Farhan Zaidi: tech guy

Not a compliment

We’ve all seen the Modern Tech Guy. He draws you in with lavish promises about a utopian future that only his product can provide. He wows you with his impeccable resume of great companies where he played a key role. He sells you on the ideals of his company, their mission, even before he gets to the money everyone can make. He’s kinda doofy and awkward, but that just adds to his authenticity, in a way. He’s just a harmless nerd! And as we all know from repeatedly hearing it from harmless nerds, harmless nerds are the engine that drive progress.

They are movers. They are shakers. They are ludicrously successful. They are perpetually disappointing. They never follow through on their promises. They are full of grandiose self-importance. They are exemplars of the cultural rot in both the Bay Area and the country.

And Farhan Zaidi is absolutely one of them.

Everything about the Giants under Farhan has been transformed. In some ways, that’s what you expect from a new regime taking over, especially when the old one had been around for a couple decades and fallen on some hard times. Of course the team is going to want to bring in a guy who does things differently than the things that didn’t work anymore. That’s how you modernize and innovate.

And for a while, it worked. We all remember 2021, of course, but even in the shortened 2020 fake season, the offense was objectively good. They were sixth in the league in wRC+ and eighth in the league in runs scored. Then, in that 2021 season, they were fourth in the league in wRC+ and sixth in runs scored. A lot of that came from the team beefing up its analytics staff and finding new voices and disrupting the industry. The Giants sure looked like baseball’s shining example of a bold new direction.

And then they weren’t. And they didn’t change anything.

The Giants are a tech company that does not know how to adapt when something goes wrong. They are WeWork, counting on money pouring in (no one realizing that they can just throw fastballs down the middle and the Giants will take them) until they figure out how to be profitable (develop prospects). They are supposed to have a genius in charge, but everything about the team seems to be turning more and more into dogshit every year. Does anyone actually think this team will turn it around this year?

And do you remember all the hype about Farhan? How smart he is? How clever? That’s all we ever hear about the guy, like he founded Theranos or something. We’ve been hearing the hype for years: Just wait until he gets it going. One day, the farm system will start pumping out prospects and then the Giants will be unstoppable. When is that day coming? Well gosh, looking at the calendar, sometime between peak oil and the singularity. Soon!

Really, though, it’s not just that Farhan Zaidi embodies being a Tech Guy. It’s that he represents one specific technology in particular. It’s one that I’ve talked about before in this newsletter, and certainly not one that’s impressed me.

Having Farhan Zaidi run a team is like having AI run a team.

Let’s start with the most obvious thing: there never seem to be any consequences for Farhan doing a bad job. This is his team. This is his sixth season running the team. Any flaws in it are his flaws; amy issues are his issues. And yet, the only noise about him not having a job anymore comes from powerless people on social media. There’s nothing official, nothing from the media, no leaks about his job being on thin ice. As far as anyone can tell, ownership — who just gave Farhan an extension at the same time Bob Melvin came on board — isn’t addressing him at all.

This is exactly how AI is. You might see people on Twitter or Bluesky whining about how it’s obviously stupid to have AI tell you how to pass a kidney stone or write a book on identifying poison mushrooms. But none of that affects the stock price or the bottom line. You have this thing that’s objectively bad, and yet not one single stakeholder has any incentive to do something about it.

And then there’s process. AI’s process is, putting it simply, predicting words. It doesn’t think or evaluate or do anything other than predict what words will come after the words that just came out. Sometimes that prediction is pretty good. Sometimes it’s not. Either way, it changes nothing and then uses the same process the next time someone asks it something.

Farhan Zaidi looks at swing decisions, picks a guy up off of waivers, immediately starts him for three games, and then when he fails because he’s Mark Mathias and has no business being on a big league roster, does it again. On occasion, he’ll find an Alex Dickerson. Usually, he won’t. Then he’ll do it again. And again. And again.

Is Farhan putting any thought into acquiring players or just following his process like a robot? When he closed the deals this offseason for Matt Chapman and Blake Snell, how much scouting was there? And how much did he listen to it about what to expect? Or did he just see brand name players at Kirkland prices and jump on the deal?

Is Farhan Zaidi actually putting thought into these player acquisitions or does he just have some boxes that anyone could check? Is he personally doing anything that a fed-on-Farhan’s-actions OpenAI couldn’t do? Well, yes, almost certainly. But is any of that showing up on the field? Is Michael Conforto around because there was something special about him or because, hey, he might be good, may as well try? And couldn’t basically anyone take that chance?

At the beginning of Zaidi’s tenure with the Giants, he seemed creative. All the minor trades and minor pickups that led to a couple successes in improving the roster. But now? He gets credit for the month Jordan Hicks has had, sure. But where’s the Super Genius Never Lost A Fantasy Football League guy when the offense is perpetually scuffling? Where’s the smart move that no one could predict? Where’s the trade that brings energy to the team? Where’s the fire to make these guys better?

We were sold a bill of goods. Every day, it is becoming more apparent that those goods will never show up. This is the tech sector. This is the Giants. Maybe someday it’ll change, but that’s clearly not happening anytime soon.