Buster Posey made a sheepish acknowledgment Friday afternoon: When he began compiling his list of potential general manager candidates with a strong scouting background, he neglected to include his own pro scouting director.
But as he gathered background information on other potential targets, speaking with senior advisers and department heads and respected former baseball officials, Zack Minasian’s name kept coming up. And even the greenest area scout will tell you: The ones you absolutely can’t afford to miss are the ones in your backyard.
“I’ll be honest, and I haven’t told Zack this: I didn’t go into this process thinking that Zack was honestly even a candidate,” Posey said on a Zoom call with reporters to announce that Minasian had been appointed as the 11th GM in the Giants’ San Francisco era. “So when I got word he was someone I should look into, I was open-minded. But if I’m being honest, I didn’t see us sitting right here a month (after) this process started.”
Posey was so convinced Minasian was the right person for the job that he offered him a three-year deal. The Giants’ president of baseball operations and his GM are contractually in alignment.
Everyone arrived at Friday’s announcement because Minasian had the required skills and experience. More than that, he kept making the right impression. Posey would walk away from every interaction and every follow-up conversation with the same thought: This guy has a feel for the game. He just gets it.
He had a prepared answer for every question. He brought an easy affability into every conversation. Posey’s stated goal as the Giants’ chief baseball architect is to get back to the business of making memories. It’s no surprise that he connected with a GM candidate who is a storyteller as well as a scout, who didn’t respond to questions with Chat GPT pablum but with personal anecdotes.
One specific question that Posey put to Minasian in their initial interview was about the Pacific Rim and the Giants’ frustrations at failing to sign star Japanese players. What were they doing wrong? What can they change? Should they de-emphasize their scouting investment in that space if it’s not going to lead to anything?
Minasian, who made several trips to Japan in 2023 to scout right-hander Yoshinobu Yamamoto and who was a leading voice in the failed efforts to sign him, answered without hesitation: “Look, missing out on a player here or there isn’t going to deter me. Not when it took 25 years to convince my wife to marry me.”
It was an answer that must have resonated with Posey because, in their next interview, he asked Minasian to tell him the story. That’s when Posey heard all about the Armenian church camp that Minasian attended when he was 14 years old, and being smitten upon meeting a 13-year-old girl from Ohio named Karina Nova, and keeping in touch across time zones, ostensibly as friends and pen pals, while Minasian was a teenager working for his father in the Texas Rangers’ clubhouse, and then finding ways to stay connected while Minasian went to work in the Milwaukee Brewers’ front office and Nova worked as an Emmy-winning TV reporter in Columbus.
The #SFGiants and President of Baseball Operations Buster Posey have named Vice President, Professional Scouting Zack Minasian as the club’s new General Manager. pic.twitter.com/2luB4nlR7g
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) November 1, 2024
They married in 2022 and they’re finally in the same city. Karina is an anchor and producer for ABC7 in the Bay Area. And their young son, Nico, is a Bay Area native. All of that weighed on Minasian’s mind when it became more and more apparent in September that the Giants would fire his boss, Farhan Zaidi.
Regime changes create instability. Now that Minasian had finally been able to grow tender roots, he had no desire to rip them out.
“Listening to Buster’s initial interview (describing) what he wanted in the (GM) role, my eyebrows kind of raised,” Minasian said. “Like, ‘I think that sounds like me.’ But the GM role … it is so far above what I ever thought. It’s such a dream, I don’t think you really think it’s realistic at times. So I tried to get out of my head and really just focus on working. I wanted us to be prepared, especially with a new boss coming in. At the time, my focus was, ‘I want to run the best pro scouting department and be prepped on every team going into the offseason for my new boss.’
“When Buster called and asked me about my interest level, I told him, ‘I’m a Giant first.’ I love this city. My wife and I moved here. We had a baby here. This organization has been great to me since the first day I walked through the doors. It was important for me to continue with the Giants in whatever role Buster thought worked best.
“Obviously, I was elated when he asked me about interviewing for this and the rest is history.”
Persistence and persuasion are notable attributes when you’re negotiating with Scott Boras or seeking to swing a deal with a rival executive — and yes, Minasian’s counterpart with the Los Angeles Angels is his older brother, Perry, who swung a trade with the Atlanta Braves on Friday to get Jorge Soler.
“I think he was just nervous I got the job,” Zack Minasian said, smiling.
Will the Minasian brothers get together on a trade, like all the fantasy baseball deals they made while growing up in the Rangers’ clubhouse? Well, maybe. But any talks will be executive to executive, not sibling to sibling.
“Perry’s as competitive as they come,” Zack Minasian said. “So showing my cards to Perry probably isn’t the best thing for the Giants anyway. One thing that is helpful is these jobs, they’re tough. They’re very competitive, they can be very stressful, and having your brother go through it and see what he deals with on a daily basis, more so from the fan base. … It’s been a little bit of on-the-job training with not having to do the job.”
Minasian learned the art of closing a deal in his 14 seasons in Milwaukee, where he rose at age 27 to become the youngest pro scouting director in the game. Minasian’s inquisitiveness and baseball sensibility as a clubhouse attendant had made an impression on the Rangers’ GM at the time, Doug Melvin. When Melvin left for the Brewers, he found a place for Minasian in his front office and gave him room to grow.
“He was a hard worker, as were his dad and brothers,” Melvin said in a phone interview. “They stayed late. They put in the time. They were always prepared. And they had great relationships with the players, win or lose. He was the best man for my son, Cory, at his wedding. He was a baseball junkie just like I was.
“Zack was very helpful in Milwaukee. We were a smaller market, we had to be creative, and trades were a big part of it. He was a big part of a lot of trades we made: CC Sabathia, Zack Greinke, we got Francisco Rodríguez at the deadline, and the (Josh) Hader trade was big, too. The Giants should be confident they’ve got someone who knows players. Zack has got a great mind and memory. He’s a great note-taker. He’ll tell a story about almost every deal we made or didn’t make.
“And Zack will bring the same thing to the Giants: a personality that will allow people to have fun doing their jobs. He’s not a guy who will go in his office, close the door and come out at game time. That’s not who Zack is.
“He told me there are some very good people working there. He said he loves the conversations he’s had with Buster Posey. I told him, ‘Well, yeah. He’s a baseball guy. That’s why you enjoyed those.’”
Minasian called Melvin “a huge mentor of mine, probably the most influential. When it came to those trade conversations, we were side by side. I feel very fortunate to have been able to do those things with him and to learn from him. A lot of those trades, it was my responsibility to know the organizations, know their strengths, know their weaknesses, know how we lined up.
“So a lot of the leg work and idea generation would have come from me and the rest of the baseball operations staff and Doug, who I consider not only a brilliant baseball mind, but just a fantastic person, was the ultimate decision-maker and the person executing the deal.”
Posey might be the Giants’ ultimate decision-maker, but he’s also finishing up his first month of work in a major-league front office. So Minasian’s authority will be relied upon and his experience in trade negotiations, especially, will be critical for an organization that will have to get creative to close the gap between themselves and the upper echelon in the rigorous National League West.
“In the background work on him, every person just spoke so highly of the character,” Posey said. “Number one for me in this role is finding somebody who obviously is very astute in their baseball knowledge, which Zack is, and having somebody that I can trust, that we can all trust and share similar visions and goals for the San Francisco Giants was very important. And I think Zack most definitely checked all those boxes.
“Not that other people out there didn’t have this background as well, but I thought it was important that Zach had spent time in other organizations and had a chance to see how things were done. And also, him being here for the last six years was important as well to me, that he’s got a good sense of how people are operating, and probably will help me navigate maybe where some strengths are, but also weaknesses as well.”
While Posey and Minasian both spoke broadly about roster needs, they echoed a vision for a team that would leverage its ballpark by winning with pitching, defense, fundamental play and a lineup that is multidimensional and opportunistic.
Sort of like how the Giants won three World Series with Posey behind the plate from 2010-14.
“I think it’s a huge advantage that we have this blueprint from not too long ago on what works in this ballpark,” Minasian said.
But the game has changed in not-so-subtle ways, too — not just since the last World Series parade in 2014 but from the time Posey played his last game in 2021, too. Posey agreed that the interview process was valuable because he was able to pick brains and gain myriad perspectives on today’s game.
“Ultimately, it’s still baseball,” Posey said. “It’s about having great players on the field and putting them in positions to succeed. A lot of this is fostering relationships and gaining the trust of people and being willing to ask people to do some hard things, and being able to hold people accountable and to a standard.
“And that’s something Zack and I have talked about a lot. We’ve had discussions with player development and just in our thinking of who we want to be. We have a clear identity about how we want to play the game.
“I really feel like he gets what it means to be a San Francisco Giant.”
(Top photo of Buster Posey from Oct. 1: Robert Edwards / Imagn Images)
