Giants legend and fan favorite Buster Posey is now running the team's baseball operations, but as the new season starts Thursday, he faces a challenging landscape where the defending World Champion bum Dodgers keep getting richer with superstar talent.
It’s crack-of-the-bat, smell-of-the-grass time of year again, as your San Francisco Giants open their 2025 season Thursday afternoon against the Cincinnati Reds at 1:10 pm. (Their home opener is not until Friday, April 4 against the Seattle Mariners.) And there’s plenty of reasons to believe they’ll be better than they were in the 2024 campaign, when they finished with a below-.500 record of 80-82, for last place in the NL West.
A big reason for optimism is new president of baseball operations Buster Posey, who’s replaced the now-fired analytics-minded Farhan Zaidi. Posey was a core member of the three Giants championships of the 2010s, and a Hall of Fame-bound leader who’s difficult to second-guess.
Plus the Giants just finished Spring Training with a 21-6 record, the best in the big leagues! So you can take encouragement from that, but it’s still meaningless. It’s the first time the Giants have won more than 19 Spring Training games since 2017, though as the Chronicle points out, that year “they finished last in the National League West and lost 98 games.”
And to throw more cold water on things, oddsmakers are predicting that the Giants will finish last in the division again this year.
This is largely because the offseason went just as the last several offseasons have, with the Giants as always-the-bridesmaids in free agency. This year they missed out on slugger Juan Soto (to the Mets), pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto (to the Dodgers), and Roki Sasaki (also to the Dodgers). That’s two new superstars on the Dodgers, who are already the stacked World Champions, and overwhelming favorites to win it again.
Do the Giants have any blueprint to stop this? They might.
The pitching rotation is still led by the sublime Logan Webb. They added Justin Verlander and still have Robbie Ray — both former Cy Young winners, though certainly with a lot of tread on their tires. The Chronicle wonders if the Giants' pitching staff could be “among MLB’s best,” which seems a farcical proposition given the shaky bottom half of their rotation. But there is a consensus that the Giants' bullpen is among the better in the Big Leagues, so that’s an undeniable set of assets.
And the Giants did add free agent shortstop Willy Adames and five-time Gold Glove third baseman Matt Chapman, which should make this a very fun infield to watch. Korean phenom Jung Hoo Lee returns after a shoulder injury cut his last season short, so there are some very talented pieces here.
But there's also a nagging suspicion that the Giants executives are just happy making money and having a nice ballpark. Maybe their real estate investments at Mission Rock are a bigger priority than winning championships at this point.
So there’s some question if the Giants’ top brass are all that interested in being contenders again. But there’s no question that one guy among that top brass, president of baseball operations Buster Posey, is determined to make them contenders again.
Image: SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - DECEMBER 12: Buster Posey introduces Willy Adames #2 of the San Francisco Giants during a press conference at Oracle Park on December 12, 2024 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Suzanna Mitchell/San Francisco Giants/Getty Images)
