PHOENIX -- The Giants team Farhan Zaidi has watched over the past week is the one he thought he was putting together months ago.
The Giants are pitching as well as anybody in baseball, getting dominance from big offseason addition Blake Snell and real contributions from the wave of pitching prospects that has started to arrive. They're playing clean defense and showing more athleticism. Matt Chapman and Michael Conforto, two of his biggest signings in the last few years, are among the players leading the lineup on a daily basis.
The Giants have won six of seven on this trip, and with one more win in Phoenix they'll have three straight series wins over teams that could be playing October baseball. They, of course, will not have any responsibilities beyond Sunday's season finale, and that has led to one question hovering over everything else in recent weeks.
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Zaidi remains confident that the future is bright in San Francisco, but will he be part of it?
"It's been a disappointing season even with this recent play and anytime you have a disappointing season it's my job to evaluate everything in my purview and it's (ownership's) job to evaluate everything in my purview, plus me," Zaidi said during a session with the team's beat writers before Tuesday's game at Chase Field. "I think that process is happening and I understand it. You look around baseball and there are other teams in the same boat as us that have playoff aspirations that didn't happen and they're trying to figure out what went wrong and how to be better, and I'm still very committed to that."
During the session, Zaidi made it clear that it is business as usual in his world. His focus is on positioning the Giants to get better in the offseason and making decisions about next season's roster. Zaidi said he does not want to get into whether he feels safe or not.
"I'm doing my job every day, thinking about next year and thinking about what we need to do, and that's just not something that I'm thinking about," he said.
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The decision is not his to make, anyway. Zaidi reports directly to ownership, and at some point over the next week that part of the organization will publicly pick a direction. Zaidi and Bob Melvin both have guaranteed contracts for next season, but it was right at this time a season ago that Gabe Kapler started to feel the temperature get turned up. On the final Friday of the regular season, Kapler was let go.
The Giants have five games to go and then the usual end-of-season press conference at some point next week. Their hope is that they can at least finish on a high note, and if ownership truly is undecided right now, the last week certainly has helped Zaidi's case a bit. The Giants will miss the playoffs, but they have a chance to finish at or above .500, which seemed very unlikely when they left San Francisco two Sundays ago.
On Tuesday, Zaidi talked excitedly about what he is seeing on the field. He said there has been a silver lining to a rough year.
"I think we're going to go into next year with the best group of young players that we've had on the roster since I've been here, both on the position player side and the pitching side, and that's really something to build on," he said.
That will be part of the calculus for ownership. But this is the end of Zaidi's sixth season in charge, and for the fifth time, the Giants have missed the playoffs. Asked why it happened, Zaidi pointed to a few things, but primarily a pitching staff that was not quite what the Giants expected. It was just about seven weeks ago that he called it potentially the best rotation in baseball, but for most of this season, that hasn't been close to being true.
"Unfortunately I think our story is not super unique for teams that don't reach expectations before the season. I think it's a combination of health and some guys not hitting their career norms, and in an odd way I think some of that has to do with the timing and the rhythm of the season," Zaidi said. "We've talked some about how, particularly from a pitching standpoint, it got off to a tough start, and I feel like that's something that we felt was a strength for us and we were kind of playing catch-up with it all season.
"Even as I think through the year and think about the deadline and think about how good we felt about the rotation going into the last couple of months of the season, we had that one good turn through the rotation and then it was a bit of a struggle."
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