Dodgers 2019 NL West Outlook: San Francisco Giants

Over the next few weeks leading up to Spring Training (which is less than 40 days away), I will be going through each team in the NL West and recapping their 2018 (overall and against the Dodgers), analyzing their off-season thus far, and “Dodger Killers” on their rosters.

For the first installment in this series, I decided to talk about the San Francisco Giants, because the Giants are the least likely team in the NL West to make a ground-shaking move this offseason and of course because they are indeed the Dodgers’ fiercest rival.

The Giants had a terrible 2018. Almost everything that could go wrong for the Gigantes did go wrong. Injuries demolished the starting rotation and many of the veteran bats did not show up consistently, and this combination led to what was a 73-win season. However, their 2018 finish was in fact better than their finish in 2017, when they finished in last place with just 64 wins (but Bumgarner did hit two Opening Day home runs that year).

Due to an aging core and a lack of prospect depth at any level within their minor league system, the Giants have yet to declare what term they would like to use to describe their rebuild, but they did hire former-Dodger GM Farhan Zaidi to be their President of Baseball Operations early on in the off-season.