With the worst season San Francisco has endured in decades nearly over with, all the Giants and their fans can do is look into the future and hope like heck there are some answers out there this winter for some of the teams laundry list of problems.
If you've watched the club this season then you already know that you would be hardpressed to find any real positives that they'll be taking with them into the winter. Instead, we're looking at an offseason that should present many of changes, Including Possibly moving on from some guys who've been mainstays for the squad the last half decade or so and were Instrumental in their championship runs. First off, the Giants have three games on the schedule remaining and are sitting at 97 losses, so they are very well within distance of a 100-loss year which is about as bad as it gets. Then when you consider the team is coming off a nice little mini dynasty from 2010-16 in which they won 3 titles and made 4 playoff appearances, it makes the drastic fall-off of 2017 that much more astounding to a lot of people. However, if you watched this teams epic collapse in the 2nd half of 2016 and then their failure to really address all their needs over last winter, it really shouldn't come as that big of surprise.
It certainly wasn't an earth-shattering surprise to me if you go back and read my posts from last winter, as I just couldn't figure out why they didn't add more bullpen depth, bring in a sure-fire everyday left fielder who can put the ball in the seats and just bring in more depth overall. And we saw all those areas haunt them early on as they got no production out of left field, terrible bench contributions and no real defined roles in the bullpen. Granted, their one signing from last winter, closer Mark Melancon never really looked healthy at all this year and was essentially a non-factor spending most of the year on the DL and finally a going under the knife in September. The hope is that by performing the surgery in-season, he'll be ready to rock when pitchers and catchers report to Scottsdale in February but he'll be entering his age-33 season and is anything but a guarantee to return to pre-'17 form. His recovery along with lefty relief ace Will Smith will be crucial to the bullpens rebound in 2018.
I'm typing this on an IPad as my computer monitor has recently broken and my laptop got wet and died out, so I'm going to cut this one short. We'll be talking much more about what happened and what went wrong This summer, even if I have to keep posting shorter posts, they will appear more frequently.
We'll asses some players who did OK, as nobody including Posey, BCraw, Belt or Pence really had memorable seasons. And also whether or not this can be a one off-season fix or if the Giants will be entering rebuild mode for the first time since Barry Bonds was on his way out. So despite the sad season and underwhelming performance from the orange and black, they've left us with no shortage of topics to disect over the next 4 months until spring training kicks off.
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