The most abysmal season in San Francisco Giants history is winding to a close. Just three games against the Dodgers remaining and pretty much everyone – players, employees, media, fans – can’t wait for this lost season to be over.
“It’s been a rough year,” manager Tony Vitello said in quite an understatement. Watching Vitello adjust to the big leagues has been part of the bumpy ride.
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The entire season has been a disaster on and off the field. Not just bad baseball but bad publicity, bad decision-making, bad vibes.
Wednesday was another loss, the 94th of the season. Another forgettable day for a team that is supposed to be – as Buster Posey said when he became head of baseball operations – in the “memory making” business.
It was “Faith Day” at the ballpark, which might surprise some Giants pitchers who seemed to think that day came back in June, when they chose to mar their caps with a scrawled bible verse that serves as an avatar for denying gay rights.
A few hours before Wednesday’s game, about 150 fans gathered to hear Dave Dravecky give a pregame talk about Jesus while a Giants-colored cross lit up the big screen in the outfield. Oddly, Wednesday was also the day that the Giants chose to reduce beer prices, in a cross promotion with KNBR. Not exactly what one would expect on Faith Day. But the unlikely pairing came for a game sure to be sparsely attended: a Wednesday afternoon against the Twins with many fans who wouldn’t be drinking beer. The Giants could afford to be generous.
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It’s the time in the season for “end of the year” awards and Vitello proposed one.
“Our MVP this year would be our fans,” he said. “Our fans have been resilient … I’ve compared away fan bases to ours and I would choose ours over everybody, in quantity and also quality.
“Now this is a pretty damn good ballpark to come to, even if you don’t want to watch the game and you just want to walk around and eat, like a couple of my buddies did the other day. I think (our fans) have been the most consistent, best thing of the year.”
Well, even MVPs have off days. Though the crowd was announced at over 28,000 that seems generous. As the game progressed the air in the ballpark became smokey and acrid. That wasn’t the Giants’ conflagration you smelled; it was a prescribed burn on Angel Island.
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The day’s biggest cheers came whenever the big screen showed Mike Krukow, whose formal farewell is on Sunday and who has been surfing a tsunami of love for weeks, ever since he announced his retirement. The news rocked the fanbase, and the shockwaves were compounded by the recent news that Duane Kuiper has been diagnosed with throat cancer and will undergo treatment.
Krukow and Kuiper have been the tether to this team for almost 40 years, through championships and irrelevance and everything in between. Their ability to keep fans engaged was never needed more than this season, when the team was playing bad baseball and the organization was making decisions that alienated fans. The iconic duo has filled homes and hearts and now that cord is being cut. Who knows if the bond will ever be the same.
Above one of the entrances to Oracle Park is a marquee proclaiming “Nothing Like It.” And that soft marketing slogan has certainly been true this year. From flipping the bird to the gay community on Pride Night to not being able to apologize or account for that behavior afterwards. From a centerfielder with a bad foot further injuring himself by crashing his scooter reportedly into a fire truck after the bars closed (bizarrely recreating an incident from his college days) to the team’s best prospect getting concussed by a door frame. From infuriating fans by pimping a betting site over game highlights on social media to bringing in Joshua Kushner as an investor. To fundamentally bad baseball, day in and day out. Nothing Like It.
Now we’re left wondering: What is there to look forward to next season? Learning if Vitello figures out how to be a major league manager? Putting odds on whether the team will surpass this year’s franchise record for players used? (Kalshi will be happy to take your bets).
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The team’s biggest drama may come next June, if next June’s baseball is not lost to a lockout. Will the Giants have learned any lessons from the Pride Night debacle this season that turned off so many of their most loyal fans?
Of course, there are some bright spots. Young players got playing time. The farm system is better. The season is almost over.
Vitello will gather the team on Friday for one last message that he said would be about, “you know, next year, what we want to be good at.”
How about baseball?
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This article originally published at Giants’ season of bad vibes, bad baseball is almost over. Hopefully 2027 is nothing like it.
