SAN FRANCISCO — The San Francisco Giants took the field for their season finale on Sunday with the possibility of joining an exclusive if not enviable baseball cohort.
Their record stood at one game under .500. Their run differential for the season was minus-1. If they achieved a one-run victory over the St. Louis Cardinals, they would’ve become just the third team in major league history — joining the 1983 San Diego Padres and 1922 Chicago White Sox — to finish with a .500 record and a flat-footed run differential of zero.
It didn’t happen.
In front of a sunshine-splashed home crowd that soaked up its last glimpse of baseball at 24 Willie Mays Plaza this year, the Giants lost 6-1.
They’ll have to accept a season of somewhat breaking even.
That turn of phrase, if it didn’t immediately register, was uttered by Giants chairman and control person Greg Johnson last October at the press conference to introduce Bob Melvin as the club’s new manager. Johnson was attempting to describe the ownership group’s annual financial goals. Those break-even targets, of course, were tangential to their goals between the foul lines: to field a consistent and sustainable contender that can reach the postseason every year.
Grateful to each and every one of you for your unwavering passion and support#SFGiants fans are truly the best in baseball 🧡 pic.twitter.com/6UCPuzKmMg
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) September 29, 2024
But the nuance mattered little to those who seized upon Johnson’s comments as evidence that the Giants were not committed to making the high-profile investments that could return the team to the upper echelon of the National League. Maybe it also failed to register to those detractors when the Giants guaranteed more than $400 million in new money, spending more this past offseason than any team except the Los Angeles Dodgers, while crossing the luxury tax threshold ($237) million for the first time since 2017.
The Giants used free agency as an expensive poultice for every wounded area of their roster. Some of the compounds didn’t hold so well. Other wounds opened up as the season went along. The result was mediocrity at an immodest cost. The Giants didn’t score enough or pitch well enough to break from the pack in the National League. Their team was functional in all areas but buoyant in none. They never won more than five consecutive games, and that came when they’d already been eliminated with nearly two weeks left on the schedule.
Breaking even on the field? That was never an acceptable end point. The Giants finished with an 80-82 record on Sunday. Farhan Zaidi has presided over one winning season out of six. We’ll find out soon whether there will be a reckoning in baseball operations as a result.
As much as the Giants appeared to tread water from one month to the next, their season went in a distinct direction that wasn’t reflected in the standings. They got younger along the way.
They turned to Heliot Ramos, who had been among the first wave of cuts in the spring, when $113 million center fielder Jung Hoo Lee dislocated his shoulder in early May. That window of opportunity resulted in a breakout season for Ramos and the franchise’s first All-Star appearance by a homegrown outfielder since Chili Davis in 1986.
When Nick Ahmed’s release opened a chance for Tyler Fitzgerald as the everyday shortstop, the 24-year-old rookie became the first Giant since Barry Bonds to hit eight home runs over a seven-game span and finished with an .831 OPS. That pivot to youth was never more apparent than on July 30 when Zaidi jumped at the chance to escape the three-year, $42 million contract that Jorge Soler had signed just months earlier. Trading Soler to the Atlanta Braves was supposed to free up the designated hitter role for Marco Luciano. While that specific pledge lasted just a handful of games, it became clear from that point that the Giants were done with Band-Aids and poultices. They were going to let the roster breathe and rely on their own youth to heal what ailed them.
The Giants became even more reliant on young pitchers. They hadn’t planned to lead the National League in innings thrown by rookies, but that’s just how it played out for better or worse. They received a final flash on Sunday from 22-year-old right-hander Hayden Birdsong, who pumped 98 mph fastballs against a biting slider while striking out 11 in 4 1/3 innings. Right-hander Trevor McDonald made his major league debut with three shutout innings to finish the game. The Giants’ 536 1/3 innings from rookie pitchers was their most since 1975. Rookies threw 37 percent of the team’s innings this season.
But part of the bargain of developing young players in the major leagues, especially with today’s accelerated timelines, is that you’ll have to tolerate inconsistency, and yes, occasional ineptitude. The Giants received the full experience this season: some of their young players exceeded expectations, some of them enjoyed fleeting success, some were clearly overwhelmed. And most of them got better along the way.
Making incremental progress is how a team will seek to cast a transitional season as a success story. The issue with that: this was not a transitional season. The Giants spent with little restraint even after missing out on Shohei Ohtani. They sacrificed their second- and third-round draft picks to sign qualified free agents Matt Chapman and Blake Snell. Those are not the kinds of moves that teams make in anticipation of a season in transition. The expectation was that Sunday’s game wouldn’t be the final time to gather at Third and King this year.
But the Giants’ ticket sales and marketing departments might have outperformed the players. The Giants drew 103,777 fans over their final three-game home series to watch an eliminated team. They averaged 1,916 more fans per game this season, the seventh best year-over-year gain among major league teams. Even with an eroding season-ticket base of roughly 16,000 that no longer enjoys a new ballpark or World Series afterglow, their total attendance of 2,647,736 this season was their largest since the pre-pandemic 2019 season.
Thank you to the best fans in baseball for an incredible 2024 season 🧡🖤 pic.twitter.com/Vyc16fELuf
— Oracle Park (@OracleParkSF) September 29, 2024
The announced crowd of 32,348 appeared to be well represented despite the conflict of a 49ers home game. And even when the Giants trailed 6-0 in the seventh inning, they remained as engaged as ever. The ballpark thundered with applause when Brett Wisely singled home the only run the Giants would score.
For Melvin, a Bay Area native who was a Giants fan before he became one of their players, it was an inspiring moment at the end of a disappointing season.
“They stayed till the end,” Melvin said. “What did we have, 11 walkoff (victories)? They’ve been a huge part of that. So we felt it. They were just waiting for something to cheer for, you know?”
There were a few moments to cheer this season. In addition to those major league-leading 11 home victories in their last at-bat, Patrick Bailey hit the first home run into McCovey Cove that didn’t make a splash — because it landed in the lap of a kayaker. Ramos became the first right-handed hitter in the ballpark’s 25-year history to reach the water on the fly.
Elsewhere, Blake Snell’s tenure as a Giant was checkered but it included a 14-start run that exceeded even the height of Tim Lincecum’s Cy Young dominance — and included the 18th no-hitter in franchise history on Aug. 2 when he dominated the Reds in Cincinnati. Chapman became such a paragon of professionalism and two-way impact that ownership fell over itself while locking him into a six-year, $151 million extension. Melvin ensured Chapman and Mike Yastrzemski would get early exits on Sunday so that the crowd could give them an appreciative sendoff.
End of season remarks, courtesy of @LoganWebb1053 and Matt Chapman 🔊 pic.twitter.com/wTiPlf3gno
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) September 29, 2024
There were moments to mourn as well, of course. The defining moment of 2024 for the franchise came on June 18 when the video board at Wrigley Field displayed news of the death of Willie Mays. Giants ace Logan Webb asked for timeout as he gathered himself at the back of the mound. The Giants lost their franchise icon and a piece of their soul just two days before they were set to honor Mays at Rickwood Field, where he played as a teenager for the Birmingham Black Barons. Three weeks later, the Giants also mourned the passing of Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda.
The Giants’ season combined breaking even with heartbreak.
But if the Giants’ ultimate goal remains to restore the franchise to glory, then Webb’s description of his thoughts upon learning of Mays’ passing should be required reading for anyone who walks through those clubhouse doors in future seasons.
“I needed to take a moment to think about it,” said Webb, “and be prideful for the jersey I was wearing, the hat I was wearing, knowing Willie did the same.”
(Top photo of Tyler Fitzgerald and Brett Wisely engaging with fans: Eakin Howard / Getty Images)
