Probably needed to happen. No guarantees that it will improve anything.
More than a thousand words will follow those 11, but if you’re short on time, those are the only 11 words you need to know about Farhan Zaidi’s dismissal as the San Francisco Giants’ president of baseball operations on Monday. Those words don’t necessarily apply to the Giants hiring Buster Posey for the same role, but let’s focus on Zaidi first.
There was no way to bring Zaidi back without further alienating a large portion of the fan base, no way to convince people that things were going to change by staying the same. There was no way to justify keeping the front office intact by pointing to the trades for LaMonte Wade Jr. and Mike Yastrzemski (three and five years ago, respectively), or reminding everyone of an unlikely season four years ago that hasn’t come close to being replicated since.
The optics would have been lousy, if not suffocating. Every waiver claim making you roll your eyes, every short losing streak met with the gnashing of teeth, every long losing streak leading to threats of open revolt. If you run a million simulations of the 2025 season, how many of them make a majority of fans happy with Zaidi in charge? A 90-win season probably wouldn’t have done it, and that would have been on the optimistic end of scenarios.
Probably needed to happen.
It’s that second part that sticks with me, though, especially as it pertains to Buster Posey becoming the new president of baseball operations. There are never guarantees in baseball — not on the field, in the clubhouse or in the front office. But while a change in the Giants front office might have been necessary, we don’t actually know a danged thing about Buster Posey, executive.
The #SFGiants are excited to announce that Buster Posey will now take on a greater role as the new President of Baseball Operations pic.twitter.com/BjnktDCqMk
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) September 30, 2024
I’d like to think that a player who came up in 2009 and retired in 2021 isn’t averse to advanced metrics. Posey knows that more data is preferable to less. He was given tablets with batted-ball metrics and biomechanical analysis for everything he did, and if his 2021 season was any indication, he successfully implemented a lot of suggestions. There isn’t a single team in baseball that’s ignoring the volumes of in-house information these days. Hasn’t been for decades. That won’t change in a Posey front office.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t 100 unanswered questions, if not 1,000. If the Giants’ lack of contact is a major concern, how will that be addressed? What are Posey’s thoughts about folding young talent into a veteran roster? How does he weigh the future contributions of a prospect against the present contributions of a trade target under contract for just two more months? How much deference will he give his scouting director? What’s the timeline for the Giants to become winners over the next three years? How involved or uninvolved will he be with the draft? What does he think about the velocity explosion in baseball over the last decade? What’s the best way for hitters to combat it? How much of a roster should be built through free agency? What direction does the Giants’ farm system need to go in? How can the Giants have more success with international free agents? How can they improve with domestic free agents? What are the most important changes he can make to improve the Giants’ ability to develop homegrown players? Does he support a long-term contract for Blake Snell? Did he support one for Kris Bryant? What are his thoughts on long-term contracts in general? If a 40-man roster leaves Scottsdale going 80 mph at 12:01 p.m. on a Monday, and the expectations for the following season leave San Francisco going 83 mph at 10:04 a.m. on a Tuesday, where do the two trains meet?
I was tempted to stretch that paragraph out for another 50 rhetorical questions, but the point has been made. We know nothing about how Posey will run a baseball team, other than it will be different.
Different can be better. Different can be worse. Some of these questions will be answered with the Giants’ postmortem press conference on Tuesday. Most of them won’t be answered for months, if not years. The only certainty is that the Giants’ roster will be built by someone different.
What the Giants had in Zaidi was a president of baseball ops who knew enough to sign Kevin Gausman in the first place, but didn’t trust him enough to re-sign him and avoid a bunch of headaches. He was cagey enough to sign Alex Wood and Anthony DeSclafani on the cheap, but he was overconfident enough to re-sign them to multi-year deals. He couldn’t land Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani, but he could land Blake Snell and Matt Chapman, both of whom helped the Giants contend in 2024. He built a winner out of a mess of a roster, but he also turned that winner into a mess of a roster. He built one postseason team and five teams that didn’t make the postseason. A change probably needed to happen.
What we’re left with, though, is a blank slate. Posey might be the new president of baseball operations because the franchise needs a friendly face to sell a complete teardown and rebuild. He might be here because before the season he privately articulated a 18-point rebuttal to the construction of the 2024 Giants roster, and all 18 points were proven correct. It would have been hard for the Giants to pick a lesser-known quantity. This is about as open-ended as presidents of baseball operations get.
Something to understand is that Zaidi wasn’t fired because he chose the wrong free agents. He had a lot of successes and failures, but that’s because they were free agents, which are inherently bad ideas most of the time. Everyone from Brian Cashman to Dave Dombrowski whiffs on a few free agents and nails a few. I’ll even get bold enough to suggest that Posey will be empirically worse at signing the right free agents, if only because Zaidi was better than most.
A lack of smart free-agent decisions isn’t what was bedeviling the Giants, though. It wasn’t the trades they didn’t make, or the players they couldn’t sign. It was the homegrown players they couldn’t count on. Zaidi’s notable developmental successes were Patrick Bailey, Kyle Harrison, Tyler Fitzgerald and Hayden Birdsong, all of whom still have serious questions to answer. He had no idea what to do with Marco Luciano, Luis Matos or Wade Meckler. The constant roster churn was exhausting, and his tenure was bookended with a March surprise in 2019 with the Opening Day outfield and a March surprise in 2024 with the Opening Day shortstop.
Do you remember which season Joey Rickard spent with the Giants? Trick question, the answer is all of them, at least metaphorically. He was on the Giants because the organization didn’t feel like they had the depth to fill a major-league roster. Things were better by the end of 2024, but it’s not as if the roster is a fully mature apple tree producing enough apples to make a few pies and gift a grocery bag to your neighbors.
That kind of abundance is what needs to happen for the Giants to match up with the Padres and Diamondbacks, much less the Dodgers. There were positive developments in that regard this season, with Fitzgerald and Heliot Ramos looking like they might be everyday regulars for a long time. They need Bryce Eldridge to become a star more than anyone coming up through the farm system since Will Clark.
Wait, check that. They need Eldridge to become a star more than anyone since Buster Posey. And they’ll also need Posey to become an incredible roster architect faster than anyone before him, even though he has far less experience than anyone before him.
A change was probably necessary. This specific change was a shock, though, and it’ll take a long, long time to know if it worked. Any change at the top was going to come with uncertainty and risk. This one comes with more than most. Buster Posey can steal a strike with a great frame job, but can he steal a fifth-round pick using the bonus money saved on an under-slot second-round pick? Maybe! That’s not a snarky rhetorical question; it’s just one of 100 different components that will dictate if the Giants are more successful over the next six seasons compared to the previous six.
The Giants took a predictable step by making changes in the front office, but they followed that up with the least predictable change possible. So let’s plug our noses and dive into the deep end together. Scream “Cannonball!” if it makes you feel better. You won’t know if the actual baseball is any better for a few years, though.
(Photo: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)
