The San Francisco Giants problems at shortstop actually began in 1959 and ended, at least temporarily, in 1971.  I referred to this period in the tweet which started this discussion as "the 1960s", but the actual dates are 1959 to 1970.  It began with the decision to move Daryl Spencer from shortstop to second base.  

In 1958 Spencer had his best major league season, hitting .256 but with 17 homers, 76 RBI, and 73 walks, and also playing OK at shortstop.  Although he did lead the league in errors,  his fielding percentage was only .009 below average, and Baseball Reference lists his "Rfield" for the season—Runs from fielding—at +/- zero, and credits him with 3.3 WAR.   By Win Shares he was the #4 shortstop in the major leagues, behind Ernie Banks (1958-1959 NL MVP), Dick Groat (1960 NL MVP) and Luis Aparicio, who was second in the AL MVP voting in 1959. 

            The 1958 Giants had one of the greatest rookie classes of all time—Orlando Cepeda, Felipe Alou, Leon Wagner, Jim Davenport, and a couple of other guys who had long, productive careers.  Bob Schmidt and Willie Kirkland.  19-year-old Mike McCormick was 11-8 for the 1958 Giants.

            Perhaps the most exciting of those rookies at the time, however—other than Cepeda—perhaps the guy they were most excited about was Andre Rodgers.  The first player from the Bahamas to come to the major leagues, Rodgers was a fantastic athlete, a big guy (for a shortstop) with a cannon and the agility to play shortstop.  They had another promising young shortstop backing him up, Eddie Bressoud, and more in the minors.  They decided to move Daryl Spencer, one of the best shortstops in the majors in 1958, to second base so that they could get Andre Rodgers into the lineup.

            It was a disaster.  Rodgers had not played a lot of baseball growing up.  He could not get his footwork co-ordinated with his throwing motion.   Although he hit OK, his confidence washed away.  He lost the job at the end of June, and was sent to the minors a couple of weeks later, Eddie Bressoud taking over.  Bressoud was a pretty good hitter and had some very good years later on, but he had fringy defensive skills for a shortstop.  He was not top-shelf either in quickness or arm strength. Giant shortstops for the season were last in the league in assists, last in putouts, tied for second in errors, second-to-last in fielding percentage, and last by a mile in double plays; their shortstops were involved in 74 double plays, while every other team had at least 92. 

            1959 was the stumble; 1960 was the fall.  Daryl Spencer played OK at second base (1959), but after the season the Giants packaged Spencer with Leon Wagner, a surplus outfielder, and sent them to St. Louis for Don Blasingame, one of the better second basemen in the league.  They went into 1960 with Bressoud as the shortstop. 

            Candlestick Park opened on April 12, 1960.  Within weeks, Giants players were bitching in the newspapers about having to play there.  The infield was a rockpile, the wind whipped nastily through the infield and across the outfield, and it was, apparently, a cold, cold summer in San Francisco.   For the season, Willie McCovey hit .203 in Candlestick Park, and if Willie McCovey can’t hit there, God help the rest of the league.  Don Blasingame, Eddie Bressoud and Andre Rodgers all had terrible seasons, at least statistically if you don’t adjust for the very low park run factors, and at that time, nobody had any notion of adjusting for park effects.  The Giants also led the major leagues in errors. 

            The Giants gave up on Bressoud and Blasingame, trading both men away and going with Chuck (Iron Hands) Hiller at second base, and Jose Pagan at short.  In retrospect, they might have kept Bressoud and lived with his inherent defensive limitations.  Bressoud became the best-hitting shortstop in the majors from 1962 to 1964. 

            The Giants middle infield, on the other hand, was on a treadmill through the Twilight Zone.  From Daryl Spencer (1958) they went through Andre Rodgers (1959), Eddie Bressoud (1960), Jose Pagan (1961-1962), Jose Pagan and Ernie Bowman (1963), Jose Pagan and Jim Davenport (1964), Dick Schofield, Jim Davenport, Jose Pagan, and Tito Fuentes (1965), Tito Fuentes, Jim Davenport and Hal Lanier (1966), and then mostly Hal Lanier (1967-1970).  Jim Davenport, losing the third base job to Jim Ray Hart in 1964, played over 200 games at short for the Giants from 1964 to 1968—not because anyone thought that he was a shortstop, but because somebody had to try. 

            The rest of this article is based on Matthew Namee’s research.  Matthew worked in my office from 2003 to 2005.  One thing I asked him to do was to take the Win Shares book, and construct a spreadsheet placing each and every blessed player at a position on a team.  He produced an extremely valuable spreadsheet, which will be one of my greatest assets if I ever get around to doing a fourth edition of the Historical Abstract.  It uses Win Shares to map baseball history.   You can use the spreadsheet to see patterns of things that you otherwise KNOW or sense, but can’t put a finger on.  The spreadsheet would have been much more valuable to me than it has been had I not go on the long career detour of working for the Red Sox (2002 to 2019), which limited my book writing.

            Anyway, this is the sort of issue for which the thing is valuable.  It was by studying the spreadsheet that I realized where this problem started and what the dimensions of it really were.   Here is a small snapshot from the file, describing the Giants lineups’ from 1958 to 1971:

            This column represents Willie Mays:

            "1B" represents Orlando Cepeda and Willie McCovey; the values are low in 1960-1961 because McCovey was playing there half-time with Cepeda in left field.  Cepeda was only in left field half the time, but one person is necessarily assigned to one position in this format:

            While the #1 and #2 starters (S1 and S2) are generally Marichal and Gaylord Perry:

            And, before we go, we should highlight the 1958 season of Daryl Spencer and the 1971 season of Chris Speier, who bookend the shortstop disasters, and the star periods of third baseman Jim Ray Hart and right fielder Bobby Bonds:

            OK, now let’s cut off the 1958 and 1971 seasons, and form totals of what remains:

            The 1960s Giants (1959-1970, you dork) have a total of 393 Win Shares from their #1 center fielders, Willie Mays.  This is the highest total for any team at any position during those years.  For what it is worth, these are the highest position totals in the major leagues:

            So we can see there why the National League won almost all the All Star Games in those years.  Anyway, the point is that the Giants had three of the top 9 position totals in the major leagues, but won only one league title in this period, whereas the Yankees won 5, the Dodgers 4, the Cardinals 3, the Pirates 2 and the Orioles 2. During these years the Giants won more games than any other National League franchise, more than any other major league team except the Orioles.   

            The Giants had only 112 Win Shares in 12 years out of their #1 shortstops.  This is the fifth-lowest total in the major leagues, at any position.   Because teams split playing time at catcher, the three lowest totals are all at catcher.  Fourth and fifth are at shortstop:

            The Giants’ starting shortstops were one Win Share better than the Phillies, but 35 Win Shares worse than any other team in the majors.  

            Among the 16 "original" franchises, this is where their shortstops ranked year by year:

            Pagan in 1964 was their #1 shortstop by playing time, but Davenport was by value. 

            One of the strongest franchises in the majors, literally trading away valuable players like Felipe and Matty Alou, Leon Wagner, Willie Kirkland, Orlando Cepeda and Bill White because they had no place to play them, had a below-average regular shortstop for 12 straight seasons, with the arguable exception of 1962, when Jose Pagan had a kind-of decent year.

            In 1959 the Detroit Tigers had the weakest first baseman in the major leagues, with the position manned by Gail Harris, Gus Zernial and Bobo Osborne.   That winter they made a very minor trade for Norm Cash, and in 1961 they had the best first baseman in the majors.

            The same year, the Baltimore Orioles had the second-weakest first baseman in the majors, Bob Boyd.  That winter they made a very minor trade with the Los Angeles Dodgers, and in 1961 they had the second-best first baseman in the majors, in Jim Gentile. 

            In 1959 the Washington Senators had the worst regular catcher in the major leagues (Hal Naragon).  That winter they traded their aging star (Roy Sievers) for a young catcher, and in 1960 they had the second-best catcher in the major leagues (Earl Battey).

            In 1962 the St. Louis Cardinals had the weakest shortstop in the major leagues (Julio Gotay). That winter they made a trade for Dick Groat, and in 1963 they had the best shortstop in the majors; Groat earned 31 Win Shares, and was second in the MVP voting. 

            In 1962 the Baltimore Orioles had the second-worst catcher in the majors, as old Gus Triandos hit .159.  That winter they made a trade with the Giants for one of those extra players who couldn’t get into the Giants’ lineup, John Orsino, and in 1963 they had the 4^th-best catcher in the majors. 

            In 1965 the Chicago White Sox had one of the weakest center fielders in baseball, as glove wizard Ken Berry hit .218 with 34 RBI in 147 games.   That winter they traded a package of second-line players to the Indians in exchange for Tommie Agee (and Tommy John), and in 1966 they had the third-best center fielder in the majors, behind Willie Mays and Al Kaline (who played center and right in 1966, but we have listed him in center.) 

            These stories are common.  Good organizations identify their weaknesses, identify the best young player who is blocked with his current team, and make a trade.  It is very puzzling that the San Francisco Giants, one of the best organizations in baseball, were never able to do that, and lost pennant after pennant because they could not do that.   And it’s not like they traded for players who went bust on them; they just didn’t make the trades.  Rodgers, Bressoud, Pagan, Davenport, Fuentes, Lanier—these were all guys who were in the system.  The only effort they made to patch it with a trade was Dick Schofield in 1965, but he was a guy who had been in the league for more than ten years, had played badly for Pittsburgh for the last two years, and they just flipped him for Jose Pagan, who was the same age as Schofield. 

            And this was the consequence of that.  In 1964 the Giants missed the National League pennant by 3 games.  This is a position-by-position comparison of the Giants to the first-place St. Louis Cardinals:

            The Cardinals won by three games—9 Win Shares—and held a 13-Win Share advantage at shortstop.  Of course, this is not a technical comparison because the Giants had multiple shortstops, Davenport and Pagan, but all of the San Francisco shortstops together earned only 11 Win Shares, nine fewer than Groat, and it isn’t actually that close, because about 40% of Jim Davenport’s 1964 playing time was at other positions. 

            In 1965 the Giants lost the National League pennant to the Dodgers by just two games—6 Win Shares.  Let’s compare the two teams position by position:

            The Giants lost the pennant by 6 Win Shares, but were 24 Win Shares behind at shortstop (Maury Wills vs. Dick Schofield.) 

            In 1966 the Giants again lost the pennant again by just two games, although they didn’t really lose that one at shortstop, as Fuentes had a not-terrible year, and Maury Wills had a not-great year.   In 1959 the Giants finished just three games behind the first-place tie, and we can, if you want, compare the Giants not to the champions, the Dodgers, but to the team which tied them in the regular season:

            The Giants finished three games—9 Win Shares—out of the first-place tie, but were 11 Win Shares behind the Braves at shortstop.

            That show doesn’t work for the Dodgers that year because the Dodgers switched shortstops in mid-season, from Don Zimmer to Maury Wills, and the Giants finished second in 1967 and 1968, but by wider margins.  But I must add this:  what are the two years 1959-1971 when the Giants had a decent shortstop?  1962 and 1971.  And what are the two years in that era when the Giants won something?  1962 and 1971.  In neither case was the shortstop great; he just wasn’t terrible.

            Of course, many teams have a "black hole" position that, for some reason, they just can’t fill.  With this tool, I could identify the worst "Black Hole" positions in baseball history, but then, I could have done that 15 years ago, too, and I haven’t got around to it yet.  What makes this one noteworthy is the combination of a REALLY BAD black hole with a team that is losing the pennant by two or three games a year.  And we add to that combination of facts:  it was an organization that was swimming in surplus talent.