It’s rarely easy, or particularly fruitful, to compare an incoming manager to the outgoing one. There are so many variables, and we’re still not entirely sure how much impact a manager has — or in what ways. And in the case of the San Francisco Giants, there’s a whole bunch of roster turnover that makes a fruitless task even sillier.
Still. When the San Francisco Giants switched from Gabe Kapler to Bob Melvin — a move I liked and, if you did too, 18 games should not change that — one of the logical conclusions was that the team would shore up their fundamentals.