The 2024 San Francisco Giants screwed up their plans for shortstop in the offseason.
This is not hindsight or revisionist history. At last season’s postmortem press conference, Farhan Zaidi was unambiguous about what the Giants were going to do at shortstop in 2024. “We view Marco (Luciano) as our shortstop next year.” There were no lines to read between. It was settled law. They were going to put up with rookie struggles and inconsistency, both at the plate and in the field, and start the Luciano era.
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Then, in the first week of spring training, they signed Nick Ahmed as insurance for Luciano. This was the roster equivalent of starting a book report the night before it was due. The book report got a D+ and snarky comments from the teacher. The early defensive returns from Ahmed were positive, but he finished his Giants career with negative WAR, which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. There was never any public explanation offered by the Giants as to why they pivoted away from Luciano.
There were public explanations offered by Luciano himself, though. Here he is explaining it in great detail:
The Giants had the highest ground-ball rate in baseball last year, and they added even more sinkerballers to the staff in the offseason. At the same time they were adding those pitchers, Luciano was having a rough time at shortstop for the Leones del Escogido in the Dominican Winter League, with four errors in 10 games.
While we don’t have access to the scouting reports from those games, it feels safe to assume that they weren’t great. The Giants didn’t sign Ahmed at the start of spring training because they were panicking; they signed him so that they didn’t have to panic at the end of spring training. It’s not great to start the book report the night before, but it beats starting it the next day between classes.
It’s now the middle of July, and it’s possible that the Giants have landed on the best possible outcome at the shortstop position. They’re going with Tyler Fitzgerald and Brett Wisely, and while the combination might not out-field Ahmed, they’ll come close enough, while also offering more speed and offense. They’ll give manager Bob Melvin more flexibility, too, as both of them can play a strong center field. It’s a better 26-man roster, both in the short- and long-term.
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The Giants will get to evaluate both players as potential full-time options going forward, and I’m not sure if they could have gotten here without screwing up in the first place. This isn’t to exonerate the front office. This isn’t to defend the process because the results happened to work out. It’s just a reminder that baseball never, ever cares about anyone’s plans and sometimes that can be a good thing.
With the benefit of hindsight, what was the offseason answer at shortstop? Isiah Kiner-Falefa is having the first good offensive season of his career, even if Statcast is skeptical. Kevin Newman is doing well for the Arizona Diamondbacks. Elvis Andrus is doing exactly what was expected of him for the Chicago White Sox, which is a compliment. There were definitely ways to make the position worse in free agency (Tim Anderson), but there were better options than Ahmed.
I’m not sure if any of those players, though, would have the Giants in a better position than they are now, with two young players who complement each other and offer more of a ceiling.
If you look at the shortstops who are thriving this year, you’ll note that none of them were available in a trade last offseason. Maybe Willy Adames if you made the Milwaukee Brewers an offer they couldn’t refuse, but that’s a stretch. And it would have cost a lot of prospects. I’m sure the Brewers would have been keen on Hayden Birdsong, but they would have wanted even more.
Could the Giants have skipped right to the conclusion, going with a Fitzgerald/Wisely arrangement on Opening Day? Oh, man, I wish that’s what happened, but only for the comedy. It’s hard to imagine just how angry this would have made fans. It also would have been unfair to both players, with both of them subject to more scrutiny than they deserved or needed. A slow start from Fitzgerald and Wisely would have made them the main characters of the roster, proof of front-office incompetence and a lack of urgency. There’s no guarantee that they would have performed as well in that setting. They would have been easy targets for a fan base that’s a little edgy these days, and they would have been playing in the shadow of whatever Luciano was doing in Triple-A Sacramento.
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Maybe the most practical answer was to move Luciano to a different position and keep him in the minors to work on it, while giving Casey Schmitt the job and leaving him alone. Schmitt had some rough at-bats in the majors this season, but he’s also holding his own in Sacramento (.288/.341/.511). He’s not exactly blocked by the Fitzgerald/Wisely tandem, either. The Giants’ current arrangement still has room for him.
The Giants fell up the stairs, in other words. They’re in a comfortable spot, with a better active roster than they had last week, and it’s hard to imagine another path that would have gotten them there.
If you’re looking for a historical analogy, here’s a dramatic one: On Oct. 3rd, 2010, the Giants needed to win their final game of the regular season to win the NL West. It was, by every definition, a must-win game. Their starting right fielder in this must-win game was José Guillen, who had started 15 out of the last 16 games. He was the Giants’ unquestioned starter. When both Guillen and Andrés Torres were healthy, Cody Ross was buried on the bench.
Then the F.B.I. got involved. Guillen was left off the postseason roster because of a PED-related investigation, and the Giants’ plans were blown all to heck. Thank goodness for that. Ross became the starting right fielder during the postseason because of the literal Federal Bureau of Investigations, and now he’s an October legend. The Giants fell up the stairs so hard, they crashed through the ceiling.
The progression from Ahmed to Wis-gerald isn’t nearly as jarring or unexpected as that, but it’s hard to imagine another way they could have arrived here. There were other shortstops they could have acquired, other things they could have tried, but on July 10, 2024, the Giants have settled on what was probably the best shortstop arrangement that was available to them all along.
The Giants worked hard on a new book report and stuffed it in the teacher’s pile when they weren’t looking. They got a solid B-minus after all that. Pretty sure there was no way to get a better grade in the first place.
(Photo of Wisely: Lachlan Cunningham / Getty Images)
