How much continuity is the right amount?

An important question

When the Giants hired Buster Posey to run the show, it was a clear sign that Things Are Going To Change. For three years, they’ve been a moribund franchise, hovering just under .500, never making a move that got them over that hump. A restless fanbase demanded change, and they got it, first with Gabe Kapler’s dismissal, and then with Farhan Zaidi’s.

But is that enough change? A front office is more than just one man, no matter how easy it is for us to project all of our frustrations onto him. Whatever went wrong went wrong at level after level, trapping the Giants in perpetual mediocrity. It’s not like the entire organization was looking up and shouting at Farhan, “Give Seth Lugo a 4-year deal!” and he was looking down and whispering, “No.”

Easy decision then, right? Get rid of them all. Hire better people from other organizations and start fresh. After all, when something is going wrong in an organization, you, as an outsider, should be able to pick which of the two simple, extreme options that seem readily available will do the trick. It can’t be true that running a baseball team is hard and that there’s no way any outsider is actually qualified to judge what’s going wrong, right?

Right?

Aw, nuts.

The only thing that is indisputably true is that the Giants haven’t been good for the last three years. Anything beyond that is, in the best case scenario, an educated guess.. Yes, Farhan was running the team for the last six years, but we don’t know how much ownership interfered. Did they tell him they weren’t raising payroll even after 2021? Did they insist he sign a bunch of free agents before 2024?

Or did they hire him because they already agreed on issues like not trying to give long deals to players who weren’t locks for the Hall of Fame? Did Farhan get the job because he and the ownership group agreed on how to build a sustainable winner?

In this context, the way to build a sustainable winner is to have a farm system that pumps out decent-to-good players, have them on the major league roster for 4-5 years, extend the superstars, and trade the good-but-not-great ones as they’re hitting their last year of arbitration. Like the Rays, if they extended their superstars instead of also trading them. Of course, they didn’t end up following through on trading any of their players, because they didn’t have the steady stream of adequate replacements coming up from AAA that they needed to make the whole thing work.

Or maybe Farhan didn’t want to do that at all! We really have no idea.

Did Farhan achieve the profitability metrics that ownership wanted but they had to fire him for PR reasons? Who knows? Did he do a good enough job of revitalizing the farm system but didn’t get that one extra year to see it bear fruit? No idea! Did the Giants rush their prospects because they thought it was the best way to develop them, or because Farhan was trying to catch lightning in a bottle to save his job, or because they were just throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck? Gosh, I’d love to have the answer to that one!

Not only do we not actually know where the problem was, we don’t even know that there was a problem. Maybe it takes so long to reorient the organization around modern analytics that the Giants were doing what they needed to, but didn’t have time to finish the job. Maybe Pete Putila had a great plan to revitalize the minor league system, and he didn’t get to fully implement it. Maybe the players who the Giants would have been well served to sign never would have wanted to come to San Francisco. We don’t know and we can’t know.

But it seems really unlikely that they couldn’t have been better. It would have taken a wildly implausible series of catastrophic coincidences to get the Giants to this point, where they’re not competitive, without the front office bearing responsibility. But who? There are thousands of variables here, and Buster Posey, who has never run an organization with anything close to this level of complexity, has to sort it out.

Posey is really in a tricky spot. If there’s too much change, you get rid of the institutional knowledge that has allowed the Giants to escape the truly abysmal depths of the Rockies or the White Sox. If there’s not enough change, the same people keep making the same mistakes.

From the tenor of his introductory press conference and what seems to be true about Posey as a person, it seems likely that, before hiring a GM, he’s going to lean hard on the front office people who were part of the dynasty teams. He’s not going to dismiss analytics, but he believes in a lot of the virtues that built those teams. If that means that Jeremy Shelley ends up as GM, well, there are worse things.

Just as one example of the Giants not being that bad at player evaluation, three out of the four starting pitchers in the playoffs yesterday were Giants in 2022 and 2023, which is a sign that the organization knows how to find talent. It didn’t take that much genius to sign Carlos Rodon, but Alex Cobb and Sean Manaea were both tougher calls that the team got right. There were really good starting pitchers in there. Sure, it only kind of worked for Manaea in San Francisco, but the core of the evaluation was right.

And yet, it took too long to click for Manaea as a Giant. Maybe that’s a coaching issue, or maybe that’s a coaching asset. Maybe, when he came over from the Padres, he wasn’t quite right, and it took months to get him there. Or maybe it was already there, and the coaching staff took wrong turn after wrong turn trying to coax it out of him. Do you keep the analytics people who told the coaching staff what to do because it worked eventually, or do you get rid of them because by the time they got it right, it was their fifth suggestion of what to do?

Where is the problem with the Giants? That’s the most important question that Posey has to answer. And the hardest thing is, no one will ever know if he was right. I mean, occasionally, you’ll have such a catastrophic decision, or such a blatant turnaround that you can make the call easily. But for almost every decision Buster makes, he’s not going to know if it was right. Some of them might turn out well because something went right somewhere else; some might go terribly because of bad luck or unpredictable trickle-down effects from elsewhere.

It’s really hard to do this. It’s a really hard job. I don’t want to make it seem like I think Buster is bound to fail or that the Giants are going to be bad forever, but there are so many ways for this to go wrong that nobody wants to think about because Buster was so good both on a baseball field and in that commercial where he said, “Ay que lindo!” These are tricky, complex decisions that could easily go wrong. I’m hoping they don’t, but I have to be realistic about the less pleasant possibilities out there.