San Francisco Giants: Top 5 worst contracts heading into this offseason

The San Francisco Giants are at a crossroads between moving into the next generation of young talent and creating space for some of their established stars. The reality for them is that those stars come with hefty price tags.

With any semblance of a late-season playoff run well behind the San Francisco Giants, the focus has shifted to this coming offseason, where the front office will be tasked with offloading some of the big money tied up in unproductive players.

The Giants may have handcuffed themselves to some degree by playing so well in the summer months — which, consequently, made them balk at the opportunity to make moves for the future at the trade deadline.

Sure, they were successful in moving pieces like Mark Melancon, who, in his time with the San Francisco Giants, was mediocre at best on a four-year, $62 million deal. But there were missed opportunities on trying to bolster a farm system that’s better than it was, but still not great.

It’s probably worth mentioning, also, that Melancon has thrived since taking on Atlanta’s closer role. In a playoff role, no less.

But the focus here should be on the Giants and president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi. They aren’t nearly out of the woods yet just because they moved on from Melancon.

The Giants have been no strangers to dangling out massive contracts that turned out to be pretty ugly. One of the worst contracts in baseball history still belongs to Barry Zito, who signed the largest pitcher’s contract in baseball history at that time — seven years, $126 million.

But despite the flack that the Giants front office may have gotten for giving an annual $18 million to a pitcher with a 4.62 ERA, they at least got a return on their investment.

Zito would play a pivotal role in the Giants’ 2012 World Series run when he’d spin nearly eight innings of shutout baseball against a slugging St. Louis Cardinals lineup in Game 5 of the NLCS.

Down 3-1. On the road.

Bad contracts happen. For the big-market teams like the Giants, a sunken contract doesn’t necessarily mean relegation to the cellar of the division.

But you can’t have a handful of bad contracts and expect to do much better than a .500 record on the season.

The San Francisco front office has a lot of work to do this upcoming winter — and by no means will it be easy. But the very first step is to figure out which contracts are the worst and which can still be moved without having to tack on extra value.

Thankfully for Farhan Zaidi, if he happens to stumble upon this article, we’ve done the work for him. Here they are, the five worst contracts bogging down this team from piecing together another magical playoff run (plus a bonus player since there are so many bad contracts).