BoMel Must Go
I honestly don’t get how anyone could support BoMel at this point. If you do, I’m putting you on the spot: tell me why? And don’t give me any bullshit about “he can’t hit the ball or pitch the ball or throw the ball.” What has he done THIS YEAR that you think has been a reason (or reasons) to keep him? Obviously Buster extended his good buddy but hiring your friends and keeping them around even when they fail at their job is probably more of a hole in your own game than something to highlight.
A Place To Talk About Giants Baseball 
I remember when Buster took over he said that he didn’t really know Melvin. They’d always kept a distance during his playing days. He inherited Melvin. Picking up the option was a simple biz decision that backfired. What seemed like a sensible way to juice the chemistry, to project confidence , as a promising season got going, went very wrong.
Melvin had good teams in AZ and fizzled in the PS. Eleven years in Oakland with great young players led to six PS fizzles. We saw what he did in SD. Bad biz decision, imo.
We have nearly a 200 million dollar payroll. Maybe Melvin is better working with rookies and guys who make no money. I don’t know. What I do know is that whatever he is selling our guys ain’t buying…..
as you note below, Melvin had a similarly high payroll in SD with good players. Their total was fifth highest in mlb in 2022. Third in 2023. He couldn’t get it done.
I do like your twist on the financial crap I’m pushing. Clever.
I think he needs to go just for the sake of change. It really isn’t his fault players make bonehead mistakes. The way it looks to me is we need to go into a 3/4 year rebuild. I would trade anyone for the best young talent possible and at this point I would even get rid of Webb and Ray. Maybe not Webb but I bet he would bring a hellova return.
Really, rebuild. For the first time in years we have some legitimate hitters in our lineup:
1B: Devers
2B: Schimtt
SS: Adames
3B: Chapman
CF: Lee (questionable)
LF: Ramos
DH: Smith
We have a terrible hitting catcher and no rightfielder who can be identified. Otherwise, any team would want all of the players mentioned hereinabove.
We have a pitching staff for next year as follows:
We have already been dickin around for the last 3 or 4 years anyway.
I figure they’ll wait until the end of the year to fire him. If they let him go now, who would they promote? Not the Nazi salute bench coach, Ryan Christenson who came with Melvin and not Matty Williams who also came over with Melvin, nope. Wait until the end of the year and they could promote Dave Brundage who manages the River Cats and clear the deck of those Melvin guys. Put Busters pal, Halberg back to being the 3rd base coach.
I’m going to repeat this: SD was so off this dude they told a division rival “go ahead, take him.” For free. They had to have been “lol” quietly to themselves when we took on this grenade.
The identity of the team is one that makes constant mental mistakes. So either we have the dumbest players in the world or they’ve tuned out the coaching staff who I would expect would be stressing the fundamentals of the game.
Time for new voice, definitely. But SD’s “lack of talent” describes team. Pads have guys like Machado Tatis Jr. promising 2nd year guy Merrill and great pitching. Meanwhile SF is running out same old underperformers, with little help from Sac. Dom smith, career journeyman, is one of the highlights of entire year. Nice pickup, but if he’s one of your better hitters and players, problem is bigger than manager. Posey has to address roster holes (including pitching) once he figures out who he wants to manage it.
well lack of top talent across the LU explains why they’re not better than a .500 team. But I don’t think it explains why they’ve been losing at an historically horrible pace, in laughable ways , especially at home.
There’s still month and half of baseball to see how guys finish–as in who stays and who doesn’t, including rotation and pen. Hopefully Ramos can show he’s better LF, Schmitt can handle 2b, Gilbert and Lee can hit some, bench player adds occasional clutch spark, yada yada. Bottom line they’ve used 4 guys at 1b and same with RF not name Yaz. Bailey’s D lapses have been costly and more numerous while too many hitters aren’t outperforming much above what Yaz did.
Not my favorite public personality, but this recently showed up on the screen:
“What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence” – Christopher Hitchens
The only baseball writer with opinions that are usually as stupid as Bruce Jenkins’ has this bewildered take. I almost never read her, but was curious what the Goddess of Clubhouse Chemistry herself had to say. What, we replaced the slick egotistical automaton with feel good choice Old School Bob and it just doesn’t make any sense to me:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/annkillion/article/something-clearly-wrong-giants-bob-melvin-20817775.php
100% agree. As Craig pointed out, SD let a manager under contract go to a division rival. Considering the recent Dodgers success and payroll, the Giants and Pads would be basically fighting for 2nd every year and they let him come to their main rival with no compensation?? Nuts. They know what we now know. I say good riddance!! The sooner the better.
Didn’t the Padres do the same with Bochy?
they did.
Here’s another take, if you guys don’t think a manager or his staff can influence player performance then why have them? Why not just have CHATgpt spit out a LU and have the players manage themselves in the game?
That’s a bit reductionist. There are a lot of decisions to be made over the course of a game — why burden the player(s) with them? Do they rotate the responsibility? Someone has to communicate and coordinate. Managers are cheap enough and it’s simply pragmatic to have one. They just aren’t going to make the difference between a good team and a bad team. Beyond a professional level of competence and credibility, there just isn’t enough scope there to distinguish one from another. Even the dumbest tactician the Giants ever had couldn’t sink his team when he allowed/forced Will Clark to make 17 outs on the base paths one year.
It’s interesting to me to look at standings and see Dodgers in 2nd, Yanks 6.5 games behind Toronto in 3rd, and Mets 5 back of Philly. 2 of those teams were in WS last year and free spending Mets got Soto off Yanks. Fan bases (like here) up in arms over poor play $$ spent, manager GM etc.
It’s well known here that the Knicks and Rangers have exit interviews with their players at the end of every season and they’ve directly led to coaching changes. Idk to what extent that might be practiced elsewhere…
Man, that dude was a downer, he took away our nerfball hoop.
Exactly!
djloo…As life-long dedicated Rangers fan (I don’t care one iota about Knicks or NBA), I’m not sure Blueshirts model of end-of-season exit interviews with players that productive. Instead it seems to result in parade of new coaches every two years. Gallant, Laviolette, now Sullivan.
While Laviolette lost locker room last year, I blame players and Drury. The players resembled 2025 Giants showing lack of discipline, drive, commitment and accountability. And Drury’s off-season waiver of Goodrow and attempts to trade Captain Trouba and in-season shopping of players to other clubs fractured team.
Similarity between 2024-2025 Rangers and 2025 Giants is that changes needed to be made. But I personally think putting too much reliance on opinion of disgruntled players poses risk.
When it comes to the Rangers, especially this past season, I don’t think anyone is blameless. Complete disgrace of a season and total disrespect of the paying fans.
Pretty sure the Knicks got Thibs fired…
Reminder:
Willy Adames 701/758
Matt Chapman 761/788
Rafael Devers 755/855
If the $600 Million Men were performing reasonably well, we’d be a few games over 500 instead of 3 games under. Still not a great showing, but I doubt many would be worried about who the manager is right now If the Stable for the Next Several Eons left side of the IF didn’t lead the league in errors at their respective positions, there might even be one or two more wins on the ledger.
are you saying that the manager and coaching staff have utterly failed to prep the stars to face opposing pitchers every day? Plausible. Bad days at the plate probably undermine them in the field too, I guess.
I’m trying to imagine the specific interactions or lack thereof that would lead to this failure. In the absence of any proof that Bob Melvin and his staff are substantially different in their practices from the other lifers across baseball, I’m going to remain highly skeptical.
Lotsa talk about Melvin. KNBR callers are mostly calling for his head. I don’t disagree. Do it now makes Buster look bad, having just extended him. Do it post-season may be more palatable to management. If the team continues to crater massively, and look terrible doing so, delaying the trigger pull may not be possible.
All this makes me think about wine and baseball. I love both. They have similarities. In both, top quality takes time to develop. Only constant work and smart choices keep it there.
Consistently great vineyard, great terroir, great grapes, then a good winemaker almost always makes very good wine and a great winemaker can make the occasional fantastic wine when all those conditions really mesh all at once. Increasingly lousy, insipid grapes from your aging or mismanaged vineyard or creeping botrytis or a bad couple of weather seasons, then even a great winemaker can only do so much — mediocre, boring ass wine and the brand suffers.
The winery owners and their top management need to fix the root problem — the quality of the grapes. Firing the winemaker and bringing in a new one without fixing the vineyard and maybe just buying some supposed good quality replacement or blending grapes from a contract producer – maybe keeps the brand artificially afloat a while longer. But, it isn’t going to make great wine consistently –in the next vintage, and the next and the next. The wine club members loyalty will only last so long in that scenario…
I don’t know if you’re a fan of Corbières wines, but a lot of vineyards there have gone up in smoke this week. Probably my favorite wine is the Magnon Campagnès. 100 year old Carignan vines. Right in the middle of the fire. Ah, well, the shitty wines you describe are few and far between now. Good practices have become standardized, although there’s also more diversity in styles. Unless you’re shopping in CVS, you have to work hard to find lousy, poorly made wine.
This blend is suspect, I’ll admit:
https://manoswine.com/products/san-francisco-giants-gold-reserve-etched-wine-bottle?variant=42310485016654&utm_campaign=17693421306&utm_source=google&utm_medium=paid&utm_keyword=&utm_content=&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=17336314686&gclid=CjwKCAjwtfvEBhAmEiwA-DsKjgscmvfkCaMhf_zngEhUuMhnC-s4yQI90TDQqvo-UeSOMPibNBLv2hoCJAoQAvD_BwE
Chuckled reading this and no, I can’t argue with the analogy.
Interest article
https://apple.news/AzV4cP2ZgTAu6iYxupuPebw
Melvin last shining hour might have been 2022–89 W Padres knocked off 101 W Mets in WC 2-1, then 111 W Dodgers in NLDS before losing to Phils.
Thoughts on this?
https://apple.news/A8DLgiGsdSG2x89nTElVlCw
MCC is usually a place to find intelligent life (and minor league recaps), but that DFA half a dozen guys and “play the kids” post near the end is FUBAR. You aren’t going to learn anything by doing this and it’s demeaning to season ticket holders to run inferior product out there. I get doom over how things have been going lately, but Adames Chapman and the other mainstays of lineup (Ramos Lee Devers Schmitt Smith) are being paid to play every day and that’s what they want to do as well.
If you want platoon Gilbert/Fitz in RF and give backup to Bailey more ABs, fine. Lucchesi shouldn’t be going anywhere, he is one of the positives. Hopefully at some point R Rod gets more chances to close a game for a save.
I have no problem cutting Verlander and Wilmer. I said last week after his disastrous 3 innings – 11 hit meltdown that they should do V a favor and cut him so a playoff team might pick him up. He might win a couple of games for a team that actually can score. As for Wilmer, I don’t see any point in him being here any more. He won’t be here next season, so cut him loose, somebody with a WC shot might pick him up. Use his spot to see if Luciano can take hold of DH for a while. I think he’s out of options, so if he comes up I’m not sure what that means for his status in the offseason. They’ve screwed him over so much, maybe he gets hot and somebody else might get interested. Crazy that 6 years into being a Giant they still appear to have no clue what to do with him…
I think Giants are beyond done with Luciano, who can’t play any position and isn’t even hitting in the Coast League except at elevation yards–maybe Rockies are his best destination.
they already have too many guys whose best position is DH. Flores hardly plays anymore; if Giants asked him his preference stay or go, that’s how his last 6 weeks should be handled, imo. Same with V–if he wants to finish season out here, fine.
He’s been terrible for a while now, but without Wilbur’s unconscious start, the season would’ve been over long ago…
Does Wilbur make the Wall of Fame at Oracle?
Anybody got a list of who’s on it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:San_Francisco_Giants_Wall_of_Fame
Thanks Blade. Looks like a stall but no wall for Wilbur. Unless Marvin decides to hop off…
Flores is one of the most un-athletic looking successful major league players that I’ve ever seen. He can hit, but so prone to injury and reduced productivity as a season goes along. The guy seems to get some sort of injury if he even looks at the LU card with his name put in as a position player — he’s like most of the Niners…
Speaking of ChatGPT, the lazy fuck decided to save a few trees, refusing to extract or crunch the data necessary to respond meaningfully to my carefully engineered prompt based on Snarrk’s question. Prompt engineer, this, mofo, said he . . . . Below’s the summary of its best high level attempt to identify which orgs have done the best job recently developing and exploiting homegrown talent. It excludes impact players acquired for high ranked prospects. The AI understood what I wanted, but, nope, too much work. Like the blackboard image Loo posted. Nothing surprising here:
Summary table — two team metrics (2015–2024 focus, emphasis on 2019–2024 homegrown production)
For each team I show:
1) Houston Astros
2) Baltimore Orioles
3) Los Angeles Dodgers
4) Tampa Bay Rays
5) Cleveland Guardians (Indians)
6) Detroit Tigers
7) Seattle Mariners
8) Atlanta Braves
Three shared things these organizations do to produce mainstays
Across the eight teams above the repeated playbook is:
I don’t think there’s a Romanee-Conti or Petrus among these teams.
In a “bad penny” vintage of those, the Asian market will still scoop up and pay top dollar, regardless. It’s the brand, the prestige…
canonical? Well, that settles it.
That made me smile, too.
Interesting results. Giants are unsurprisingly nowhere to be found.
It seems also not surprising and somewhat affirming of the research that the farm depth and development is best seen in teams we’d expect from our recent anecdotal observations of success — Rays, Tigers, Braves, Doghairs; Astros to some extent. What do they have in common across their organizations to get to that happy place?
Rays play in a garbage stadium, not great fan support, I assume they’re middle to lower pack of financial wherewithal in MLB. Yet, they are up there with Doghairs and Braves who are on the opposite end of all that. My guess is the international scouting is perhaps the most important common strength — they are consistently finding talent, their development of that talent is strong, relentless. Would the Rays’ location near Caribbean help? Well, Miami is in the same region — they are showing signs this late in the season that they’ve got some up and coming players.
Found talent, along with the “coordinated” development and analytics programs across the farm system levels — to me that translates into a Dodgers “way” or the Braves “way”. Those systemic, repeatable “ways” mean that more (than other organizations) of their AAA players, when promoted, are prepared for and quickly hit the ground running as key contributors. Compare that to he Giants “way” of talent identification and development, if there is one. It has to be objectively flawed and discombobulated — as we see in the scattershot play and contributions of many if not most of their position player call-ups — who constantly po-go stick up and down between SF and Sac…
Where am I?
Fire Melvin Now!
Chapman back to the IL.
Put Schmitt over at 3rd and see if we really miss “Chappy” a helluva lot…
Juan Soto is such a complete flop this season…
Dom gets er done.
Whatever Dom is eating re hitting with RISP, he should share with the team.
As result, I was about to comment with pleasure and surprise at the rare early lead. But, it quickly disappeared over the fence…
Running into runs tonight.
I was only a few at the time here that was campaigning hard for Steven Vogt to be the manager after 2023 season.Posey takes over as GM and being green out of the gate (and I get that to a point) but to throw in all your chips for a guy in Melvin who’s never gotten to a W/S was absurd!
Vogt only a year are 2? Removed from the game, and clearly had the respect of players from the new generation at only 40
WTF was that “throw” from Koss to 1B? Are Giants unclear on the concept of getting the ball to the 1Bman before the runner gets there?
Now, tied at 3-3, partly due to that …
Adames with a welcome bolt. Back in the lead. He needs to keep swinging to hit oppo field…
He nailed that.
Willy was having trouble with the fastball but not with a hanging slider. Hell, we’ll take it.
Nice of Schmitt to yank a grounder to the pull side rather than go oppo to move Dom from 2nd to 3rd. Giants continue the stupid situational hitting…
Pitchers named Seymour aren’t very good.
If the Giants were going to trade any young dudes, I wouldn’t mind it being Fits and McCray.
Well, well, Bailey with a welcome 2-RBI double. Nicely erases the horrible base running of Dom when he didn’t take third on that wild pitch, and almost got Koss picked off first. This clueless base running continues into head-scratching territory…
That was a big SO by Gage
Pfffttt! Well, that devolved into a shit show.
What are the odds Seymour gets through this appearance without giving up a dinger?
No dingers !
But, he got the hook leaving 2 on for Luchesi including messy walk and hit batter …
Gotta admit, I’ve always loved the drop G logo.
The season’s most dreaded scenario for the Giants.
Bases loaded, no outs.
Bailey, Gilbert, Ramos.
Pfffft….
The most inept team ever, bases loaded no outs, no runs. I will ask again why is Boobmel, not pinch hitting for Bailey? He either strikes out or grounds out, sometimes into a double play.
Good point Kev . . . No fucking idea why Bailey is playing, much less batting in situations like this. Pathetic that the Giants have this situation at the catcher position. His “framing” expertise is overrated.
AUGH!!!! Insane how bad we are with bases loaded!!!
Giants follow the dreaded bases loaded-no out situation with the equally dreaded runner on 2nd-no out situation, with predictable results.
I’m staying up for this shit? I’m a fucking idiot.
Nah. If so, then we’re all morons. Doubt that – too many successful people post here daily.