SAN FRANCISCO — Fans showed up to 24 Willie Mays Plaza this season in numbers not seen since before the pandemic. Despite their middling play, the Giants enjoyed the seventh-largest attendance bump in the league, nearly 2,000 more per game from last season.
But the strong support at the box office didn’t resonate the way you might think.
Ownership saw the product on the field, the results it yielded and determined the Giants under Farhan Zaidi had stalled out.
“You felt it all the year, the desire to see those young players and the excitement when they played well,” chairman Greg Johnson said Tuesday after introducing Buster Posey as their new baseball boss. “But I think we’re asking an awful lot to keep this going every year where nothing’s really changing and we’re playing .500 ball.”
As the Giants’ new president of baseball operations, Posey inherits a more stable situation than the one left for Zaidi after the 2018 season. Ushering in a new age of analytics, which Posey confirmed was “here to stay,” Zaidi deepened their 40-man roster and restocked a barren farm system.
That said, the franchise had fallen behind not only the Dodgers but also the Padres and the Diamondbacks in the NL West and even further from its glory days just a decade earlier, when Posey served as the field general for three World Series championships.
After watching for two years in the ownership group, Posey told Johnson he wanted the responsibility and the accountability of the top job, and he’ll have his hands full correcting the course of a club that has won three postseason games since its last world championship in 2014.
After guiding them to an 80-82 record and a distant fourth-place finish in his first season as manager, Bob Melvin said he would like “a little bit more well rounded team, to where we can win in different ways.” Posey said he wants the Giants “to be known as the ultimate prepared team. … where fundamentals are held at a really high standard.” He mentioned “good, crisp, clean baseball” and “doing the little things better.”
“Ultimately,” Posey said, “we just have to play better baseball.”
To get there, Posey will have to cross off a number of items on his to-do list as he settles into the big chair.
1. Hire a GM
Posey, 37, has never negotiated a contract. The only agent he’s dealt with was his own. He probably hasn’t spent the past two years knee-deep in spreadsheets, methodically monitoring the waiver wire or texting potential trading partners.
Johnson noted that Posey was hired to “set the tone.” The other stuff, he’ll delegate.
Posey’s first and most important decision will be hiring a general manager who understands the ins and outs and day-to-day of running a team. He didn’t offer too many hints but said he would be seeking a “servant leader” and “ideally someone with somewhat of a scouting background.”
“Having in mind,” he added, “that today’s game is so much about meshing what your eyes see and your instincts are with what the data is telling you.”
Posey will rely on the existing braintrust that includes assistant GM Jeremy Shelley, farm director Kyle Haines, pro scouting director Zack Minasian and vice president of baseball resources and development Yeshayah Goldfarb, who should all be instrumental if not internal candidates for a promotion.
Externally, the organization could look at A’s assistant GM Billy Owens or former Marlins general manager Kim Ng. Kevan Graves, an assistant GM with the Pirates, also interviewed for the position before the team hired Pete Putila, who will be assuming a new role if he remains with the organization.
2. Sit down with Blake Snell
With free agency looming in the first week of November, Posey said he hopes to start the interview process “right away.”
It might not be worth waiting until a candidate is in place to get a head start on rest of the Giants’ offseason planning, and the first order of business should be seeing what it will take to re-sign Blake Snell. After all, Posey already reportedly helped get an extension across the finish line with another client of Scott Boras, third baseman Matt Chapman.
After posting a 1.23 ERA over his final 14 starts, Snell is expected to opt out of his $30 million salary for next season, and Posey said, “He’s obviously someone who’s going to be a priority for us to take a hard look at and make a decision as a group.”
That said, Johnson touted their group of young starting pitchers as “the envy of the league” and said when it comes to spending, “It depends on the players. To me it’s about individual smart decisions. Free agency is not going to be the way how you win. You’ve got to develop players.”
3. Evaluate the player development pipeline
Baseball America ranked the Giants’ farm system 28th out of 30 after Zaidi’s first year on the job, as high as 13th in 2020 but back in the bottom third of the league, 22nd, at the end of 2024.
The past season produced some success stories such as Heliot Ramos and Tyler Fitzgerald, but the system has not graduated a star position player since, well, Posey. Teenage first baseman Bryce Eldridge looks promising, but Patrick Bailey remains the only one of Zaidi’s first-round picks to reach the major leagues.
The herky-jerky handling of Luis Matos and Marco Luciano, two of their top prospects, also raised eyebrows inside and out of the organization.
4. Restore reputation
It wasn’t just that Zaidi often acted in conflict of his public messaging in regards to the two top prospects, separate actions reportedly rubbed others the wrong way.
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His lack of communication with Brandon Crawford during the Carlos Correa saga, his willingness to allow then-director of pitching Brian Bannister skirt MLB’s vaccine mandate by working from home and his festooning of Thairo Estrada, the reigning Willie Mac award winner, in Triple-A all damaged the organization’s reputation, according to reports by NBC Sports Bay Area and The Athletic.
Asked directly, Posey said, “I wouldn’t say the brand has been tarnished.”
But Posey saw something that inspired him to step and, in Johnson’s words, “ask for the ball.”
“I think that’s a lot of discussion that we’re going to be having over the next weeks and months is about our identity,” he said. “What’s really important to us as an organization and what are we going to hang out hat on at the end of the day.”
