The San Francisco Giants are not exactly playoff favorites. Most predictions have the Giants somewhere in the middle of the pack, with variance in either direction.
But with a few titans in the National League, they aren’t getting much love from pundits or oddsmakers.
ESPN’s Buster Olney isn’t buying them either. He joined Murph & Mac on Wednesday before the season opener and said he sees them as an average team.
“I have a hard time envisioning to see how the Giants could make the playoffs this year, especially when you have those three beast teams in the National League East,” Olney said. “You get the Braves, you get the Mets, you get the Phillies. The Phillies land, Trea Turner, they augment their lineup. In the Central, I think the Cardinals are the easy pick. They get this dynamic 20-year-old Jordan Walker who looks like he’s a future MVP. You have the Padres, clearly Peter Seidler, their owner, is all-in, whatever it takes. And then you have the Dodgers. And I think you know, the question for me is which team just below that group is is actually going to potentially invade those top six.”
The counter to Olney’s argument is something vague about the way they were able to surprise people in 2021 and win 107 games.
But he made a distinction there:
Unless the Giants get a huge surprising performance or two this year, it’s just hard to see. Because let’s face it, when they shocked the baseball world by winning 107 games and winning the National League West, they did it because they had great core performances from Posey, from Crawford, from Belt.
And last year, when they didn’t have that, then the pieces and parts nature of their lineup didn’t work as well. And I can’t look at that lineup and say yeah, these three guys are going to come out with superstar performances that are going to carry this team.
That said, he can absolutely see a path to the playoffs for the Giants. It’s one, though, that requires some disasters from other teams. He highlighted Rhys Hoskins’ knee injury for the Phillies, Kyle Wright’s injury for the Braves and Edwin Diaz’s disastrous WBC injury for the Mets.
“I think they need to be helped out by adversity within other organizations,” Olney said. “Those type of scenarios I think help the Giants because it plays down those other teams to where the Giants ceiling might be.”
This all begs the question of how San Francisco will upgrade its lineup going forward. They whiffed on the likes of Aaron Judge and Trea Turner… and the Carlos Correa deal imploded before our very eyes.
The biggest fish, obviously, is Shohei Ohtani. The 28-year-old WBC champ will be a free agent this offseason and is expected to get the biggest contract in history.
Olney expects two teams to fight for his services, and neither are the Giants. He predicts Ohtani will sign with the Dodgers, but that the Mets will be in play, too:
Both of those teams have structured their recent signings, you know, J.D. Martinez for the Dodgers. For the Mets, Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander. They signed a bunch of guys to short-term deals, I think, in part, because they want to take this run at Ohtani. That, I know for a fact, has been a conversation within the Dodgers organization.
And on the Mets’ side, we know that their general manager Billy Eppler, formerly the GM of the Angels where he lured Ohtani to the Angels. They have a great relationship and Steve Cohen, their owner, is the richest owner in baseball and he might decide you know what, that’s the piece of art that I want for my team.
It’s a deal that Olney believes might actually be worth $600 million, “because of how unique he is” and because he’s also the “most marketable player we’ve ever seen.”
His implication is that the Giants won’t be competitive in a race to pay one player a potential $60 million a year.
Listen to the full interview below. You can listen to every KNBR interview on our podcast page at knbr.com/podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Catch Murph & Mac weekdays from 6 a.m. – 10 a.m. on KNBR 104.5 / 680 and streaming live on KNBR.com.