After a 98-loss season where nothing ever seemed to go right, the San Francisco Giants cleaned house Saturday.

Well, sort of.

Related Articles How the SF Giants’ decision to let Kevin Pillar go looks a year later

SF Giants Gameday podcast: Time is running out for the Giants to take control of NL wild card race

When Giants need him at his best, Johnny Cueto struggles in blowout loss to Rockies

San Francisco Giants’ assistant coach Alyssa Nakken shows up on Jeopardy

San Francisco Giants preparing to enter quarantine ahead of possible playoff appearance The Giants fired pitching coach Dave Righetti, bullpen coach Mark Gardner, and assistant hitting coach Steve Decker Saturday. Officially, all three have been re-assigned within the organization, but let’s be honest, they were canned.

More changes to the staff are likely to follow — Giants general manager Bobby Evans did not give a vote of confidence to bench coach Ron Wotus or hitting coach Hensley Meulens on Saturday, and Evans even admitted that he’s interviewed candidates for Meulen’s job.

The reason these men are out of their jobs (or are soon to be)?

“Changes sometimes are needed as much for the sake of that new voice as anything, and I think that was really the priority here,” Evans said on a conference call Saturday.

In one sentence, Evans said nothing … and everything.

Specifics as to why Righetti was no longer the right pitching coach for this Giants team would have been nice to hear — it’d be good to explain in detail why someone has failed in their job — but there’s absolute validity to believing that new voices could help turn the Giants around. That said, wiping out manager Bruce Bochy’s staff before the start of a critical season doesn’t portend good things for Bochy or those turnaround efforts. For complete Giants coverage follow us on Flipboard.

Let’s start with the lack of logic in all of this:

Is it justifiable to fire coaches after a 98-loss season? Absolutely. But it doesn’t make much sense to chalk up the failure to “voices” and then keep the most important and significant voice on the coaching staff in place.

Bochy no doubt had to sign off on these moves, but there’s no indication that he pushed for these changes — the decision to clear his staff (we’ll see to what degree) came from above.

But for a front office who has made it clear that they blame the failure of last year on the coaching staff to then keep the man main from last year’s coaching staff in place speaks volumes.

One clear takeaway: you’d have to be a fool to think that Bochy’s seat isn’t hot.

Now, I’m not advocating for Bochy to be fired — with four National League pennants and three World Series titles to his name, he’s earned the right to claim that the 2017 season was an outlier and to then use his clout with the organization to stay in his position.

My argument is this: if Evans and his cohorts really believe that the Giants’ clubhouse needs new voices — that’s code for new leadership — they should have been fully committed to that belief and really cleaned house.

Removing assistant coaches but leaving the main voice in charge? This all feels like a half-measure, and half-measures rarely work.

And they always seem to turn into full measures — only more prolonged and painful.

(The latest, greatest example of this kind of failure: the 49ers hiring Chip Kelly as head coach while keeping Trent Baalke as the general manager. They had to clean house, in earnest, after a season, but not before wasting a year of our lives.)

In many ways, the Giants’ move today is a public relations move: Evans saying to the fan base “look, we did something.”

Don’t fall for it.

Considering the discord in the clubhouse last year (losing is tough and the Giants didn’t take to it well), it’d be impossible to say the manager and coaching staff didn’t have something to do with the Giants’ season from hell, but the key reason San Francisco lost 98 games last year was because the Giants had a bad roster.

In the grand scheme of things, managers and coaches don’t matter as much as they think they do. They can’t make a bad team good — they can really only make a good team great. (And good teams are built by good general managers.)

This to say that Righetti was low on the reasons the Giants lost 98 games last year and that he’s now being used as a scapegoat.

The question is this: is he the scapegoat for last year, or is he supposed to cover up for next year too? Reading this on your phone? Stay up to date with our free mobile app. Get it from the Apple app store or the Google Play store.

The Giants have strongly hinted that they plan on running more-or-less the same team onto the field next year. The front office is adamant that the Giants’ core — Bumgarner, Posey, Belt, Crawford, Pence — is going to stay in place for 2018. The Giants are pot committed. But the hope of most (if not all) Giants fans — I sure hope I’m reading you guys right on this — is that reinforcements to that core are on the way via trade or free agency this offseason.

Simply put, it doesn’t matter who the Giants’ pitching or hitting coach is — if those reinforcements (see: Stanton, Giancarlo) don’t come, the Giants are going to have a hard time competing next year in a home-run-driven league and the tough-as-nails National League West.

Wiping out Bochy’s staff reeks of a move made by a team that’s not going to make major upgrades this offseason. The pitch: these new coaches can teach these old dogs new tricks.

And if that’s what the Giants’ brass is trying to sell now, you can bet that they’re going to be selling the same thing — only with the last coach standing — if this team isn’t in the playoff hunt next summer.