Kurtenbach: SF Giants’ brutal 2026 ends not with relief, but a deep sadness

The 2026 San Francisco Giants didn’t just stumble. They face-planted into a steaming pile of their own hype and hubris.

Ninety wins? What idiot (perhaps columnist) thought that was possible?

Try 97 losses and a never-ending string of dumpster fires that should have arson investigators working overtime.

Yes, even more modest expectations went up in big, billowing plumes of toxic black smoke this season. Even the silver linings flaked away.

This season stunk out loud.

Yet watching the final out Sunday didn’t bring sweet relief — it brought a pit in the stomach.

Why is it so damn hard to say goodbye to a team that, on and off the field, brought so much annoyance, if not downright pain?

Part of it is sentimental, and genuinely heartbreaking. The merciful conclusion of this horrific season officially ends the Mike Krukow era in the Giants broadcast booth.

One of baseball’s truly transcendent voices is stepping away. Krukow wasn’t just a former pitcher with a microphone; he was the Bay Area’s daily summer roommate, turning even blowout losses on cold nights in the Bay into warm front-porch chats.

Losing him hits hard enough. But that’s not entirely it. No, Krukow’s exit merely puts a finger on the button of truth.

The real issue is the looming, billionaire-fueled 2027 lockout. That’s the one that presses the button.

Because, as Krukow highlighted so well, baseball’s great gift isn’t high drama. It’s companionship.

A 162-game schedule is, frankly, about 120 games too long for every single pitch to feel existential. Save that coronary stress for the second season, in October — assuming you can remember what playoff baseball looks like in this region.

To those of us who love the game, baseball is a habit. When you play nine nearly every single day for six straight months, you forge a sacred covenant with the audience.

Some sports demand your total, screaming attention once a week; others a couple nights a week. Baseball just sits next to you, passes the popcorn and stays a while.

The other sports play games.

Baseball is a pastime. That label carries emotional weight.

Normally, an agonizing 97-loss season gets immediately washed away by the glorious, delusional churn of the Hot Stove. But nobody with a functioning brain expects free agency to kick off around Thanksgiving to deliver holiday optimism.

Instead of debating megadeals over turkey and under-the-tree presents, we’ll get passive-aggressive press releases from union reps and team lawyers arguing over tax thresholds.

And we can’t go booking those March flights to Scottsdale to catch minor-league depth pieces work on their launch angles under the sun, either.

We can’t even guarantee anyone will be passing through the turnstiles at Oracle Park on March 25 for Opening Day. (This time, hopefully without Netflix, though I’m willing to relive that streaming fanfare catastrophe if the season starts on time.)

For the handful of teams chasing a pennant this month, life rolls merrily along. They’re delaying reality. For the other 18 franchises — including Buster Posey’s broken experiment — the truth hit hard on Sunday.

It’s no longer “We’ll get ’em next year.” It’s “When will next year start?”

Or worse: “Will there even be a next year?”

Nobody’s naive enough to pretend baseball doesn’t have deep structural issues in the governance and organization of the game. The sport’s economic model looks like it was drawn up on a cocktail napkin during the Taft administration, and collective bargaining is the right way to fix it.

Hammering out a new CBA is a serious, vital process.

And when the dust settles from it all, 30 owners will get astronomically richer, the players’ union might claw back a concession or two (but not, I suspect, for the rank-and-file) and, as is tradition, it will be the fans again holding the bill.

We in the Bay just endured six months of unwatchable baseball. We saw ground balls turn into double plays (but not on defense), pitchers implode on the mound and a new name showing up almost every 20 minutes, all while paying $19 for lukewarm domestic drafts.

Our grand reward for a brutal summer shouldn’t be a cold, empty winter of boardroom warfare and an unused ballpark come April.

Baseball, even the kind the Giants played this season, is too important to not have, much less be held hostage.

Yet that’s precisely what’s coming down the tracks.

For months, if not years, I’ve known that I would miss baseball when it’s gone.

Now it is gone in the Bay, and no one is sure when it will come back.

And, yep, I already miss it.