Assets

We all love business

There are a lot of really good things about the Matt Chapman signing. As much as I was against it at the beginning of the offseason, the structure of the contract and the pretty clear upgrade for the team is a really big deal. The team is better today than it was a week ago, and that’s really all you can ask for. This is a good thing, and it sure seems like the Giants, despite missing out on Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, have had a good offseason.

And I’ll be happy to discuss all of that…on Thursday.

But today, I’m still gonna be negative! We like to have fun around here.

When the Chapman deal finally went through on Friday night, incumbent third baseman JD Davis was in a screening of Dune 2, and he found out from his family and friends. As of Saturday morning, the team still hadn’t contacted him, and while that has presumably been remedied by now — or there’s a madcap sitcom-like situation where Bob Melvin is going out of his way to not be in the same room with JD Davis, leading to zaniness and antics as he desperately tries to jump into the air vent in the ceiling anytime Davis comes within 10 feet of his door — it was still a bad look.

But as Davis himself pointed out, there’s a sense in which that was expected. “If Brandon Crawford didn’t get a phone call, I ain’t gonna get a phone call,” he said on Saturday. “It is what it is. It’s part of the business.”

Crawford, too, felt disrespected this offseason. He had told the Giants that he would happily accept a backup role as a mentor for Marco Luciano, and that he was willing to play multiple infield positions, and that above all, he wanted to stay. Farhan Zaidi wasn’t willing to entertain the idea, only extending a minor league contract with an invite to Spring Training after the Cardinals had already offered Crawford a major league deal. In an interview with Andrew Baggarly, Crawford was a bit miffed with Zaidi, suggesting that while Zaidi listened to him, he wasn’t necessarily listening.

And that wasn’t even the first time the Giants didn’t discuss Brandon Crawford’s future with Brandon Crawford! When the team almost signed Carlos Correa after the 2022 season, they didn’t breathe a word of it to Crawford, who would have been a somewhat important part of the plan, considering he would have had to change positions. The Giants said nothing. The Giants didn’t communicate.

Farhan Zaidi just doesn’t think he has to do that.

Zaidi doesn’t think he needs to tell players about moves that involve them. He doesn’t believe in letting his underlings know where they stand, what to expect, what the future holds. He does not see them as people who will perform better if they feel that they are valued by their bosses. He sees them as assets, which exist only to do a job. Would you explain to a stapler why it’s being replaced? No, of course not. That’s some wildly unnecessary, hippie bullshit. A stapler doesn’t need you to tell it that the staple holder part is a little bent and the staples come out funny, and you don’t feel like opening it up, jiggling them around a little, and then putting it back together so it works for the next couple days. You can just go out and get a new one. Problem solved.

So it is with people, in Zaidi’s mind. JD Davis will get over it, and if not, well, he’ll likely get traded before the end of March anyway. Crawford is unhappy, but it’s not like he’s on the team, so who cares? And sure, he would have appreciated a phone call about the Correa thing, but it’s not like he wasn’t going to learn third base in the spring, so it was fine. Besides, that deal fell through, so no harm, no foul, right?

This is just an awful way to manage people. When people are confident and secure, they perform better, no matter what work they’re doing. When the organization creates a legitimate perception that nothing they say can be trusted, players will perform worse.

Imagine that JD Davis sticks around and gets some consistent playing time somewhere. Maybe it’s at first or maybe it’s in the outfield. I don’t know. Not the point. He’s well aware that this organization doesn’t really believe in him, and now there’s nothing they can say to convince him, because he’s already heard them lie. Now he starts pressing, feeling like he has to be a hero in every at bat or else he’ll lose playing time. He gets out of his game. His numbers plummet. He plays less, and when he does play, he’s rusty and still pressing, so he does even worse. It’s a vicious circle, and its root cause was the Giants not feeling like being honest with him.

The team sees the players as business assets. Nothing more, nothing less. Sure, you want to give your assets the best food, because that way they’ll produce more. You want them to have a high quality gym, because they can improve themselves more. There are plenty of good results that come out of this mindset, but it’s a bad process. Treating people well will work better than being indifferent to their emotional states, because not only would the players still get their good food and nice gym, but they wouldn’t have to spend every second wondering “What does Farhan really think of me?” I mean, it would save a lot of time on making those paper fortune tellers, at least.

This asset mentality goes beyond the major league roster. It’s why the Giants are constantly doing that incessant Pick A Minor Leaguer Up, Then DFA Him Four Days Later For Another Minor Leaguer thing. They’re assets, not people. The Giants have a ranked list of the top 3,000 players in organized ball, and if they have to bump #1386 because #1379 just became available, well, screw your life, buddy, that’s just what they’re going to do.

It’s dehumanizing, it’s demoralizing, and it sucks. It doesn’t really work either — the Giants had Hunter Harvey in the organization from late 2021 through early 2022, let him go during Spring Training, and eventually watched him throw 100 innings of 151 ERA+ ball for the Nationals over two seasons. They uprooted his life for a little bit, gained nothing, and watched him succeed somewhere else, all because instead of viewing him as a player who they could help, he was an asset easily replaced with a slightly better one.

This is an ugly way to treat people, and I don’t think that it will stop as long as Farhan is in charge. Treating people like people is simply not one of the core ways he runs the organization. Even beyond the on-field problems, acting that way just seems low rent. I want the team I root for to be better than that. I want the guy in charge of it to make unhappy phone calls because it’s the right thing to do. I want them to be honest and transparent. Because when I think about the front office, I get this vague sense of unease, like I want to ask, Do you know what people are?

Except I’d never actually ask. I know they’d say yes, because they know that’s the right thing to do. But I don’t know whether that would be the truth. After all, you can’t really trust anything these guys say. They might want to keep me on their side, because maybe someday, I’ll be an asset.