SAN FRANCISCO — Not long after the Giants hired Farhan Zaidi to become their top baseball official prior to the 2019 season, the analytically inclined former lieutenant with the A’s and Dodgers met with season-ticket holders for a chalk talk in the home clubhouse.
He discussed unconventional strategies including the use of a relief pitcher to open games. He expected pushback. He also expected to win them over. “What if I told you that using an opener would without question improve our chances to win that night’s game?” Zaidi, who holds a degree from MIT and an economics Ph.D from Berkeley, told the assembly. “Would you still be against it?”
Almost every hand in the room shot up. And in that moment, as Zaidi would later explain, he understood what he was up against.
Zaidi tried but struggled to adapt to the traditional baseball expectations that permeate the Giants’ ecosystem. The franchise’s top decision-makers and diehards demonstrated only so much flexibility in return. They were willing to buy into Zaidi and some of his less conventional strategies in 2021, when the team won 107 regular-season games and finished atop the National League West.
But the winning seasons did not continue. The playoff appearances did not continue. And regardless of fault or cultural fit, the record and the results will always weigh heaviest. They will always sink down to the bottom line.
The Giants signaled a major regime change on Monday, firing Zaidi after they failed to post a winning record for the fifth time in his six seasons. Franchise legend Buster Posey, a member of the team’s board of directors, was named as the club’s new president of baseball operations.
This change came despite the fact Zaidi had been awarded a somewhat cosmetic two-year extension with a club option just 11 months ago. There was bound to be a reckoning after the Giants committed more than $400 million in new guaranteed money this past winter while crossing the luxury tax threshold ($237 million) for the first time since 2017 and those investments resulted in a disappointing team that reached a high-water mark of three games over .500 in early August.
The Giants spent money under Zaidi but did not land a difference-making free agent like Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani. They graduated young success stories to the big leagues but did not develop the kind of budding star who could inherit the franchise-player label from Posey. Zaidi was adept — brilliantly adept at times when he spun straw to acquire players like Mike Yastrzemski and LaMonte Wade Jr. — at raising the floor of rosters and ensuring that the Giants would be competitive; they only finished more than four games under .500 once in his tenure, when they went 77-85 in his first season. But aside from this past winter’s signing of third baseman Matt Chapman, whom manager Bob Melvin lobbied hard to acquire, Zaidi was unable to secure the kind of difference-making star players that could raise everyone’s ceiling.
Perhaps it isn’t Zaidi’s fault that Judge chose to stay with the Yankees or that Ohtani preferred the Dodgers all along or that Carlos Correa’s ankle was a last-minute red flag that scuttled a $350 million contract. But the failed pursuit of franchise players in free agency is a bottom-line result, too.
Zaidi operated with near carte blanche authority following the 2019 season when he expended personal capital to replace manager Bruce Bochy with his hand-picked choice, Gabe Kapler, an unpopular candidate who had just been fired in Philadelphia with a year remaining on his contract and whose introductory press conference turned into a grilling over how he handled an alleged assault involving minor-league players while serving alongside Zaidi as the Los Angeles Dodgers’ farm director.
When the Giants regressed in 2022 and ’23, though, Zaidi’s power became more and more checked by ownership that asked him to make concessions. So Zaidi went with a more traditional approach this season. At the behest of an ownership group that added Posey to its board of directors, Zaidi fired Kapler during last season’s final weekend and pivoted from an iconoclast to a conventional choice with local ties. Melvin grew up in the Bay Area, played three seasons with the Giants, and won two of his three Manager of the Year awards during his 11 seasons in the Oakland A’s dugout. Zaidi reduced the roster churn and the number of straight platoons under Melvin as the Giants attempted to appease their fans while developing more continuity in the lineup and rotation. The team limited the opener strategy to May and June when injuries hit three-fifths of the rotation and the young depth options they were counting on were either on the IL or ineffective.
But success was fleeting again. While San Diego and Arizona went on blistering second-half runs to separate themselves in the NL West, the fourth-place Giants didn’t put together a five-game winning streak until the last road trip of the season when they’d already been eliminated.
That’s how it goes sometimes. Best-laid plans fail to work out. Injuries and underperformance can sink an otherwise well-conceived offseason. Contrary to what some folks might have been saying in 2021, no baseball executive is smart enough to have cracked the game’s code.
But it’s harder to create excuses for Zaidi’s tenure on the player development side. Although the Giants have graduated useful players with upside like left-hander Kyle Harrison, infielder Tyler Fitzgerald and catcher Patrick Bailey, the organization has little to show for its efforts at the top of the amateur draft. Bailey was the club’s top pick in the 2020 draft. But outfielder Hunter Bishop (2019) wasn’t protected from or taken in the Rule 5 draft last December, right-hander Will Bednar (2021) got derailed by back issues and control problems, and left-hander Reggie Crawford (2022) pitched sparingly before undergoing labrum surgery on his left shoulder this past week. When Crawford reports to spring training in 2026, he will have thrown just 37 1/3 professional innings.
And because the Giants signed two qualifying free agents (Chapman and Blake Snell) this past winter, they selected just one player (outfielder James Tibbs III) in the first three rounds of this year’s draft.
Heliot Ramos had a breakout first half and became the Giants’ first homegrown outfielder to make an All-Star team in 38 years. But he was a prospect that the Zaidi regime inherited. So was catcher Joey Bart, the Giants’ highest draft pick (second overall in 2018) since Will Clark in 1985, who was squeezed out the moment that Zaidi signed injury-prone catcher Tom Murphy to a two-year, $8.25 million contract this past winter.
Zaidi faced a difficult landscape in San Francisco, where he had ample resources but was under orders to keep the top spinning. When he met with reporters in Arizona last week, he lamented that so much of the roster building over the past three seasons was done through free agency.
“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.”
Despite unimpressive rankings of their farm system from major industry publications, there’s little doubt that the upper levels of the system are in better shape than when Zaidi took control six years ago. If the Giants’ next top baseball executive achieves rapid success, it will be partially due to the work that Zaidi and his staff put in to infuse talent into the system — including 19-year-old first baseman and budding star Bryce Eldridge, who was promoted three times this season and ended the year at Triple-A Sacramento.
Zaidi, who has dealt with health challenges in recent months that involved a brief hospitalization at the end of August, isn’t likely to remain unemployed for long. His skills remains in high regard throughout the industry and he is expected to have high-profile opportunities outside baseball as well.
What will be the Giants’ hiring criteria for Zaidi’s successor?
Well, major-league baseball operations departments tend to follow the same pattern as presidential administrations. When dissatisfaction abounds, a team usually hires someone who is the polar opposite in skill set and temperament. There is no such thing as a top baseball executive who divorces themselves from analytics, but the Giants aren’t likely to hire a pure quant head. After complaints that Zaidi could be insular at times with members of his own baseball operations group, the Giants’ board is likely to seek out confident candidates with leadership and communication skills.
And they are likely to revisit some of the candidates that they interviewed before choosing Zaidi after the 2018 season. Former Miami Marlins GM Kim Ng is likely to be considered again. So is Diamondbacks assistant GM Amiel Sawdaye. Philadelphia Phillies GM Sam Fuld blends analytics with an MLB playing background that includes parts of two seasons under Melvin in Oakland. Former Giants player and farm director David Bell is available after the Cincinnati Reds fired him from the manager position. Sabean, now a New York Yankees senior advisor, has told friends that he would take a top baseball executive position again, but he doesn’t expect the Giants to circle back to him. Texas Rangers special assistant Nick Hundley, who was Posey’s backup for two seasons in San Francisco, has put himself on the GM track. Seattle GM Justin Hollander, a frequent trading partner with Zaidi over the years, is considered a rising star in the game. Former Kansas City Royals GM Dayton Moore is another Rangers senior advisor who would represent a total 180-degree turn from the approach under Zaidi.
Whomever the Giants hire to succeed Zaidi, that executive will face the same thread-the-needle task. Rejuvenate the roster, refresh the farm system and restore the Giants to relevance in the National League without a full-scale rebuilding effort. And if they’re a natural at holding chalk talks with season-ticket holders, all the better.
(Top photo: Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)
