Bay Area sports is approaching full throttle with the Giants crumbling, the 49ers surging and the Warriors are on the verge of returning to training camp.
The Giants were eliminated from playoff contention on Tuesday night and many fans are calling for the team to fire President of Baseball Operations Farhan Zaidi and manager Gabe Kapler. Farhan has been getting flack lately for comments he said last offseason – implying San Francisco was tough to lure star players – after striking out on high-profile free agents yet again.
During Wednesday’s edition of 95.7 The Game’s “Willard & Dibs”, Tim Kawakami of The Athletic joined for a wide-ranging conversation and said that there are holes in Farhan’s logic.
"The 49ers are good because they got superstars,” Kawakami said. “The Warriors are good because they got superstars. They found a way to get them. This Giants regime is not new and has not figured out a way to get them. At some point, you're accountable for that."
During the 2022 owners’ meetings in November, Farhan raised some eyebrows when claiming that the market isn’t conducive to signing big players.
“I don’t know if we would say San Francisco is an idiosyncratic market, but I do think maybe it is more that way than it was 20 years ago,” Zaidi said. “I think it’s a little bit of a polarizing place among players in terms of the desire to play there. This is sort of totally independent of the competitive situation, but geography, politics, whatever.”
As we’ve seen in recent years with the Warriors, the Giants’ neighbors in Mission Bay, championship success is very much possible. The 49ers have also become a behemoth in Santa Clara, so maybe the problem isn’t The Bay.
The Giants mix-and-match philosophy and micromanagement doesn't seem to be the answer at McCovey Cove, despite chairman Greg Johnson's recent vote of confidence for Zaidi and Kapler.
"I think it's naïve for the chairman of the team to say they're for sure going to be back," Kawakami said. "I don't think it's for sure. ... I just think the combination of Zaidi and Kapler is wearing on the situation. It feels a little stale from the outside. It feels like it's not going anywhere, if anything it might be going backwards."