Adding McCutchen and Longoria should help Giants erase remnants of 2017 debacle

Let's start with what should be an obvious statement: Even with newcomers Andrew McCutchen and Evan Longoria on the roster, the Giants are not better than the Dodgers.

They're still not close, really.

The Dodgers might be the best team in baseball, though the Astros probably still own that title, what with last fall's World Series championship and the recent addition of Gerrit Cole to the rotation. Regardless where you have the Dodgers near the top of your MLB ranking — at one, two, three or four — I think we can all agree they're set up to finish well ahead of their primary rival in the NL West, that team about six hours north on Interstate 5 in San Francisco.

And that's OK.

After a disastrous 2017 season — the Giants were 10 games behind the Dodgers in the NL West by May 9, never closer than 20 games out after June 19 and never closer than 30 games out after July 23 — the most important thing for San Francisco was just to focus on making the offseason as productive as possible.

“It was very crushing for us as a front office," Giants GM Bobby Evans told SN at the GM Meetings in Orlando in November. "We have high expectations and certainly felt like we were building towards a continued playoff hunt, and it became very apparent very early in the year that we were going to fall short."

After 2017, winning the 2018 division pennant probably wasn't exactly the most realistic goal.

Not when the Dodgers were bringing back pretty much every important piece from their pennant-winning squad. Not when the Giants failed to win more than 10 games in four of the six months of a go-nowhere season.

Nah, the goal for the Giants in 2018 was to compete. Somehow, compete. Compete to not finish last in the division. Compete for .500, hopefully. Compete for a wild-card berth, even.

Those things are realistic.

And as much as Giants fans want to believe their team is better than the one in L.A., they know the truth. They also know this truth: Their 2018 team is much, much better right now than it was before adding Longoria — a trade addition right before Christmas — and McCutchen — a trade addition today. Longoria replaced Pablo Sandoval, who was kind of awful, at third base. McCutchen's addition means they won't have both Jarrett Parker and Gorkys Hernandez atop outfield depth chart spots heading into spring training (and maybe neither guy, if Evans keeps dealing).

Those are very good things.

Look, the Giants had pretty much everything go wrong last year. Formerly reliable players got hurt (nobody played more than 144 games) or struggled (Matt Moore came in with a career 3.91 ERA but posted a 5.52 mark in 2017) or both (Mark Melancon, who averaged 74 games and a 1.80 ERA the previous four seasons, had a 4.50 ERA in just 32 games). And some guys had all kinds of bad luck: Jeff Samardija had a 3.61 FIP but a 4.42 ERA, for example.

The best part of 2017 came when the season not-so-mercifully ended.

The best part of 2018 is that this season can't possibly be as bad as 2017, right? The Giants feature an older lineup, no doubt, and that means injuries are possible. With McCutchen in a corner outfield spot and Longoria at third, the Giants have starters in their Age 30 season or above at seven of the eight fielding positions. Yeah.

But if those veterans stay healthy and productive, and that's certainly possible, the Giants could make a wild-card run in 2018. Those veterans are all very good players. They have Madison Bumgarner back atop the rotation — things started to fall apart when he was injured in an off-the-field accident last year, remember — along with Samardzija and Johnny Cueto. Melancon seems like a prime bounce-back candidate at closer.

With Longoria and McCutchen in the fold, this group isn't the 2017 Dodgers, but it's not the 2017 Giants, either. And that's what really matters.