Kurtenbach: The SF Giants’ offseason strategy? Buying plausible deniability

I said it at the beginning of the Giants’ offseason: Don’t believe anything until you see a jersey pulled over a collared shirt.

And seeing as we’re still waiting on the Giants to sign or acquire a player worthy of a full-bore press conference this winter, I suppose I need to update that take.

Don’t believe in the Giants until you see a jersey pulled over a collared shirt.

Maybe that comes in the final days before spring training begins. Maybe not.

But in the meantime, the Giants are just spinning their gears with a collection of “meh” transactions, hoping the sheer volume of paperwork might be confused for ambition.

It isn’t.

The latest move — signing Luis Arraez — is being sold by advocates as a return to “Giants Baseball.” It is actually something far worse: fan service for diehards who wish it were still 2012.

It is a move designed to make you look at antiquated stats like batting average and ignore the analytical crater where the rest of the offense is supposed to be — to ignore the last decade of baseball and the irreversible way the game is played today.

It’s also asking you to ignore the rest of the Giants’ lineup.

The Giants will claim they want to limit strikeouts with this Arraez signing; that they want to put the ball in play, that they want to “keep the line moving.”

If the goal was really to limit strikeouts, explain the acquisition of slick-fielding centerfielder Harrison Bader (who whiffed on nearly 30 percent his swings in 2025 — 22nd percentile in all of baseball last year), or Rafael Devers (32 percent whiff rate), or the signings of Willy Adames (29 percent) or Matt Chapman (a downright demure 25 percent) before him?

Apparently, Arraez, who almost never swings and misses (5 percent whiff rate), won’t strike out enough to cover up the whole team.

I’ve heard the argument that the former batting champ is to “set the table.” The problem is that in 2026, Arraez is using plastic cutlery.

The obsession with batting average is a relic of a time when we didn’t have Statcast to tell us what was actually happening when the ball meets the bat.

Baseball in 2026 is about damage. It is about slugging. It is about speed. Arraez provides none of these.

Arraez hit .292 last year — a career low — but even that number is a mirage. He had a .289 batting average on balls in play, down 34 points year-over-year and 73 points since his 2023.

He is a one-trick pony whose one trick is on a dramatic downturn. Last season, Arraez finished in the 1st percentile in Major League Baseball in both barrel rate (1.1 percent) and hard-hit rate (16.7 percent). He hits the ball with the authority of a wet newspaper (perhaps even this one). His average exit velocity of 86 miles per hour is below the velocity of a modern-day slider. Defenses have him pegged.

He’s a slap hitter. That works if you are the Milwaukee Brewers and you have guys like that who are also cheetahs, capable of stealing bases and vacuuming up ground balls on defense.

Arraez is not that. He runs in quicksand — 25th percentile sprint speed — and fields like he’s wearing oven mitts.

So yes, he’s on base (though with a 5 percent walk rate, he has to earn every bit of that below-average .327 on-base percentage), but he clogs them.

And put him in the field, and he’s good at putting a few runners on base via errors.

Sure, he had nine more hits than Shohei Ohtani last year — Arraez’s 181 hits led baseball. But he also had 182 fewer total bases than Ohtani — his 245 was good for 68th in baseball.

The goal is to score runs, not just get hits. Arraez neither drives them in nor scores them at any useful rate.

It all leaves the Giants with a lineup-construction puzzle with no obvious solution.

Scenario A: You bat him leadoff. He hits a soft single. He stands there, a station-to-station runner, waiting for the 2-3-4 hitters to drive him in. Now those strikeouts of Adames, Devers, and Chapman are even more annoying.

Scenario B: You bury him at the bottom of the lineup. Now he is waiting for the bottom third of the order — Patrick Bailey, chief among them — to drive him in with power. Bailey isn’t driving anyone home unless they’re in his car.

The Giants aren’t building a machine designed to score runs; they are building a machine designed to avoid looking like they aren’t trying.

At least it’s just a one-year deal.

So are the Giants really more competitive with Arraez? The math says no. And math rules the day in baseball.

They’re just buying themselves plausible deniability. They’ll say “we did something” while pointing to Arraez’s past batting titles. They’re hoping you look at the back of the baseball card rather than any of the real, useful data. They’re trying to convince you that one player — and his one weird trick — can balance out an entire lineup.

Meanwhile, the rotation looks a pitcher or two short, and the bullpen is an underwhelming crapshoot.

They aren’t trying to win the division or compete with the Dodgers. They’re barely keeping up with the small-market Reds.

But at least folks eager for nostalgia for an antiquated style of play feel heard.