My issue with all of this is that the standings are based on wins and losses, not ROI. The goal is to win championships, not to win every negotiation.
None of us know what deals this winter will turn out to be good ones or bad ones, but a high revenue team should be willing to enter into potentially "bad" deals in the cause of winning.
Historically only about a third of megadeals ($100 mm+) have generated surplus value. However, position player mega contracts have fared better than pitcher mega contracts, and not surprisingly the best deals in hindsight skew toward younger players. A $100 million contract for a 30 (or under) year old position player is more or less a 50/50 proposition. However if the return is deficit value, but the player is the difference in reaching the playoffs or winning a pennant, was it a bad deal?
The Giants infield is currently composed of the following:
Brandon Belt (turns 34 next month) - played well last year (2.7 bWAR) but only appeared in 97 games.
Tommy LaStella (33 years old) - 0.3 bWAR (barely above replacement), only once in nine seasons has he been above 0.6 bWAR.
Brandon Crawford (35 years old) - phenomenal 6.1 bWAR season last year, but an outlier, only 2.3 total bWAR in his previous three seasons.
Evan Longoria (36 years old) - also ok last year (1.8 bWAR) but only appeared in 81 games.
Some of the contracts handed out this winter by other teams are correctly criticized as not going to age well, but the Giants infield has already aged and continues to age, so we must similarly assume that these players will decline, perhaps decline sharply. Crawford was a phenomenal player last year and received a two year extension, but he's almost certainly not going to provide similar production this year, and even less likely next year playing shortstop at age 36.
So let's take Corey Seager or Carlos Correa or Marcus Semien, who are each being paid $25 million - $35 million per year. If Corey Seager and Marcus Semien only generate $45 million in value while being paid $57.5 million next year, but make Texas relevant again and perhaps make them a playoff team then are those "bad contracts"?
Getting back to the Giants, maybe Carlos Correa ends up only being worth $25 million next year. Isn't he still worth at least five wins as an improvement over LaStella and/or Longoria while also filling in for Crawford if needed? and in a very competitive division such as the NL West isn't five games (and I'm being conservative) possibly the difference between reaching the wild card vs being home, or winning the division vs being the wild card, or the difference in winning or losing a playoff series? Technically it's a pretty bad deal (negative $10 million of value relative to cost) but it's a great deal for SF if it's a difference maker. And that's close to a worst case scenario unless he's injured, given that he's 27 years old with a track record of elite level play.
Trevor Story might be paid in the $25 million range next year, and that is likely an overpay relative to production, but he's still going to generate much more value than LaStella, so a team that can afford it (such as SF) should be eager to overpay in order to maximize its chances of winning. Nick Castellanos is likely not going to be worth $100 million, but even if he only produces $60 million in value as a substantial upgrade to the Giants current hitters then it's also arguably a justifiable expense for a wealthy team such as SF.
There is no hard cap in baseball, so there's no opportunity cost in spending money on a player. The Giants are currently about $90 million under the de facto soft cap anyway, and at least three teams (Dodgers, Mets, Phillies) have already exceeded the CBT threshold and are willing to pay the tax, which is minuscule in the grand scheme of things. Money not spent in baseball is merely more profit for ownership.
What's clear is that Farhan Zaidi is operating under certain financial parameters and that ownership is prioritizing profits. That's fine but not something to be celebrated. We congratulate Zaidi for not making any bad deals but there are certain types of bad deals that are actually good deals for a team that is aggressively trying to win. Zaidi executed these types of "bad but good" deals when he was in LA under ownership that was willing to reduce ROI (and to eat the cost of deals that are total failures) in an effort to maximize their chances of winning the division, which they did eight years in a row.
Zaidi is doing a phenomenal job following the Dodgers model or building a strong farm system, opportunistically finding undervalued players in other organizations, being active at the trade deadline etc. But LA is willing to spend for special players (Betts, Freeman) while SF apparently is not, which means that everything has to go right for the Giants - as it indeed did last year - in order to compete at the highest level, and everything going right isn't something to count on.
None of us know what deals this winter will turn out to be good ones or bad ones, but a high revenue team should be willing to enter into potentially "bad" deals in the cause of winning.
Historically only about a third of megadeals ($100 mm+) have generated surplus value. However, position player mega contracts have fared better than pitcher mega contracts, and not surprisingly the best deals in hindsight skew toward younger players. A $100 million contract for a 30 (or under) year old position player is more or less a 50/50 proposition. However if the return is deficit value, but the player is the difference in reaching the playoffs or winning a pennant, was it a bad deal?
The Giants infield is currently composed of the following:
Brandon Belt (turns 34 next month) - played well last year (2.7 bWAR) but only appeared in 97 games.
Tommy LaStella (33 years old) - 0.3 bWAR (barely above replacement), only once in nine seasons has he been above 0.6 bWAR.
Brandon Crawford (35 years old) - phenomenal 6.1 bWAR season last year, but an outlier, only 2.3 total bWAR in his previous three seasons.
Evan Longoria (36 years old) - also ok last year (1.8 bWAR) but only appeared in 81 games.
Some of the contracts handed out this winter by other teams are correctly criticized as not going to age well, but the Giants infield has already aged and continues to age, so we must similarly assume that these players will decline, perhaps decline sharply. Crawford was a phenomenal player last year and received a two year extension, but he's almost certainly not going to provide similar production this year, and even less likely next year playing shortstop at age 36.
So let's take Corey Seager or Carlos Correa or Marcus Semien, who are each being paid $25 million - $35 million per year. If Corey Seager and Marcus Semien only generate $45 million in value while being paid $57.5 million next year, but make Texas relevant again and perhaps make them a playoff team then are those "bad contracts"?
Getting back to the Giants, maybe Carlos Correa ends up only being worth $25 million next year. Isn't he still worth at least five wins as an improvement over LaStella and/or Longoria while also filling in for Crawford if needed? and in a very competitive division such as the NL West isn't five games (and I'm being conservative) possibly the difference between reaching the wild card vs being home, or winning the division vs being the wild card, or the difference in winning or losing a playoff series? Technically it's a pretty bad deal (negative $10 million of value relative to cost) but it's a great deal for SF if it's a difference maker. And that's close to a worst case scenario unless he's injured, given that he's 27 years old with a track record of elite level play.
Trevor Story might be paid in the $25 million range next year, and that is likely an overpay relative to production, but he's still going to generate much more value than LaStella, so a team that can afford it (such as SF) should be eager to overpay in order to maximize its chances of winning. Nick Castellanos is likely not going to be worth $100 million, but even if he only produces $60 million in value as a substantial upgrade to the Giants current hitters then it's also arguably a justifiable expense for a wealthy team such as SF.
There is no hard cap in baseball, so there's no opportunity cost in spending money on a player. The Giants are currently about $90 million under the de facto soft cap anyway, and at least three teams (Dodgers, Mets, Phillies) have already exceeded the CBT threshold and are willing to pay the tax, which is minuscule in the grand scheme of things. Money not spent in baseball is merely more profit for ownership.
What's clear is that Farhan Zaidi is operating under certain financial parameters and that ownership is prioritizing profits. That's fine but not something to be celebrated. We congratulate Zaidi for not making any bad deals but there are certain types of bad deals that are actually good deals for a team that is aggressively trying to win. Zaidi executed these types of "bad but good" deals when he was in LA under ownership that was willing to reduce ROI (and to eat the cost of deals that are total failures) in an effort to maximize their chances of winning the division, which they did eight years in a row.
Zaidi is doing a phenomenal job following the Dodgers model or building a strong farm system, opportunistically finding undervalued players in other organizations, being active at the trade deadline etc. But LA is willing to spend for special players (Betts, Freeman) while SF apparently is not, which means that everything has to go right for the Giants - as it indeed did last year - in order to compete at the highest level, and everything going right isn't something to count on.