The Dodgers' division rival in San Francisco have taken a free fall nosedive into a pit of awfulness this offseason. The Giants have already been spurned twice by the year's biggest free agents who ultimately chose LA, and although they made a leap by signing Jung Hoo Lee, it seems like that's where the bulk of their spending will end. The Giants and president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi are coming up with any excuse not to go after the more expensive options left on the market.
The Giants' hopes have shifted to Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery, the cream of the remaining crop and the best options to bolster San Francisco's ailing or too-young rotation, but they might not be in the cards for them for much longer.
Zaidi's latest comments on the state of the Giants' payroll and their reasoning for not going after big free agents have devastated Giants fans and should have Dodgers fans even more reassured that the Giants will be far from fighting form during the upcoming season. During an appearance on the TK Show, Zaidi said that he's not only concerned about player payroll, but is also concerned about "our employees, not laying people off, providing benefits and resources to the people who work here..."
Farhan Zaidi’s latest comments show why Giants will never surpass Dodgers
Shifting the narrative from a blatant unwillingness to get embarrassed again after losing Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto to "we just care a lot about our employees" is an objectively ridiculous thing to do. The Giants were clearly willing to spend mere weeks ago (they reportedly offered Ohtani the exact deal he received in LA, and it's likely that they surpassed $300 million in their bidding for Yamamoto), but now their concern in going any higher than they've already gone is...layoffs? Cutting employee benefits? Sounds fake, but okay.
The Giants organization is worth billions of dollars, and presumably run competently enough that player payroll and staff payroll don't run up against each other, so it seems unlikely — to say the least — that the livelihoods of Giants employees will be threatened by a signing, no matter how much that signing costs.
At this point, it's hard to do anything but pity Giants fans, who have to deal with their most forward-facing executive publicly making up excuses for not adding to the team. For Dodgers fans, this is a win. The Giants are stooping lower and lower this offseason, making it clear that they're in no position to seriously compete with the Dodgers now or in the near future.