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The Giants’ 2025 season, initially full of so much hope and energy, unofficially was read its last rites Wednesday.
Unless they surprise us all (including themselves) with a crazy late-season surge, it’s over before August. It was a frustrating failure for everybody involved. And things are already getting cleared out to set up for next season.
The Giants’ excruciating 2-1 extra-inning loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates to close out a historically awful 0-6 homestand was just the finishing touch, by the way. In the middle of the game, the Giants announced they’d traded longtime key reliever Tyler Rogers to the New York Mets for three young players. Then the Giants continued their parade of futility at the plate, which made Wednesday’s loss feel inevitable from about the fifth inning on. Or maybe from late-June on.
The game result explained the sell-off trade: Why keep Rogers around for important fall innings when the Giants almost certainly aren’t actually going to play any important fall innings and he’s going to become a free agent in November, anyway?
It was a white-flag surrender on the 2025 season, but also quite logical. The Giants simply aren’t good enough to pretend that they rightfully can aim for an October run. They made their big move in June. They got Rafael Devers. They’re on the hook to him for a load of money for a load of years.
And that didn’t work this season. Maybe it’ll be better in 2026, 2027, 2028, gulp, 2029, 2030, big gulp, 2031, 2032, and 2033.
Just tactically and stylistically, it’s not great to make an all-in move in June and then start selling off good players five weeks later. But denying the ugly reality at this point would be worse than anything else.
As Bob Melvin and multiple players somberly conceded after the game, the Giants put themselves in this spot by crumbling so stunningly after the All-Star break (and really, there were signs before that).
What was Buster Posey supposed to do with Thursday’s trade deadline coming up fast? Blindly keep faith in a team that’s 2-10 since the break and an MLB-worst 13-24 since Posey traded for Devers in June, sliding swiftly out of NL wild-card contention? Nope.
“It’s not a position you want to be in,” Logan Webb said in a nearly silent clubhouse. “But I don’t blame Buster for doing something like that.”
There might be more selloffs coming. I don’t think Posey, in his first trade deadline as a baseball chief, wants to tear up the roster just out of anger or impatience. The Giants aren’t a franchise that embraces multiyear rebuilds and I know that Posey personally abhors the idea. He wants to win ASAP. But that’s no longer about this season.
Point-blank: This likely won’t be a full-out fire sale; I don't think the Giants have many players that other teams would give up much to acquire. But I also think that Posey will consider any offer for relatively valuable players who probably or almost certainly won't be back next year, starting with Camilo Doval, Mike Yastrzemski, and Wilmer Flores.
And Posey will be judged for this too, of course. He’s new in the job and inherited most of this weak-hitting roster from his predecessor, Farhan Zaidi. This isn’t his fault. But Posey was left with this strong pitching staff, too, and his acquisitions so far have not improved much of anything.
Can Posey flip Yastrzemski and Doval and get three or four real hitting prospects back? I’m sure calls are being made and names are being tossed around. We shall see what happens by 3 p.m. Thursday.
But as the days have progressed this season, even after the fast start and strong run of pitching, it’s become clearer and clearer that the Giants’ lineup is in drastic need of an overhaul. It’s built around four players all signed to $100-million-plus contracts (Devers, Willy Adames, Matt Chapman, and Jung Hoo Lee), and none of them has been great so far this season. It's also supposed to feature dangerous at-bats from Heliot Ramos, Yastrzemski, Patrick Bailey, and anybody who can play second base without striking out multiple times a game... but they haven't gotten much of that, either.
On Wednesday, the flashpoint for me came when the Giants bunted three times in the late innings — one for a hit, two as sacrifices. I’m not an anti-bunt zealot, but there’s no more direct way to admit that you have a terrible offense than to bunt all of the time.
"We’re trying to score a run," Melvin said a little heatedly when I asked if he called all those bunts (which he did). Sad result: The Giants didn’t actually score a run any of those times.
The existential problem is that the Giants are pot-committed to Devers, who is striking out at an alarming pace recently, and Lee, who was supposed to be a strong part of the top of the order and now is a weak part of the bottom. The Giants have no way to replace either of them and have serious chunks of their payroll devoted to them for years and years.
But other than the prospects the Giants might acquire in the selloff trades, mentally dumping on 2025 could give them one other long-term benefit. They can ease the pressure on Devers, Lee, Chapman, Ramos, and Bailey. They can try to give them confidence and momentum over these last two relatively carefree months.
And the Giants can plan for 2026. They can maybe see if Bryce Eldridge looks comfortable against big-league pitching in September. They can get Webb and Ray some rest. If Lee, Bailey, and others continue to struggle late into this season, I think the Giants will have to look for some replacements for 2026.
Posey can also weigh whether Melvin is truly the right manager for this group. This is not the time for rash decisions, but the last few weeks have been sloppier than anybody should expect from this team. Maybe it’s worth noting that Melvin was Zaidi’s managerial pick a few years ago. I think Posey respects Melvin; he certainly brought him back without a blink this season. But that doesn’t mean that Melvin is beyond examination over the next two months.
Now that 2025 is unofficially over, everything about the Giants should go under the microscope. As the Giants said themselves on Wednesday, they did this to themselves.