PHOENIX — Farhan Zaidi leaned against a cinderblock wall in the tunnel outside the visiting clubhouse at Chase Field and took questions from four Giants beat reporters Tuesday afternoon.
He sketched out offseason initiatives and priorities. He signaled the desire to sign or trade for a solid defensive shortstop. He expressed interest in re-signing left-hander and expected free agent Blake Snell but acknowledged that having a seat at the table will only matter so much when the table is expected to be the size of a banquet hall.
Zaidi sought to clear up confusion over the tumultuous handling of hitting prospect Marco Luciano and last month’s abrupt decision to outright Thairo Estrada, who was the 2023 Willie Mac Award winner. He made it clear that the Giants wouldn’t sign a first baseman or designated hitter to a multiyear contract that would block the way for Bryce Eldridge, who hit his way to Triple A as a 19-year-old this season.
He couldn’t come out and say that he would tender a contract to outfielder Mike Yastrzemski but spoke of that decision in rubber-stamp terms. He spoke optimistically about the way so many young pitchers are finishing the season and agreed with the notion that the Giants could lose Snell and still assemble a quality rotation without signing a free-agent starter.
And he acknowledged the possibility that, by the end of this week, none of these decisions will be his to make.
Zaidi, who has another year on his contract plus a club option for 2026, said he has not received clarity on his status from ownership, nor has he sought any. He acknowledged that those discussions are ongoing between Chairman Greg Johnson and an executive board that includes CEO Larry Baer and former franchise star catcher Buster Posey.
“Anytime you have a disappointing season, it’s my job to evaluate everything in my purview, and it’s their job to evaluate everything in my purview, plus me,” Zaidi said. “And so I think that process is happening, and I understand it. You look around baseball and there are other teams in the same boat as us with playoff aspirations and it didn’t happen, trying to figure out what went wrong and how to be better. I’m still very committed to that.”
Johnson has been Zaidi’s most fervent and outspoken supporter over the chief baseball operations executive’s six-year tenure. But dissatisfaction has grown among board members to the point that Johnson might be compelled to make a change. The Giants’ uptick in attendance and their improved play down the stretch are other factors to consider, but all indications are that the board has arrived at its decision and are waiting until the season ends to announce a way forward — either with Zaidi or with a search for his replacement.
The Giants entered Tuesday with a 78-79 record and they were eliminated from the postseason last week with nine games remaining on the schedule. That elimination marked the fifth time in six seasons under Zaidi that the club will not reach the playoffs. Zaidi classified the team’s failings as “not super unique” for teams that do not reach expectations, chalking up their shortcomings to a combination of health and some players underperforming their career norms.
“Even as I think about the (trade) deadline and think about how good we felt about the rotation going into the last couple months of the season, we had that one good turn through the rotation, and then it was a bit of a struggle,” Zaidi said. “Just in this last stretch, we’ve gotten some momentum with the rotation, with some guys that we didn’t necessarily expect to be there, a much younger group, which I think is good for us going forward.
“I do look at a lot of the silver linings this year, the fact that I think we’re going to go into next year with the best group of young players we’ve had on the roster since I’ve been here, both on the position player side, on the pitching side. That’s really something to build on.”
In terms of organizational health, how does Zaidi stack up the club’s middling performance with the contributions from Heliot Ramos, Tyler Fitzgerald, Landen Roupp, Hayden Birdsong and others? Asked that question, Zaidi did not make a rhetorical defense or seek to argue that the farm system has made enough progress to offset disappointment with the results at the big league level. But he acknowledged that he knew from the start that he wasn’t signing up to orchestrate a full rebuilding effort.
“You look at our last couple of off seasons, we’ve been very active in free agency, and while maybe that’s created … some excitement, I do think it’s kind of blocked some opportunities for these (prospects) to sort of get over the hump,” Zaidi said. “This has not been a typical rebuild. We’ve tried to compete every year. So it’s not just going to be a tear down with three top-five draft picks. It’s taken longer. But I think (with) the players we have, we’re kind of on the other side of that where we have a different nucleus now. Now we have the ability to put a really young team out there and be more targeted in free agency, rather than feeling like we’ve got to go sign five or six players.”
Zaidi, who said his health has improved after being hospitalized at the end of August, declined to speculate whether he will be retained after the season. When asked if ownership continues to have the same amount of faith in his vision for the franchise, he acknowledged that it’s been an ongoing process for him to mesh his methods with some of the cultural expectations that might be more pronounced among Giants fans. But he did not describe a fractured relationship with ownership, saying that he and the board “very much sync up in the vision of the team we want, which is a younger team. We want a more athletic team. We want some consistency in the rotation and in the lineup.”
“I think I’ve evolved in my views of things and some of that has to do with the culture around the Giants organization and the fan base, and things our fans want, and things that this organization has done when it’s been most successful, which might not have been how I was successful earlier in my career,” Zaidi said. “And so we’ve talked about it. I think there’s been a meeting of the minds over time.”
Zaidi pointed out that the Detroit Tigers under former Giants GM Scott Harris have thrust their way into contention largely because of how they have deployed their young pitching this season. There will always be room for teams to consider and employ non-traditional strategies when they are demonstrated to lead to success.
“But I think it’s my responsibility, and as an organization, we have to figure out our identity and not feel like just because the strategy is successful, it’s the right thing for us,” Zaidi said. “So I think that’s been a bit of a learning process for me and again, I think we’ve had a lot of discussions about that, and are pretty well aligned.”
Here’s how Zaidi addressed a few other topics:
On Blake Snell: “He’s going to go into free agency the same way he did last offseason. He wants to keep an open mind. … I think we’ll be pretty high on his list, but we’re respecting the fact that he’s going to want to play out for agency. I expect us to be part of that, but it should be very competitive with the way he’s pitched. Maybe we have a seat at the table, but it’s gonna be big table.”
On Bryce Eldridge: “Once a guy is in Double-A, Triple-A, they’re in the picture. I think it behooves us to have a roster that’s flexible enough that if he’s ready next year, even early in the year, there’s a spot for him. So that’s going to be really important for us. I don’t anticipate us really locking up the first base and DH spot.”
On Mike Yastrzemski: “I have a soft spot for Yaz. I think he’s a really under appreciated player, a total pro and he does everything well. So I’m personally big fan of his, and I think he can play a big role on a really good team.”
On LaMonte Wade Jr.: “I think the challenge with him continues to be going wire to wire from a health standpoint. He has ability. It’s maybe not the typical profile at first base, but I think he has a lot of value. So again, I think he’s another guy who fits in as an important piece on a on a good team, and it’s just about having the right players around him.”
On Thairo Estrada: “He’s been a total pro, and even being down Sacramento this past month, I watched a lot of their games, and he’s been great. He’s played with energy. He’s played with a smile on his face. Tough circumstance. … He struggled this year. There’s no doubt about that. I think he’s got a chance to bounce back and be the guy he did in the past, but we’re starting to look at some of these other options between Marco and Casey (Schmitt) and Fitzgerald.
“We were open to letting him go if somebody was willing to bring him straight to the big leagues. And that didn’t happen at that point. We just thought it made sense to happen in our organization. So we did try to make some accommodations there. I understand it’s not the way he would want his Giants career to end and it’s just a tough situation.”
On Marco Luciano: “There’s a lot of factors that go into how he’s gotten to this point. Some are just the very typical challenges of development of a young player, getting to the big leagues and getting over the hump in the big leagues. Some are things like the missed Covid year and the fact that he was an international signee and had to go on the 40-man roster last year. That sort of accelerates time frames in a way. He’s still a very young player from both an age standpoint and an experience standpoint. If we were talking through some of these positional changes from short to second, and thinking about the outfield, and he was in Double-A or something like that, it wouldn’t be on the radar. But because he’s on the 40-man roster, because we’ve seen him up here, it’s a much bigger story and understandably so.
“We’ve met a lot with Marco. He’s in a really good head space. I think he understands where he is in his career and things he needs to get better at. Despite some of the reports, there isn’t really a lot of disagreement on where he is in his development. I don’t think anybody feels like he’s a turnkey major league infielder. He’s going to start working on some outfield stuff at Papago this week and we’ll see where it goes from there. We’re going to have an opening at second base next year. We don’t want to totally close that off, but we’ve told him if he wants that job, he’s got to come to spring training and be able to demonstrate that he can play an average or plus second base at a big league level. It’s kind of up to him in terms of the offseason and what he does with it.”
“We asked him, ‘How do you view yourself?’ He said, ‘I’m a shortstop. I think I can be a good shortstop.’ And I don’t think he’s putting on a show. That’s how he thinks. When you’re talking about developing a player, their belief in themselves and how they identify has got to be part of that. And that’s part of the hesitance that take him away from that. … (The bat) is not a finished product. We’ve seen some things in terms of being able to get the ball in the air, being able to pull the ball, for him to have the offensive profile that we’re dreaming of. Yet he still has some steps to take.”
(Photo of Zaidi: Andy Kuno / San Francisco Giants / Getty Images)
