Kurtenbach: Derek Holland’s ripping of the Giants’ front office rings hollow
If it's clubhouse vs. front office in San Francisco, the former picked the wrong spokesperson.
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Giants pitcher Derek Holland is disgruntled and he needed everyone to hear about it.
But instead of achieving his goal of embarrassing the Giants’ front office and perhaps forcing a move, he’s only embarrassed himself and likely ensured he’ll stay with San Francisco.
Swing… and a miss.
Saturday, the Giants demoted Holland to the bullpen, skipping his next start in favor of Tyler Beede. It was a logical move — Holland has a 9.64 ERA in his last four starts.
Only Holland didn’t see the logic.
“To be honest, I have no idea what they’re doing,” Holland said Saturday, per KNBR. “And I don’t mean that by [manager Bruce Bochy] and them, it’s more for the front office.”
“We keep changing things. I get a fake injury, so I’m not happy about that. But at the end of the day, I’m going to do whatever they ask me to do.”
“I’m going to be here for my teammates, that’s what it’s all about,” he said. “You’re never going to understand for the most part. I’ll always be out there for those guys. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know what’s going on.”
Since Holland was keen to burn bridges on his way to the bench down the third-base line, he might as well have cut through the pretense: it’s become the clubhouse vs. the front office in San Francisco this season.
And frankly, there’s only one side Giants fans should be taking.
The first year of new President of Baseball Operations Farhan Zaidi’s tenure was always going to be a huge challenge. After all, he took over from a front office that couldn’t quite explain the methodology for winning three World Series titles in five years at the beginning of the decade, so it had no idea how to stay on top, much less how to stop a team that was in a tailspin come 2017.
This morale challenge, though, was predictable.
The strife from the locker room, I’m told, has been percolating for weeks, with little flare-ups popping up now and again. (Remember the tiffs from Madison Bumgarner and Jeff Samardzija about the Giants possibly using an opener?)
But it’s important to remember that the Giants have spent so much time in the National League West’s basement over the last three seasons that they should start paying rent. This is a team that has a lame-duck manager — kept around only out of respect to his Hall of Fame resume — and a roster chock full of players that are underperforming and overpaid.
The Giants have averaged a payroll of $191 million per season since 2017. They have only 153 wins in the last two-plus years.
That’d be comical if it wasn’t so sad.
As such, not a single soul on that squad still has the right to complain or tell anyone what the correct way to go about winning baseball games is.
That’s Zaidi’s job to determine, and right now he’s implementing his ideas.
And while he’s a warm, affable guy, that’s a cold, heartless, and slow process.
This era of baseball is being run by quants and that rubs a lot of players the wrong way.
Most of these new-school guys would probably be running a hedge fund if not for the chance to manage the portfolio of another billion-dollar company. Sure enough, the Giants’ transaction log looks like it’s being managed by a high-volume trading desk in New York. San Francisco has 34 actions on their MLB.com transactions page… in the first 11 days of May.
Zaidi might be part of the new school — he’s certainly brains over brawn — but he’s not a reformed Wall Street guy. No, he’s an academic in economics — a master of breaking down complex systems, pointing out inefficiencies, and creating proper models. Per an ESPN profile, when he first interviewed to get into baseball, he was just finished a study on the effect government investment in infrastructure can have on poverty rates in Ghana. Heady stuff.
Zaidi studied at MIT and Cal. He’s probably going to need all of that training and more to fix the mess that is the Giants.
So if Zaidi wants to try Connor Joe for 15 at-bats at the beginning of the season, so be it. Hell, bring in every quadruple-A player floating around baseball for a few games — maybe one shows they were actually a big leaguer all along. And it’s not as if those trial-balloon players could be any worse than the Giants’ regulars.
Yes, the turnover is tough on the clubhouse, but this isn’t a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. These Giants players lost the benefit of the doubt last year, so they can’t blame the constant roster shuffle for the losses this season.
And if Buster Posey — who has three rings on his fingers — knows that he shouldn’t be criticizing the front office, then Holland should have absolutely known.
It makes me wonder if Holland is trying to become part of that shuffle — if he’s trying to get himself shipped out of town by going scorched earth on a slow walk to the bench down the left-field line.
If so, then he’s made yet another bone-headed decision.
Clubhouse morale only matters for teams that are playing for something — teams that already have performing talent. The Giants are not one of those teams. So all Holland did Saturday was make it harder for Zaidi to move him.
After all, who’s going to want a guy who played in the most pitcher-friendly park in baseball and still posted a 6.75 ERA and then didn’t have enough respect for a Hall of Fame manager to not whine to the media and impugn the new head honcho when he was demoted?
Even if Zaidi can land a prospect for Holland, I can tell you that no one is going to pay full price for that kind of guy — I don’t care how many impressions he can do.
Yes, the Giants could release him — Zaidi could take a stand against insolence, but that’s not a smart thing to do. If the Giants are on the hook for the full $6.5 million of Holland’s contract no matter what, and they can’t get much for him via trade, then they might as well keep him around and get some innings out of his arm.
Yes, if Holland wanted out, he probably did the one thing that would keep him in.
Maybe if he pitched a little better and complained a little less, he’d be getting his wish right now.