw to second base and minimized what should have been an inning-ending double play. The bad throw became a four-run mistake after No.9 batter Nick Fortes threaded a single and Kyle Stowers smacked a three-run home run.
“I mean, I lost that game today,” Webb said. “That was on me today. It just sucks. We score five runs, we score early, I had good stuff and all of a sudden I had one ground ball and … I haven’t watched it. I don’t want to watch it.”
A significant swath of Giants fans would prefer to be watching a slightly different team. But Marco Luciano wasn’t among the players (Tristan Beck and Blake Sabol) who were added to the expanded, 28-player roster on Sunday. There’s no telling when Luciano or outfielder Luis Matos — or even outfielder Wade Meckler — will be promoted for the stretch drive. For now, the Giants are existing in that weird, liminal space between mathematical life and looking fully toward the future.
On one hand, the Giants have begun the process of moving on from players who are no longer considered part of their future. Second baseman Thairo Estrada was unceremoniously outrighted to Triple-A Sacramento when he went unclaimed on waivers. On the other hand, the Giants haven’t moved on completely. Outfielder Michael Conforto, an impending free agent, is still getting everyday at-bats in the heart of the order.
If you can’t make sense of the mixed messaging there, then you aren’t alone. If you can’t understand why the Giants would continue holding onto Estrada, last year’s Willie Mac Award winner, rather than grant him his release, then you’re definitely not alone. If you’re looking for threads to pull on a season that is unraveling by the day, then there are any number of free-agent missteps and roster miscalculations from which to choose.
But it isn’t all dysfunction and disarray.
For a reminder of what that looked like, all you have to do is go back and read what Webb and Yastrzemski were saying last season in the weeks that led up to the firing of manager Gabe Kapler. Yastrzemski lamented that “a kind of ‘fend for yourself’ atmosphere somehow fell into place” and that there was no sense of team unity. Webb called for “big changes in here to create (a) winning culture.”
Even amid one of his most frustrating outcomes of the season on Sunday, a loss that Manager Bob Melvin ranked as one of the most disappointing this season, Webb did not have anything critical to say about the direction of the organization.
“It had all the making of a good game for us.”
BoMel details where things went wrong in today’s loss pic.twitter.com/E9VzpETHpq
— SF Giants on NBCS (@NBCSGiants) September 1, 2024
“I honestly think we played a great game today, and I messed that up,” Webb said. “If you have a goal of coming in and trying to be the best version of yourself and try to win every day, I think good things happen. We had that same mindset today. I felt really good about today up until that fifth inning and then I let the team down.”
Yastrzemski expressed dissatisfaction with the results but not with the team’s attitude or approach.
“I feel like we’re still working the right way,” Yastrzemski said. “We’re playing hard. Camaraderie is good. There’s not much more you can ask for, other than winning. We’ve got a great group of guys and we’re pulling for each other but it’s just not falling our way. It’s disappointing.
“It’s hard to grasp what we can do in terms of where to go from here, what to do, what to change. How do we maybe flip the switch mentally on the offensive side to keep going when we have a lead? We’ve just got to keep fighting. It’s a steep hill to climb, but I don’t think there’s any quit in this group. So we’re just going to keep playing our hardest every day.”
Last October, Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi spoke about the process that led to Kapler’s dismissal and he pledged to make changes. He would seek more lineup and roster continuity. He would be open to hiring a manager who might be a more moderating influence on the front office’s analytical approach. No chief baseball executive and field manager will agree on every roster decision, and not all of those changes designed to create continuity have worked out splendidly.
In terms of bottom-line results, there’s no way to sugarcoat one playoff appearance — even if that lone appearance followed a franchise-record 107 wins in 2021 — in five full seasons plus the pandemic-shortened 2020 season.
But Yastrzemski sees healthy signs every time he turns to toss a ball into the center-field bleachers.
“Our fan support has been amazing,” Yastrzemski said. “The only other time that I felt it might have been better was in ’21 but that’s for obvious reasons. That was a historic year.
“I think it attests to why we play so much better at home. We feel the support here and it means a lot to us that this city is coming out and really pulling for us. And you know, we do tend to play exciting games here regardless of how they end up. We’ve got a lot of comeback wins here. We’ve got a lot of late-inning heroics here. And I think guys really notice when people show up.”
It isn’t Yastrzemski’s job to sell tickets. But he agreed with the suggestion that attendance can be one barometer of a healthy organization.
“I think it gives us a lot of opportunities,” Yastrzemski said. “If we’re filling up the stands, then we’re doing something positive. Not to get too ahead of ourselves, but when we start talking about building for next year, hopefully it gives ownership and front office a lot of confidence that we can continue to keep pulling fans and keep bringing in money and being able to use that wisely and create a lot more wins.”
Yastrzemski lauded the way the Giants treat their players, and sure, that might seem incongruous with some of the cold-blooded decisions that the front office has made, whether it’s needlessly outrighting Estrada or cutting J.D. Davis in spring training and paying him a fraction of the $6.9 million salary he earned in arbitration. (Maybe club executives can justify those decisions because the entire industry is seemingly more cutthroat than ever. It doesn’t get any harsher than the Chicago Cubs’ decision to dump former manager and franchise hero David Ross and replace him with Craig Counsell.)
Yastrzemski could find himself on the receiving end of one of those cold-blooded decisions if the Giants decline to offer him a contract as a third-year arbitration-eligible player this winter. He’s due to receive a raise from the $7.9 million he’s earning this season. He also might be worth $9-10 million as a player with a 109 OPS+ whose solid outfield defense will make him worth roughly 2.5 WAR.
He hit his 100th home run in his 671st major league game, making him the 12th fastest player in the San Francisco era to reach the milestone. He also joined with Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski in becoming one of just four sets of grandfathers/grandsons to hit 100 home runs in the big leagues.
Carl Yastrzemski holds the Major League record for the most career games while playing for just one franchise. His grandson cannot aspire to play in 3,308 games as a Giant. But he’d love to be a part of another season here.
He likes the direction that the Giants are going in.
“I do,” Mike Yastrzemski said. “I think we’ve got a great staff, a great group of people. This organization does more for its players than any I’ve ever seen or heard of. That’s the No. 1 selling point: You will never be treated better than you are here. When the foundation of an organization is that strong, then you can really start to build something special, because people here do things the right way. They care. They want this organization to be better than when they got here.
“I think the foundation is here. We’ve got a good group and a really good group of players here that are talented and have the ability to win a lot of games. So once we can build on that, and build that confidence, then the sky’s the limit.”
(Top photo: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)
