[Mick]

4. A perfectly valid strategy which I would endorse is to spend money on position players while cobbling together a starting pitching staff from undervalued assets. Starters are less important than ever and prone to injury at some point when awarded a long term contract. This is what I assumed the Giants were doing when they essentially sat out the starting pitcher market. But they've also been inactive in the position player market. Their three best players last year were Posey (retrired), Crawford (35 years old coming off a career year that surely will regress) and Belt (will play at 34 years old this year and also likely to regress). But SF so far hasn't been involved in pursuing any position player free agents. Will SF operate at the top of that market (Correa) or near the top (Bryant, Castellanos, Story, Conforto)? All of those guys are going to be "overpaid" so the Giants may just pass and look for bargains (Pham?) and pray that they sign Suzuki.

When business re-opens I may be proven completely wrong and the Giants may move to aggressively improve the team. But right now it looks like SF is going to celebrate being $80 million or so under the luxury tax and I don't see why that's something that fans should be excited about. Signing Cobb instead of Gausman is "smart" and passing on free agents whose contracts are likely to age poorly is "very smart", but the Giants are a wealthy team owned by wealthy people who are capable of making some "not totally smart" moves and those would be a lot more fun for fans.

Each individual decision (such as not making an offer to Gausman) is entirely defensible but not something to cheer for if it's part of a master plan to reduce payroll substantially and just pocket the profits instead of investing them elsewhere.

My sense is that the Giants always wanted to be strong up the middle with Posey and Crawford, and have no worse than the third best position player in the league at the other six positions, ideally.  Seems like that was the formula for 2010-2014.

[Mick]

4. A perfectly valid strategy which I would endorse is to spend money on position players while cobbling together a starting pitching staff from undervalued assets. Starters are less important than ever and prone to injury at some point when awarded a long term contract. This is what I assumed the Giants were doing when they essentially sat out the starting pitcher market. But they've also been inactive in the position player market. Their three best players last year were Posey (retrired), Crawford (35 years old coming off a career year that surely will regress) and Belt (will play at 34 years old this year and also likely to regress). But SF so far hasn't been involved in pursuing any position player free agents. Will SF operate at the top of that market (Correa) or near the top (Bryant, Castellanos, Story, Conforto)? All of those guys are going to be "overpaid" so the Giants may just pass and look for bargains (Pham?) and pray that they sign Suzuki.

When business re-opens I may be proven completely wrong and the Giants may move to aggressively improve the team. But right now it looks like SF is going to celebrate being $80 million or so under the luxury tax and I don't see why that's something that fans should be excited about. Signing Cobb instead of Gausman is "smart" and passing on free agents whose contracts are likely to age poorly is "very smart", but the Giants are a wealthy team owned by wealthy people who are capable of making some "not totally smart" moves and those would be a lot more fun for fans.

Each individual decision (such as not making an offer to Gausman) is entirely defensible but not something to cheer for if it's part of a master plan to reduce payroll substantially and just pocket the profits instead of investing them elsewhere.

My sense is that the Giants always wanted to be strong up the middle with Posey and Crawford, and have no worse than the third best position player in the league at the other six positions, ideally.  Seems like that was the formula for 2010-2014.