Buster Posey, Giants’ response to 97-loss season is definition of insanity

SAN FRANCISCO — The best thing about Giants baseball this season? The groundskeeping.

After spending almost 40 minutes Tuesday answering for a finish that was the fourth worst in franchise history, manager Tony Vitello had to find one positive to hang his hat on.

He chose the grass.

“The shape that field was in was incredible all year long,” Vitello said. “We just need to play better on it.”

The Giants have a long way to go to do just that after completing a 97-loss campaign in which the only reason to tune in for the last two months was to see whether they would set the all-time record for the most players used in a season. (They only tied the 2025 Braves for the embarrassing spot in history, with 71, but it would have been theirs alone had they treated Zach Morgan with any semblance of respect.)

They called up the 26-year-old who grew up about two hours east of Oracle Park twice to their taxi squad in an otherwise-meaningless final month but never allowed him to make his MLB debut — just one more family given every reason to call itself former fans after this season.

The Giants weren’t just bad. They were embarrassing. Until they sank even lower: irrelevant, which is the position they’ve occupied for the better part of the past three months.

Yet, there was Buster Posey behind a microphone in the bowels of Oracle Park, flanked on either side by his handpicked manager and second-in-command, Zack Minasian.

The second-year president of baseball operations confirmed that the same leadership responsible for the disaster that was this season will get the chance to do it again next year.

“I don’t think there will be a ton of changes,” Posey said, besides the possibility of “a couple” on Vitello’s coaching staff that the front office plans to discuss this week.

The same leadership decided to fire Bob Melvin and make wholesale changes to its coaching staff after going 81-81, 16 games better than they finished this season. There wasn’t another MLB team that had a larger drop-off in its final record from the previous year.

And yet, somehow Posey came to a different conclusion.

The grand experiment to hire a coach straight from the college ranks was a gigantic failure in Year 1. So why not run it again and see if it produces a different result?

“If you’re asking if I think we can contend next year, I do,” Posey said.

Posey said he saw Vitello grow from a coach into a manager over the course of the season (an adjustment period they maybe should have had the foresight to see coming). But when Vitello was asked if he felt he had command of the clubhouse, he said that he “still see[s] myself as a teammate.” That doesn’t bode well for his chances to earn their respect in Year 2.

Likewise, Vitello was only able to muster the same platitudes about better communication when posed a question about how to avoid another debacle like the Pride Night fiasco.

“Ultimately, I need to voice my opinion probably almost as loud as anybody,” Vitello said, “at least everybody that’s downstairs [in the clubhouse].”

Almost as loud? If Vitello isn’t comfortable being the loudest voice in a room of major-league ballplayers after a full season at helm, is there any chance he ever will?

The Giants played like a team built by an executive with no prior experience and run by a manager who had never spent a second in a professional dugout.

They were about as allergic to winning at the margins as they were to winning four games in a row (something they didn’t do once all season). They committed the most errors in the field and would have had many more than 108 if mental mistakes counted, too. 

Even stuff as basic as knowing which plays to challenge from the dugout was too complex for Vitello’s staff, which only got 17 calls overturned in 46 tries, MLB’s lowest success rate.

Posey said “things just started to compound,” while Vitello suggested that the team’s confidence never rebounded from its season-opening sweep. They were nine games under .500 after only 37 games and didn’t finish a day with a winning record.

They stand no chance of building early momentum next year if Rafael Devers doesn’t find a way to thaw out of his ice-cold starts that have plagued him the past two seasons. By the time he started slugging like he was capable, the Giants had already dug too deep of a hole.

At least Devers eventually showed that he still had something left in him. That’s more than the Giants can say about the shortstop they still owe $130 million over the next five seasons.

And, yes, Posey confirmed, the Giants still view Willy Adames as a shortstop, even after a season of dismal defensive metrics and persistent back pain.

Not like there’s any history of back injuries being chronic issues or players’ production slowing down when they reach their 30s, as Adames and Matt Chapman have and Devers will next month.

Still, Posey said the Giants have “a ton of belief” in their position players — even Harrison Bader, who Posey confirmed was still in their plans for next season after his first season in San Francisco went up in flames when he rode his scooter into the back of a firetruck.

Posey took accountability for the failure to build a bullpen, acknowledging that he “probably overestimated some of the guys that we had in the ‘pen.” He admitted that they need to adjust their offensive philosophy to draw more walks and for their pitchers to issue fewer of them.

“There is a lot of work to be done, for sure,” Posey said. “There’s deficiencies that we know we have to address or attempt to address.”

He said he wants his pitchers to “own the zone,” which sounds nice. But what was stopping them this year? In reality, it’s only going to be harder next season, with the Giants down four starters rehabbing from elbow surgeries and a bullpen that has to be rebuilt from scratch.

Posey was given multiple chances to answer how he planned to address the Giants pitching, only made more complicated by a lockout looming Dec. 1, but didn’t give any reason to believe it will be any different from last offseason, when they faced the same questions.

“It’s the normal avenues,” Posey sighed. “We’ll look at free agents, we’ll have trade discussions and we’ll weigh internal options.”

It was obvious from the bags under Vitello’s eyes to the tone Posey took in many of his answers that the way this season went off the rails didn’t sit well with anyone at Third and King. But it wasn’t so clear that the people in charge had any idea about how to fix it.

There’s at least one piece of good news about a sixth straight season without postseason baseball on the shores of McCovey Cove. The playing surface will stay in pristine shape.