Is this a good idea?

It's sure an idea, all right. We know that.

Other than the one year, the Farhan Zaidi era in San Francisco was a disappointment. The team was only special once, only reached the playoffs once, only made the fans proud once. Everything else was just mediocrity: nothing below 77 wins (in a full season, anyway) and nothing above 81.

There comes a point when that’s not good enough. At that point, a smart executive might save his own job for another year by firing an important, visible member of the coaching staff — say, a handsome manager whose platoons and openers, while effective, are deeply annoying to the fanbase — but that only works if something changes the next year.

If nothing changes, if the team still appears mired in the same morass where they’ve been stuck for years, then that smart executive is going to wake up in the morning and put on his bullseye suit, because he knows he’s next. It’s simply how the game works: you only get so many chances, and at some point you run out.

Exit, then, Farhan Zaidi (there were some hints about this). Enter — or, more accurately, re-introduce — Buster Posey.

Wait, Buster Posey? The catcher? What’s he doing here???

Oh, I kid. Posey has clearly been preparing for some kind of public facing job in the Giants front office ever since he joined the ownership group. My money was on him replacing Larry Baer, but with the team’s underperformance since the beginning of 2022, the spot that opened up was Zaidi’s, not Baer’s.

And Posey has been a success at everything he’s ever done. He was obviously a Hall of Fame player, but he also made good investments along the way, most notably putting some good money into Body Armor, which led to a big windfall for him when Body Armor sold itself to Coca Cola. He was an on-field coach in a lot of ways during his career, and knows how to communicate with both players and ownership, and knows what a coaching staff needs to succeed, and knows what a roster needs to succeed. It’s not hard to see how this can go well.

But also…he doesn’t really know what he’s doing? Which could be a problem?

Running a business is a skill. Running a baseball organization is a skill. You build that skill set by taking on lower level tasks, running smaller departments so that you can then level up and run bigger ones. You take personal responsibility for player evaluations, learn from the ones you get right, learn a ton from the ones you get wrong, and do better in the future. You learn which of your instincts are good and which are bad, which teambuilding strategies you used as a player you can use as an executive, and which will be counterproductive as the architect of an entire team.

Buster hasn’t done any of that. That doesn’t mean he’s not smart, or hardworking, or unable to do those things, but there are going to be a lot of mistakes along the way, and it would be preferable to make some of those mistakes in a lower stakes environment. Think of Chris Young (tall), the current General Manager of the Rangers, who moved from the field to the MLB office under Joe Torre, where he worked for three years before moving to Texas as their GM. At the time, Jon Daniels was still the President of Baseball Operations, and after Daniels was fired in 2022, Young was free to build the team that won last year’s World Series.

Or you could think of another dedicated winner with a sterling reputation in the game, someone whose drive and knowledge of the game was unquestioned, who took over as PBO of a team and didn’t see it go well. And while Giants ownership is certainly greatly preferable to the Marlins owners who Derek Jeter had to deal with, Jeter was very, very bad at that job. He traded Christian Yelich for nothing the year before he won the MVP. He signed Avisail Garcia to a disastrous 4-year deal after looking him in the eyes to determine his character. He thought he could do everything better than everyone because he was Derek Jeter and he’d always done everything better than everyone, and he was extremely wrong.

It’s unlikely that Posey will be as bad at the job as Jeter, and he certainly has more advantages to work with, but Jeter is an instructive example that greatness on a baseball team does not necessarily translate to greatness running one. There will always be a natural arrogance to someone like Posey, who’s succeeded at so many things during his life. Some of that is a good thing, but too much can turn him into a bull in a china shop, charging forward no matter the consequences.

I don’t think Posey is particularly susceptible to that kind of thing, but he’s about to experience a different kind of pressure than he ever has. He’s also about to be able to make the decisions that he probably wished someone would make when he was a player. “We need another pitcher,” he’d tell his teammates back in 2018. Now he can get one! Maybe it’s someone who’ll help the team, but maybe the prospect cost is too high. Maybe he’ll be out of line with the industry consensus on overvaluing prospects, and maybe that’ll work out, and maybe it won’t.

There are just so many unknowns here. Bringing in an outsider to do an insider’s job is both the highest ceiling and lowest floor move. We all believe in Buster Posey because we watched him for so long — and that PR aspect is absolutely a part of the calculation for a team that hasn’t exactly been swimming in great PR lately — but we have absolutely no idea what kind of organization he’s going to run. The possibilities run the gamut from exciting to terrifying. So is this a good idea? I have no idea, and neither does anyone else.