by Richard Booroojian
I am asked the question a lot. Usually in the midst of a losing streak, or at the end of another tough year, somebody will pipe up and say "Well, if it makes you so miserable, why do you follow the Giants, anyway?" And then, after we cover that ground, the follow up is almost always "Well, it's supposed to be fun. Why are you always so negative about them?"
Pardon me while I bore you with a childhood memory.
I became a Giants fan on August 6, 1967. I was nine. The bug was passed on to me by an older cousin, and I got the disease hard. I was already interested in math and numbers, and baseball was the perfect vehicle to start stretching those skills. I would spend an hour each day pouring over the standings and the box scores, trying to understand the happenings of these games and, always, fantasizing about the great deeds the Giants were going to perform and how they would surely win the pennant (and, not infrequently, how I, despite being a scrawny little kid, would hit a home run to win it for them because, hey, it's Giants baseball and anything can happen, right?). Soon, I discovered the long history of the game and all the records and statistics, and I read book after book about Babe Ruth and Willie Mays and turn-of-the-century heroes. I memorized all of the World Series results, even the nineteenth-century ones. And, of course, I paid careful attention to all the Giants results, especially those since the Giants had moved to San Francisco in 1958. I couldn't help but notice that the Giants had done pretty well during those years.
My parents were perhaps bemused by this sudden and total infatuation, but they went along with it gamely. Soon it was understood that I would always have a transistor radio hanging out of my ear and that any conversation with me would need to deal with the subject of the Giants at some length. However, the issue of my terrible flash temper came up rather frequently, especially because I treated each Giants' loss like an unexpected death in the family, with a lot of wailing, cursing, slamming of doors, and kicking of furniture. Early in the 1972 season, during another installment of a long series of discussions on this topic, my mom asked my how I could be happy in life if I was going to keep getting so upset all the time.
"No problem," I replied. "The Giants always win more than they lose, so I'll always be happy more than I'll be unhappy." (This is an actual quote. Pivotal comments like this tend to stay with you.)
My father laughed quietly at this, but we resolved the issue for that day and it wasn't until much later that I thought about his reaction.
Since that time, you could make a decent argument that the Giants have been one of the worst franchises in baseball. In fact, I will endeavor to prove in here that, except perhaps for the expansion San Diego Padres, they were the most disappointing franchise in the old six-team NL West configuration during the period of 1969 to 1993. With a few rare exceptions, nearly every Giants' season was filled with front-office incompetence and on-field ineptitude. Never bad enough to be lovable (which is, I suppose, something that the Cubs' fans can hang on to), the Giants instead were usually numbingly mediocre and nobody ever seemed to just do something about it. It was a horrifyingly disillusioning thing to watch, for example, a rising star like Bobby Bonds be traded for Bobby Murcer, only to see Murcer bag it on the field, complain constantly and high-tail it out of town at the first opportunity. For a teenager totally infatuated with a sport and a team, it was like being spit on by a loved one.
(And, as a postscript to this little memory, the cousin who passed this on to me dumped the Giants after 1968, no longer able to stomach their late season fades and their foolish trades. He has spent the last 29 years making fun of me for staying loyal to the team. I once asked him who he roots for now and he said "Whoever the Giants are playing against." Talk about negative.)
This article will not attempt to determine why we keep going through this. I accept the fact that I am a Giants fan, with all the baggage and frustration that goes with it. Instead, this article will recap on a somewhat general level as to why we are always so disillusioned, and why we have all been conditioned to expect disaster to strike and the Giants to disappoint us. In short, I will try to shed some light on why I, at least, am always so negative about them.
The Root of the Problem
My interest in baseball coincided pretty closely with the start of divisional play in 1969. I am going to make the assumption that most current active Giants fans likely to read this also started around that time or later. (Of course, it is hard for me to believe that the Giants won more than maybe 20 to 30 new fans during their putrid series of performances in the mid- to late '70s, but whatever.) Thus, it is my assumption that our expectations of the Giants have been formed almost exclusively during the divisional era, colored somewhat by what we read and heard about the legendary 3M teams (Mays, McCovey, and Marichal) of 1958-1968. If we are too negative, the genesis is likely to lie somewhere in the period starting after 1968.
Based on those predivisional years, though, we had every reason to expect quite a bit from the Giants, and I think these expectations carried over for quite some time even after they were proven invalid. During that period the Giants had the best record in the National League, 24.5 games ahead of the Dodgers and 33 ahead of the Cards. The Giants were only two games behind the Yankees over that time. They fielded four future Hall of Fame players (Mays, McCovey, Marichal, and Perry) for much of the period. They had a winning record all 11 years, won 90 or more games four straight years, and had an average ending position in the standings of 2.73, nearly a full position better than the next-best Dodgers (and remember, this was in an eight- to ten-team league). Basically, they were in almost every pennant race and they delivered a quality baseball product to their fans. The franchise seemed a great horse to hitch a cart to back then.
Of course, in those 11 years, they only won one pennant and no World Series, and in most years they usually found a way to fall just short, often by fading late in the season. We now know that the seeds of their future troubles were being sown in that period, but those factors were being compensated for by the quality of their stars. In the latter half of the '60s, the Giants traded much of their roster depth, usually for talent that performed at a much lower level than what they gave up. During that decade, the Giants shipped out quality players such as Manny Mota, Mike McCormick, Felipe Alou, Matty Alou, Tom Haller, and Orlando Cepeda, and sought and got luminaries like Len Gabrielson, Jack Fisher, Ray Sadecki, and Joe Gibbon in exchange (these were not exact trade counterparts, but they certainly give the flavor of the exchanges). The Cepeda-for-Sadecki trade was particularly egregious; Cepeda helped the Cardinals win back-to-back pennants and Sadecki never lived up to the pressure of the trade and contributed almost nothing. In fact, the Giants pitching after 1962 was always razor thin (usually just Marichal and Perry, with occasional decent years by Bob Bolin and one by Mike McCormick). No wonder they couldn't hold a lead in September, especially against the usually strong pitching and well-constructed rosters of the Dodgers and Cardinals.
Once divisional play started, the Giants got worse fast. By the mid-'70s, the Reds and Dodgers had clearly moved far beyond the Giants as their rosters got better and the Giants' deteriorated rapidly. Free agency didn't help, but the Giants did more to shoot themselves in the foot than free agency did (they even supplied one key part of the Big Red Machine by giving away George Foster to Cincinnati). Their fading stars were traded off for nothing, and most of the young, up-and-coming talent was also traded off for little value. Weak ownership and a succession of poor managers did nothing to help a team with little depth and no real ability to improve on or even sustain the rare success they did have.
Why? It is clear that in the early '70s, then-owner Horace Stoneham was dumping players for cash considerations, but the economic factors that would have squeezed him (dismal attendance and, late in his tenure, pending free agency) were not so much in evidence in the mid-'60s. I think (without knowing, because I wasn't really there) that whoever was calling the personnel shots at that point (probably some combination of Stoneham and Chub Feeney) was just really bad at it (and this after they had proven they knew nothing about stadiums when they allowed Candlestick Park to be foisted on the franchise). They depleted the roster, got poor value out of all the talent the farm system was providing, and just screwed everything up badly. Then, when attendance started to decline, they felt they had to cut costs more and the whole team spiraled down. However, unlike the current Expos franchise, which is pretty good at picking up young talent for the veterans it can no longer afford, the Giants almost never picked up anyone useful in the last decade of Stoneham's stewardship. Finally, the cost cutting destroyed the previously solid farm system, and the franchise's fate was sealed. They have been climbing uphill, and slipping more often than not, ever since.
A little later I will recap how the team was managed and operated during certain key periods in the Giants' history since 1968 (paying special attention to the early '70s, when it all started going very wrong), but first let's take a look at the overall team performance in the National League West, and evaluate how the Giants, the winningest National League team in the years prior, fared against their competition in the years that, for most of us, are the ones that counted.
Twenty-Five Year Standings
I'm sure that someone has done a better analysis of what factors might indicate whether a franchise has been a successful one, but let me propose that the following factors are reasonably solid indicators, especially if all are present over a long period. Remember, I'm not talking about one or two years, but in this case the 25 years between 1969 and 1993 (at which point the divisions were redefined):
It's no surprise that the Giants haven't really stacked up well in any of these categories. As mentioned above, the Reds and Dodgers have clearly outperformed them on all levels, but I believe a solid case can be made that the Braves and Astros have also done a better job of performing for their fans. Remember, the Giants were the best team in the NL the decade before this all started. To say that only the Padres were clearly worse than one of the most venerable franchises in baseball history is pretty sad.
From 1969 through 1993, the overall records of NL West teams (excluding the Rockies, who were only there for one year) were as follows:
W L GB Ave Fin Div Pen Upper .500+ 90+
Reds 2,151 1,833 -- 2.708 7 5 17 18 10
Dodgers 2,143 1,844 9.5 2.542 6 5 17 19 10
Astros 1,999 1,990 154.5 3.542 2 0 12 15 2
Giants 1,992 1,998 162.0 3.542 3 1 12 13 5
Braves 1,891 2,084 255.5 4.000 5 2 9 9 4
Padres 1,783 2,203 369.0 4.542 1 1 6 9 1
Ave Fin means average finishing position, excluding the 1981 split season (ties round up)
Div and Pen mean divisions and pennants won, respectively (the former excluding 1981)
Upper means upper division finishes, excluding the split season of 1981
.500+ means annual records of .500 or better (1981 tracked as one full season)
90+ means seasons with 90 or more wins
Note that I have included the 1981 won-lost records in the above,
but otherwise did not attempt to determine or include the final
standing positioning in the above due to the confusion of the
split-season results and how to interpret them. Also note that,
all things being equal, each team should have averaged approximately
four division titles and two pennants in this period, and more
if you exclude the expansion Padres.
Let's evaluate the Giants against each of these teams and see how they compare based on my three factors discussed above. Why? Because the realization that most of these teams performed better than the Giants added to my frustration as a fan. It's bad enough that the Giants were a pretty poor team in the '70s, but it's worse when you compare them to, say, the Dodgers' results over the same period. Context adds to the pain.
Against all of this, the Giants do not stack up well. Obviously they won far fewer titles and had a much poorer won-lost record, but it is that 10-year stretch of excellence that really makes the Reds stand out to me. The best run the Giants could put together was a five-year stretch of winning records (two with 90 or more wins), and they had four stretches of two or more losing seasons in a row, compared to just one such stretch for the Reds. In other words, the Reds gave their fans a memorable and almost dynastic run to enjoy, and thereafter never left the fans out in the cold for very long. The Giants did neither of these things.
Much of the Reds' success was accomplished under Sparky Anderson, but they also got fairly good results under John McNamara, Lou Piniella, and even Pete Rose. For the most part, their talent evaluation and farm system production has been above average, so they could retool quickly and compete regularly.
The Dodgers' overall winning percentage in these 25 years was .537. Between 1969 and 1983, the Dodgers had winning records in all but one year, and they won 90 or more games seven times. Only the Reds kept them from dominating the division (and vice versa, I suppose). The only time the Giants even came close to participating in a Reds/Dodgers race in those years was in 1978, and after players of both those teams belittled the Giants' chances of hanging in there for most of the summer, the Giants proved them right by sinking like a rock in September and then falling back into their losing ways the next year.
Even more than the Reds, the Dodgers' organization set them above the Giants at every turn. Two well-respected managers (Alston and Lasorda) provided a high level of continuity, and they always had great pitching, a solid lineup, and a farm system that never quit. We like to complain about what an advantage the Dodgers have because of their big attendance base, but back then they weren't throwing big gobs of money at free agents (in fact, I believe they were one of the last teams to even get involved in free agency in the '70s). No, the Dodgers mostly built their teams from the talent in their farm system, just as they mostly do today, and over the last few decades, that farm system has made the Giants' system look pretty anemic. Even in those stretches where the Giants were putting out decent young talent (remember, they had a four-year string of Sporting News Rookies of the Year in the '70s), they could always be counted on to dump it all for lesser or even no value before it fully blossomed (and, of course, before it would start to command a large salary). The Dodgers stuck with their talent, and they won.
I think some of the criticism Brian Sabean takes today stems from the inner conviction Giant fans have that their management never plans ahead or does anything to set the team up as a perennial contender (a conviction that Sabean's actions do little to dispel, no matter how strong his moves night otherwise be). This conviction is well grounded in historical fact. The Giants have never dumped their aging veterans for young talent except by accident; instead, they usually rode them down or lost them to free agency or disaffection. The farm system was gutted early on and has never been satisfactorily rebuilt. I would have gladly suffered the '70s if the result had been a solid young team ready to compete throughout the '80s. Instead, after all that poor play, all we had to show for it was the likes of Jack Clark (who hated it here) and Johnnie LeMaster. Hardly a Big Red Machine, and certainly not a reasonable payoff for the suffering we endured.
Another thing about the Braves that gives me pause is that any time they competed head to head with the Giants for the division crown, they won. Granted, it didn't happen often, and the Giants had some good years in which the Braves weren't a factor. However, three times the teams went down to the wire, and in all three years (1969, 1982, and 1993) the Braves emerged on top. Somehow, it bothers me as a fan that we never really beat them, and I think it factors in here.
In the final analysis, though, it comes down to division titles and pennants, of which the Braves had more of both, and that strong run at the end (which continues unabated), which more than matched any run the Giants put together. To me, those factors outweigh the poorer won-lost record, and the evolution of the team from doormat to powerhouse teaches a lesson the Giants could and should have learned from. Thus, a team that should have rated lower than the Giants instead rates higher, which is a very sobering fact.
First, we must remember that the Astros were one of the first expansion franchises. It is hard to remember this in the fog of time, but when divisional play first started, the franchise was only eight years old. Further, back then, you couldn't buy a winner like today's expansion teams do. There was no free agency, and the established teams were stacked. It wasn't reasonable to assume that an expansion team in the '60s and early '70s could get on its feet in five years or less as they can today. Of the first set of expansion teams, the Mets took eight years to get into a pennant race, the Angels took 18 (after a surprisingly solid second year) and the Senators/Rangers took 14. Of the 1969 expansion teams, the Royals took five years, the Pilots/Brewers took 10, the Padres 16, and the Expos 11. I think it is reasonable in retrospect to grant these teams 10 years of slack before they start getting compared to teams that had been around for a century or more. That would cut out 1969 to 1971.
Unfair to the Giants? They had one of the best records in baseball those 10 years ending in 1971. No reason they shouldn't have been able to withstand the adjustment.
Also, in the table above, the Astros didn't get credit for any postseason activity in 1981, since I threw out that data because it was a confusing split season. They were in there, however, and though they lost to the Dodgers in the divisional playoffs, their fans got the excitement of seeing them in the postseason, which the Giants' fans did not. Let's adjust for that in the division title column as well. Now the table looks like this:
W L GB Ave Fin Div Pen Upper .500+ 90+
Astros 1,760 1,743 -- 3.429 3 0 12 14 2
Giants 1,726 1,778 34.5 3.762 2 1 9 10 3
In this context, the Astros were the better team. Not a ton better, but better. They were never flashy and they rarely dominated (they did not have a run even as good as the Giants' five-year stretch from 1986-1990, but, as we have already noted, this hardly puts the Giants in rarefied air in comparison), but they played a much more consistent brand of ball and they always were hanging around (it is interesting if not particularly meaningful to note that the Astros finished with exactly a .500 record four times, something no other team did more than twice, and which the Giants never did even once). I will concede that they were more boring than the Giants, and I wouldn't have been that interested in following them, but they were better.
But consider this. Despite being a newly formed expansion team in the first year of this period, despite all of the bad seasons, despite all of the dysfunctional organizational stuff, despite announcers becoming managers and a player accusing the owner of killing people with his hamburgers, despite all of that, the Padres were only on average 8.28 games behind the Giants in the standings. Toss out the first 10 years of the Padres' existence and the average spread was only 3.07 games. In other words, if the Padres were truly a boat anchor, the Giants sure weren't floating comfortably above the surface.
By the way, since the four-team division format was started in 1994, the Giants have the worst record in the division, and that is even after winning the division in 1997.
Some might question what these comparisons have proved. I think they prove that the Giants, during our formative fandom years, were not a very good franchise, whether evaluated on their own or in comparison to the only teams that really mattered. And let me repeat once more that the franchise had entered into this period as the long-standing best team in the National League. We had reason to believe this was a great team to follow, and it turned out not to be true by any stretch of the imagination. We're still fans, but not because the Giants won us to the cause by their on-field performance. Through a long series of disappointing seasons, we have been conditioned to expect the team to perform poorly against its competition. And I think we are fundamentally pretty unhappy about it, and it shows.
A Brief History of Time
Poor Brian Sabean. He leaves the New York Yankees as a highly regarded young executive and with the reputation of being a good judge of young talent. He waits patiently behind the paternal (if not particularly dynamic) Bob Quinn, watching the team he will one day take over go slowly downhill. Finally, Quinn steps aside and Sabean takes charge. His roster is in shambles and, rather than sitting and letting things get worse, he makes a dramatic move, trading Matt Williams for four players. And, as we all know, he is publicly excoriated by outraged fans. Trust me, he eventually pleads, I am not an idiot. Giants fans do not believe him.
Why not? The team did stink in 1996, and something needed to be done. Trading Williams hurt the fans' feelings badly, but the reaction seemed to many to be far beyond what the action called for. Sabean didn't seem to know what hit him, and I'm not sure he understands it to this day.
Let me explain it to him. It's Orlando Cepeda for Ray Sadecki. It's Gaylord Perry for Sam McDowell. It's George Foster for Frank Duffy. It's Royce Clayton for three pitching losers. It's Jack Clark for Jose Uribe and three more losers. It's Steve Frey and Jose Bautista and Rennie Stennett and Manny Trillo and a long list of disappointing players who rode into town due to the efforts of some really bad general managers. It's hiring Dave Bristol. To put it bluntly, the list of stupid things the team has done since it moved here is so long that we don't trust our team's front office anymore. Sabean never had a chance. His team's fans have been conditioned to assume he made a mistake.
You can break down the years since 1969 into several logical segments, not so much with regard to performance (which was usually not very good anyway) but rather as to how the team was being operated and what the direction of the franchise was. Not surprisingly, the direction changed frequently and almost randomly, as is often the case with a franchise going sideways for long periods of time. Usually, though, the one common denominator was that in whatever was going on, the Giants were getting the worst of it.
In designating these segments and discussing them below, I am not trying to write a history of the Giants during the period. Instead, I am trying to identify where things went wrong and which of these wrong turns most affected our attitudes in ways that still reverberate today. Much of the unhappiness Giant fans have felt over the years was directly aimed at the poor player transactions being made and some of the suspect decisions that were made in hiring and firing managers. To complain about these today is fair, because the cumulative impact of all these poor moves was to weaken the franchise going forward and to disillusion us about the likelihood of things getting better. I firmly believe we are still disillusioned to this day, and it has very little to do (at least as yet) with Brian Sabean.
A Last Hurrah (1969-1971) -- Managers: Clyde King ('69-'70), Charlie Fox ('70-'71)
The big four were all still here in full, if aging, glory. Well, Mays and Marichal were starting to wind down; McCovey was probably at the peak of his career in his MVP year of 1969 and Perry, as we know, still had many years left in him. However, the Giants were starting to bring some youth into their lineup and it was working out pretty well indeed.
Bobby Bonds made his debut in 1968. George Foster first appeared in 1969. Chris Speier and Dave Kingman were both rookies in 1971. Gary Matthews and Garry Maddox were lighting it up in the minors. Things weren't quite as bright on the pitching side, but Ron Bryant and Steve Stone started their careers during this stretch. Throw Gaylord Perry in there, and the team seemed to be in pretty good shape for the years ahead.
Stoneham Sells Out (1972-1975) -- Managers: Fox ('72-'74), Wes Westrum ('74-'75)
It's hard for me to understand, in retrospect, exactly what Horace Stoneham thought he was doing. It had already become clear that he was not a good judge of talent, if the '60s are considered as evidence. However, during this period, his increasingly difficult financial situation put him into a position where he was forced to make a lot of moves, and because of the organization's apparent lack of player evaluation skills, pretty much each and every move he made was bad, bad, bad!
This was when it all went wrong. From defending champions to doormats, from a productive farm system to an ailing one, from a proud tradition to an embarrassing one; Stoneham accomplished all of this in four spectacularly incompetent and panicked years. Mays, McCovey, Marichal, and Perry were all shipped out. The youth was dealt for little value. The team did nothing to prepare to take advantage of pending free agency. And then, after completing the destruction, Stoneham did his best to sell out the city and the fans by peddling the team to a Toronto brewery.
You could sort of accept the Mays and Marichal trades. Letting Mays go to New York was a sentimental act that had some emotional merit. Marichal was close to done; it's hard to know today what his fair market value truly was, though maybe he would have been worth more if sent out sooner. The fact that he went solely for cash that clearly was soon squandered leaves a bad taste in my mouth, though.
But as for the rest, oh my. There is no better condemnation of these transactions than just listing them:
Except for the last (because Bryant was clearly damaged goods at that point), I wouldn't have done any of these deals at the time or in retrospect, at least from a talent standpoint. Sam McDowell was a total bust. Williams, Bradley, and Caldwell were mediocre at best. Thomas, Murcer, and Montanez were malcontents, and Montanez made J.T. Snow look like Lou Gehrig. On the other hand, Perry and Stone both had Cy Young awards in their futures, and Foster, Maddox, Bonds, Kingman, and even McCovey (granted, not until after he was back with the Giants) had more productive years and pennant races in front of them than anything the incoming players provided to the Giants.
What makes it really frustrating is that the farm system was experiencing its last hurrah and still was providing some decent players to the team. The Giants had four Sporting News Rookies of the Year during this period, and Maddox, Matthews, Ed Halicki, John Montefusco, Randy Moffitt, Gary Lavelle, Jim Barr, Dave Rader, and Johnnie LeMaster all made their debuts. If the Giants had simply kept what they started with and added to it, they would have had a pretty decent team. Granted, not the Big Red Machine, but a competitive one.
Consider the Giants primary lineup in 1975, per Total Baseball:
1B -- Willie Montanez
2B -- Darrel Thomas
SS -- Chris Speier (who was traded in 1977 for Tim Foli)
3B -- Steve Ontiveros
OF -- Bobby Murcer
OF -- Von Joshua
OF -- Gary Matthews (who was gone soon after to free agency)
C -- Dave Rader
P -- John Montefusco
P -- Jim Barr
P -- Ed Halicki
P -- Pete Falcone
P -- Mike Caldwell
Bullpen -- Randy Moffitt, Gary Lavelle, and Charlie Williams
Now consider what it could have been if they had done nothing:
1B -- McCovey or Kingman
2B -- ?? (it wouldn't have been hard to find someone better than
Thomas)
SS -- Speier
3B -- ?? (this was always a trouble area for the Giants until
Matt Williams locked it up)
OF -- Bonds
OF -- Maddox
OF -- Matthews
OF -- Foster
C -- Rader (he was a Rookie of the Year and looked good at that
point)
P -- Perry
P -- Stone
P -- Barr
P -- Halicki
P -- Montefusco
Bullpen -- Moffitt, Lavelle, C. Williams, Falcone
(Jack Clark and Bob Knepper were in the wings and would have provided
some additional support, though the system went dry after this
and didn't recover for quite awhile. That's another problem that
Stoneham left to the franchise.)
Again, not a dominating team, but a lot better than what they had. Perhaps one could trade the extra first baseman and outfielder to fill the voids at second and third and, if done with sober reflection, possibly solve those problems for years to come. (Heck, in 1976 the Giants picked up Darrell Evans and Marty Perez for Willie Montanez; it couldn't have been that hard to come up with better value for Maddox or Kingman). By the way, to add insult to injury, Speier and Matthews left town soon after as well, netting only Tim Foli.
Sure, some good things happened. Halicki and Montefusco (in 1976) threw no-hitters (we haven't seen one from a Giants' pitcher since). Ron Bryant had a great year in 1973 (24-12) before he had a swimming-pool accident and saw his career shortened. There were all of those Rookies of the Year.
And in the end, we had nothing to show for it except a bad lineup full of unpleasant players to watch and listen to, a broken farm system, a string of sub-.500 records, and an owner who, in the end, betrayed Giants fans without a backwards glance as he walked away from the mess he had made. Twenty-two years later, I still have not gotten over it, and I still look at every trade suspicious that it's another George Foster for Frank Duffy (Frank Duffy!) mistake all over again.
Spec the Wreck (1976-1980) -- Managers: Bill Rigney ('76), Joe Altobelli ('77-'79), Date Bristol ('79-'80)
First the blessing: Horace Stoneham was gone for good. Bob Lurie and Bud Herseth bought the team at the eleventh hour during the winter of 1975, saving it for San Francisco.
Unfortunately, the dugout was a mess, the pitching was thin, the farm system was broken, the stadium was still terrible, and having a lineup full of stars was a long-forgotten dream. To solve these problems, the new owners turned to Spec Richardson, who had been a caretaker assigned by the league while Stoneham was bailing out. The bulk of my preconceived notion about Spec Richardson was that he came off as a better General Manager than Marvin Milkes in Jim Bouton's Ball Four (I guess in retrospect this may have been a lukewarm endorsement). His reputation with the Giants was propped up for a time on the strength of one brilliant trade for Vida Blue before the 1978 season, which contributed to his winning an Executive of the Year award, but by the time he was fired in 1981, he was almost universally vilified by the fans and the media. However, he did a better job than Tom Haller, the GM who followed him, and at least the trades he was forced to make netted some value for the team, unlike most of Stoneham's efforts late in his tenure. True, Richardson didn't end up accomplishing much of enduring value for the Giants during his time here, but he was not nearly as bad as another contemporary Bay Area GM (the execrable Joe Thomas of the 49ers).
As I consider the evolution of the Giants, my low opinion of Spec has risen a few notches (not nearly to Al Rosen's level, but at least out of the basement). He started with such a terrible hand that it may have been asking too much from anyone to sort it out in just a few years. Even Al Rosen in the mid-'80s had some young talent to fall back on. The only enduring major leaguers the farm system provided during this time were Jack Clark and Bob Knepper (Larry Herndon, Greg Minton, and Terry Whitfield, all of whom had some decent seasons with the team, arrived via trade), and considering how little there was to work with after the 1975 season, it is hardly surprising that nothing gelled for awhile. Once the team did start to come together in 1978, Richardson wasn't able to build it to a higher level, but his hand was so constantly forced by unhappy players that it is harder than I expected to condemn him for it. In fact, except for one really horrible day of free agency signings, his player movements weren't really all that bad. Not great, but not terrible.
The enduring image from this era is of unhappy Giant players. Nobody wanted to come here, and most who did were anxious to get out. Indeed, this may be the one era in recent Giants history where the players did more to harm the team than the front office did, and it was one of those eras in which I really didn't like many Giant players at all. Any number of moves were dictated by the need to move out a malcontent or try to salvage something from a pending free agent, and this got in the way of pulling together a long term plan to improve. Consider the following trades or actions:
That is a lot of movement forced by unhappy or problem players, especially for back then. In some respects, it is impressive that the Giants got as much as they did. Evans, Ivie, Holland, Alexander, and perhaps Whitson were decent pickups. Add to them Vida Blue (obtained from the A's in a brilliant trade for seven marginal players) and Jeff Leonard (along with Dave Bergman for Mike Ivie in 1981) and you would have to say Richardson did fairly well under some adverse circumstances, with only the Knepper trade being a total loser.
However, he made what was for years the de facto standard of bad free agency signings when he picked up second baseman Rennie Stennett before the 1980 season. Stennett was a total bust. Also signed on the same day were Milt May and Jim Wohlford; one can only wonder wistfully what might have happened if the Giants had dedicated the not-inconsiderable funds those three had cost to someone who could have actually helped the team a little.
All of this positive revisionist thinking about Richardson is somewhat dependent on the assumption that Richardson wasn't solely responsible for hiring managers in this period. (I base this on two factors: first, that The Giants Diary repeatedly refers to Lurie making these decisions, and second, my memory that when Al Rosen was finally hired, Lurie indicated that he would defer to him on these decisions going forward, implying he hadn't in the past. All right, not strong evidence, but considering the general lack of good judgment Lurie exhibited in his years owning the team, it is tempting to believe responsibility for these moves was at least partially his as well.) This is a critical distinction, because the franchise's managerial hirings and firings were particularly vexing during this period. After a one-year public relations farewell tour of Bill Rigney, the team showed creativity in hiring Joe Altobelli, a highly regarded minor league manager, for the 1977 season. Altobelli led the team to a couple of decent results (especially in 1978, where the team was surprisingly in contention until September), but he never really conquered the morale problems that plagued the team, and when the team tanked in 1979, he was fired. Altobelli proved to a decent manager (he won a World Series in 1983 with Baltimore), but he was probably too low key to overcome all the problems in the clubhouse. Nor did he have a lot of help; three of his four coaches were Dave Bristol, Tom Haller, and Jim Davenport. All three were major contributors to the coming bad times.
Altobelli was replaced by Bristol, who had managed three previous teams with little success (in fact, he was able to keep the early stage Big Red Machine under 90 wins for three straight seasons, only to see them win 102 games the year after he was replaced) and his teams had finished sixth in the five prior seasons he had managed. Not a good resume, and Bristol didn't have any more success here (although thanks to the Padres, he didn't finish last). Still, his worst acts didn't relate so much to wins and losses as they did player relations. His dustup with John Montefusco is still grist for the mill, and he shamed himself by not starting Willie McCovey in the Hall of Famer's final game before retiring.
Still, when Bristol was fired, the team hired Frank Robinson in 1981 (just before Richardson himself was terminated), and Robinson was to breathe new life into the franchise before Tom Haller completely undercut his efforts. That was a good hire, though Haller soon doomed Robinson's efforts just when things were starting to work again.
If Richardson had been a better GM, the Giants may have done a lot better, but if he hadn't inherited a team run down by so much incompetence, they also would have done better. Time has not treated his memory well, and his name is considered synonymous with poor personnel decisions, but at least he didn't foolishly rip up his team like his predecessor and successor did. I would have liked to have seen him bring better players into the team, but it could have been worse.
Not that this made any of us feel better at the time. And no matter what, he was still a lower tier GM.
The Giants Hit Bottom (1981-1985) -- Managers: Frank Robinson ('81-'84), Danny Ozark ('84), Jimmy Davenport ('85), Roger Craig ('85)
This was a heartbreaking period, mostly because it started out so well. New manager Frank Robinson and newly signed free agent Joe Morgan helped the team pull together during the strike year of 1981, and they were competitive in the second half of that season. Despite a lot of useless tinkering by Haller during the winter (he traded for, among others, pitchers Dan Schatzeder, Mike Chris, Rich Gale, and Bill Laskey, of which only Laskey was ever worth anything to the team), the team was even better in 1982 and competed in the race to the bitter end for the first time since 1971. Thanks to a late season 10-game winning streak, the team stayed in the race until the last weekend, then capped the year with an inspirational home run by Joe Morgan to knock the Dodgers out of the race on the last day of the season. This is many fans' favorite Giants season.
To make sure there was no chance it would be repeated, Haller foolishly tore the heart out of the team that winter. By trading Joe Morgan and Al Holland to the Phillies for Mike Krukow and Mark Davis, he crushed the Giants' hopes of competing and gave the Phillies what they needed to win the pennant. Krukow did evolve into a fan favorite, but surely he could have been obtained at less cost than this. With no leader (and also nobody around to take over the second base job), the team sunk back under .500 and soon the player sniping that was so pleasantly absent in 1982 was back in force. Haller, to fill the void left by Morgan, signed Manny Trillo to play second after the 1983 season; there may have never been a less motivated player to wear a San Francisco Giants uniform. Haller wasn't done; he traded for Al Oliver before the 1984 season (who responded with a grand total of zero home runs in 93 games before he was shipped out in midseason) to play first base. With Oliver, Trillo, Johnnie LeMaster, and Joel Youngblood, the team may have had the worst infield in their 100-plus-year history. Jack Clark was unhappy, and his sniping eventually did Robinson in. Robby was fired late in the season and replaced by Danny Ozark.
Why did Haller do it? The team was responding to Robinson in 1982, and there was no sense from Robinson that he wanted to make these moves. There were some mutterings in the Bay Area media after Robinson was fired that Haller did all of this to undercut Robinson so he could bring in his own guy (which proved to be Jim Davenport) to manage. If true, Haller threw aside one of the best managers the Giants ever had in San Francisco, and he cut short what could have been a magical time for no good reason but maybe his own ego. When Al Rosen came to the team in 1985, he quickly jettisoned almost everything Haller had acquired, of so little value did he find it.
And all of this wasn't even the worst of his moves. After the 1984 season, he traded Jack Clark, who was the only real star the team had at that point, for Jose Uribe, David Green, Dave LaPoint, and Gary Rajsich. Of course, Clark led the Cardinals into the World Series that year (this had by now become standard for name players dealt by the Giants in one-sided trades), while all the Giants ever got out of this was a steady but light-hitting shortstop in Uribe. LaPoint was another bad apple in the clubhouse (one has to wonder if Haller liked that kind of player, because he went after so many of them), while Green was, if anything, even worse at first base than Oliver had been. Left holding the bag was new manager Jim Davenport, and he proved completely incapable of handling the job. Players fought and were insubordinate to the coaches and manager, and the team lost and lost. By the time Haller and Davenport were finally fired, the team was on course for the first 100-loss year in the franchise's proud history. It had come all the way to this: from a team that was the best team in the NL the decade before divisional play started, the Giants had devolved into one of the laughingstocks of baseball, and all at the hands of two of the players instrumental to the teams' successes of the '60s. And, to cap it all off, Bob Lurie, with his usual impeccable timing, threatened to move the team after the season was over.
What an embarrassing mess. Why any of us remained Giants fans after that debacle is beyond me. As for Haller, there is no need for revisionist thinking there. He really was the worst GM in San Francisco Giants history. In fact, the whole thing was so bad that it's painful to think about, and there really isn't much more reason to talk about it here.
The Renaissance (1986-1992) -- Manager: Roger Craig
For the first time in a generation, and for the only time in all my years of fandom, the Giants franchise finally worked reasonably well for a sustained period of time.
Most of this can be attributed to General Manager Al Rosen. Manager Roger Craig was a great antidote to the malaise that had plagued the team in the decade prior, but it was Rosen who finally established a workable plan and stuck to it. For five years, it all worked well. Eventually, when injuries took a toll and the farm system had dried out some, the team had a couple of poor years. However, two down years aren't an unreasonable price to pay for five good years. In fact, I believe a good franchise today accepts that fact that it is necessary to use the occasional down period to recharge the roster after keeping a team together long enough to compete effectively for a sustained stretch. Rosen got the Giants into contention quickly after he took over, and when they started to fall back, he began to retool the team once again. Unfortunately, Bob Lurie ultimately interrupted that effort.
Most people are familiar with the Giants' great run from 1986-1990, during which time they won two divisions and one pennant, and had five straight years over .500 (the only time they have accomplished that during the divisional era). The formula was pretty straightforward: Rosen dumped all the players who didn't want to be there and replaced them for the most part with younger players who did. He then took most of the remaining talent in the farm system and traded it for mature (well, very mature) pitching. Rick Reuschel and Don Robinson and Steve Bedrosian nearer-the-end-than-the-beginning kind of mature. He also landed Dave Dravecky (as well as 1989 MVP Kevin Mitchell) in exchange for two flaky players in Chris Brown and Mark Davis, which was a great trade. With that staff, with valuable pickups like Brett Butler and even Candy Maldonado and with solid young players like Will Clark, Mitchell, Robby Thompson, Jose Uribe, and Matt Williams out on the field, the Giants were a darned good team. They didn't dominate the West, but they were the best team in it during that period.
And even in 1991 and 1992, they weren't terrible, though they finished under .500 both years. Granted, all those mature pitchers Rosen had picked up in the late '80s had moved on or were lost to physical ailments, but John Burkett and Rod Beck were arriving on the scene and Rosen made what proved to be one of the better trades in recent Giants' history when he traded a fading Kevin Mitchell for Bill Swift, Mike Jackson, and Dave Burba. Uribe was replaced by future All-Star Royce Clayton. The farm system depth was very thin, but talent was still trickling up from it. The team was not in that bad a shape. As was quickly proved, all it needed was a catalyst to get back on top.
Before we leave this period, though, it is necessary to point a disgruntled finger at the weakest link in Giants' management during this otherwise successful stretch. That weak link was Bob Lurie. Lord knows the Giants needed a new ballpark. Lord knows the politicians in San Francisco were (and still are) a particularly dense lot. Lord knows that the Bay Area special interests were incapable of seeing past the tip of their collective noses. Lord knows Lurie must have been nearly out of his mind after losing four elections, several of them by razor thin margins, in his attempts to get the new stadium that the franchise so desperately needed to survive and thrive.
But I remember that the Giants were in contention in 1992 when Lurie pulled the rug out from under the team by selling it to interests in Florida (and to an idiot who wanted to hire Tommy Lasorda as his manager, no less). The players floundered badly thereafter, bestowing on Roger Craig his worst season as the Giants' manager as a going-away present, but it's kind of hard to blame them. The franchise was suddenly in chaos once again, and for once it wasn't because of stupid trades or a bad manager. Bob Lurie, a man whose profession was commercial real estate development, couldn't figure out a way to finance a stadium that would fly in his home city, and once again, like Horace Stoneham before him, he was content to let the fans pay the ultimate price for his incompetence. People tend to look back on Bob Lurie and appreciate him as a nice guy who saved the team in 1975. I look at him as the man who hired Spec Richardson and Tom Haller and who couldn't build a ballpark, even though a former executive of a grocery chain figured out how accomplish the task within a couple of years of Lurie's departure, and who then threw a temper tantrum and tried to make sure nobody else could play with his toys. And, in reward for his marginal contribution to us Giants fans, his investment appreciated a cool $92 million during his period of ownership. I never have a good thought for Bob Lurie. He stands arm in arm with Horace Stoneham as men who abused their fans and then willingly and cheerfully sold them out.
1993 (1993) -- Manager: Dusty Baker
Meet Barry Bonds, catalyst.
The 1993 season stands on its own, and there is very little to say about it. It is worth noting, though, that new GM Bob Quinn didn't accomplished much in his first year with the team. He did not personally sign Bonds, surely the best free agent ever obtained by the Giants (that accomplishment accrues to new General Partner Peter Magowan), and when the team needed that one last pitcher to put them over the top in a terrific race with the Braves, Quinn dithered and dallied and ultimately came up with Scott Sanderson and Jim Deshaies. Neither was the solution. However, when the team reportedly could have obtained Dennis Martinez for Salomon Torres, Quinn wouldn't bite, even though that quite likely would have been enough for the Giants to win it. I guess I'm glad in retrospect he didn't make the trade (or the Giants wouldn't now have Shawn Estes), but that's hardly a strong endorsement of his efforts that year. Sadly, things didn't get any better in the next phase.
The Long Snooze (1994-1996) -- Manager: Dusty Baker
The best thing that can be said about Bob Quinn as a Giants' general manager was that at least he wasn't a destructive one. All of Quinn's actions were conservative and careful, and after the tremendous high of 1993, he more or less let the team go back to sleep. I'm not sure if this was completely his fault, because the 1994 strike cut the new owners' financial legs right out from under them, and it's likely that Quinn was under explicit orders to take no chances. However, the team's payroll was still pretty high in spite of his efforts, and the talent he picked up was generally pretty poor both in general and for the price. Throw in another boatload full of injuries and the team quickly sank to the bottom of the now-smaller NL West.
Six of the principal heroes from 1993 soon became eligible for free agency, and in only two cases did the team clearly do the right thing. Matt Williams and Robby Thompson were retained, while Will Clark, Bill Swift, Mike Jackson and John Burkett (via a trade) left the franchise. Of these moves, the Williams and Swift moves worked out well, the Thompson, Jackson and Burkett decisions did not, while Clark was injured enough in his ensuing years with Texas to cloud that result. All of this is fair enough; nobody has a crystal ball. Where Quinn really fell down was in adequately replacing the players who did leave. To replace Clark, Quinn went with Clark's backup, Todd Benzinger, rather than going after a free agent. Burkett and Swift were replaced by Mark Portugal, Mark Leiter, and Terry Mulholland. To make up for the loss of Mike Jackson (the dominant setup man out of the bullpen), Quinn brought in the likes of Steve Frey, Jose Bautista, and Rich Monteleone. Each and every one of these players was a completely inadequate substitute for the original, and nobody was ever brought in to adequately back up the frequently injured Thompson.
Add to this the signing of Glenallen Hill to replace Willie McGee; the trading of Portugal for little more than Deion Sanders (and then having to pay a $1 million year-end bonus to him just before he bolted out of San Francisco); the ill-advised trade of Royce Clayton for Allan Watson, Doug Creek, and Rich DeLucia; the signing of an aging and oft-injured Shawon Dunston to replace Clayton; the drafting of Kim Batiste under Rule V (which wouldn't have been so bad except that they actually kept him around and allowed him to play); the list could go on and on. The starting rotation was marginal at best, the bullpen fell completely apart and, thanks to a series of unforeseen injuries to Matt Williams, the lineup quickly became a seemingly never ending run of "Barry Bonds and the Seven Dwarves." And all of this falls in the lap of Bob Quinn, who regularly implied that finances were tying his hands but who never proved he would have made that many good moves even if money had not been an issue.
True, the trade of Torres for Shawn Estes was a good one, and snagging Kirk Rueter for Leiter was a fine move. It is unclear in retrospect, though, if these moves were truly spearheaded by Quinn or whether his protégé in waiting, Brian Sabean, pulled these together. My money is not on Quinn.
For better or worse, the Giants probably started a new segment in 1997, and this phase will likely run through 1999 as the team maneuvers towards the opening of Pac Bell Park. Replacing Candlestick is a long overdue move that can only help the team and remove one big reminder of the team's inglorious past. The Giants will undoubtedly herald this as the start of a new era in Giants' history, and there will be the subtle (or not-so-subtle) suggestions that we should leave the past behind, forget about the bad old days and start trusting that the best will happen instead of the worst.
We'll enjoy the new ballpark, but my guess is that Giant fans won't fall for all the rah-rah stuff. A new ballpark only just begins to make up for the nearly 30 years of mismanagement and short-term thinking that have made this franchise such a disappointment, and in fact it really only just offsets Horace Stoneham's worst (but far from last) mistake, which was agreeing to Candlestick being built in the first place. To really change our attitudes and mellow us out, the team needs to be successful. It needs to win a World Series. It needs to have a nice long run of success. It needs to win way more games than it loses.
Before I really believe the Giants' sorry past is behind us, I need to see the Giants get George Foster for Frank Duffy. I need to see us get Gaylord Perry for Sam McDowell. I need to see us sign enough good free agents to forever rid our mouths of the taste of Rennie Stennett and Steve Frey. I need to see us keep up our recent run of good managers and laugh in the faces of the likes of Jim Davenport and Dave Bristol when they come calling. In short, I need to see the Giants start acting like a proud and together franchise, and then and only then will I stop being so negative.
Postscript: There Have Been Some Good Times Too
It isn't fun to just dwell on the negative stuff. There have been some good times as well. After all, if following the Giants (or any team) was always bad, few of us would really still be fans no matter how loyal and virtuous we might think we were. The Giants have provided some warm and even thrilling memories over the last 30 years or so, and some of them might never have meant as much if they weren't in contrast to the struggles the team has otherwise experienced. It's as if you need to live through bad times to truly appreciate what a good moment really means. Or, as if a World Series win might overshadow some of the other pleasures the game can give, the way the 49ers' various Super Bowl wins sometimes overshadowed the pure pleasure of watching Joe Montana play football.
Not that I, if given the choice, wouldn't rather have the damn World Series victory. Since that hasn't been an option, we need to be philosophical.
So, in the interest of a balanced viewpoint (and because I needed to do something to cheer me up after all the above complaining), here is a list of some of my favorite franchise memories in the period of discussion:
The Giants might still win a World Series in my lifetime, but I am not as confident about that as I used to be. As has been often said, adversity makes you strong, but there needs to be some occasional reward to keep you going. I am realistic enough to recognize the possibility that these types of moments and memories may be as good a reward as we are ever going to get, and they help to keep us Giant fans.
However, never let it be said that events like these are enough to completely compensate for all the other problems. Unless and until the Giants do someday win that World Series and otherwise finally get their act together, you can expect me to continue to be pretty darned negative about them. Just don't bug me about it anymore, okay?
For more by Richard Booroojian, please see "Anything Can Happen -- And For Once, It Did." As a "consultant" based in the South Bay (at this writing), Richard has a great many "clients." Chief EEEEEE! Person Gregg Pearlman thinks he might want clients some day, but he doesn't want to have to become a masseur.
Note: The author consulted Total Baseball, The Baseball Encyclopedia, and Giants Diary by Fred Stein and Nick Peters (1987) extensively in the preparation of this article.