Why San Francisco Giants have gone from 107 wins to sub-.500

A year ago at this time, the San Francisco Giants were the biggest surprise in baseball as they rolled through the 2021 regular season with an MLB-best 107 wins. This year? Not so much. San Francisco is instead entering the final weeks of the 2022 season looking up at the .500 mark — not to mention the NL West-leading Los Angeles Dodgers.

As the Giants prepare to play the Chicago Cubs on Sunday Night Baseball (8 ET on ESPN), we asked MLB experts Bradford Doolittle, Alden Gonzalez, Tim Keown and Buster Olney to break down San Francisco's decline — and lay out the moves the Giants should make to help get back to the top of the standings.

Doolittle: The Giants threaded a lot of needles to get to 107 wins last year. That's not a criticism but a tribute. Repeating that has proved to be difficult. Ever since Farhan Zaidi took over the operation, the roster has been one of constant churn. One marginal upgrade after another.

Last season, the Giants got lots of value from this churn. This season, not so much. Then you had a lot of players performing near the upper ranges of the projection probabilities last year coming back in line, and there you have it. An overachieving team slips from the stratosphere and lands right in the middle of the road. It seems like a letdown but this is still better than where we figured the Giants would be at this point when last season began.

Keown: This is what happens when a team built on depth no longer has it. Gabe Kapler is mixing-and-matching and playing the percentages just as he did last year, but the system-wide lack of production — up and down the lineup, in the bullpen — turned last season's alchemy into this season's futility.

Olney: In 2021, future Hall of Famer Buster Posey had one of