I was going to write about Dusty Baker today, you know. There was a lot to say about him, and the Astros, and the season they had, and the team’s legacy, and how it impacts Dusty’s legacy.
I will not be writing about Dusty Baker today.
Instead, Buster Posey will be retiring today.
Huh.
Posey was the face of the franchise, but you knew that. He’s a Giants icon, but you know that too. His retirement marks the end of an era, but, well, again, you know that. He’s a private person, and he’s accomplished what he wants to accomplish, and now it’s time for him to be done.
I mean, I don’t think that, but he does. Apparently I don’t get a vote? Seems rude, considering I’ve been watching Posey both on TV and in the ballpark for so long, but that’s the state of American democracy these days.
No, Buster Posey was always going to go out on his own terms, and, as Hank Schulman astutely pointed out, those terms were never going to include people lining up to say goodbye to him:
For all the commercials he’s done over the years, for all the grace with which Posey has handled his media responsibilities and being a public figure, you never really got the sense that he liked that part of his job. He was good at it — he was great at it, honestly, if you remember some of his commercials — but he personally never needed that kind of attention.
Here are a couple of those commercials, in which he is a good actor:
Posey was a star, but the kind of star you would watch without having to be told to. You did not need to see the Buster Posey brand being promoted to Tatis-tier levels (this is not a dig at Fernando Tatis Jr, who is delightful) to treat Posey as a Tatis-tier star. He simply was, steadily, like the tides or traffic at the Bay Bridge toll plaza. If he wasn’t there, being himself, something would be weird.
For years, the Giants would teach Posey’s swings to their minor leaguers, because it was so perfect. It was as pretty of a swing as a right-hander could have, to the extent that I wrote a whole paean to him hitting a single to right field in Spring Training. Please do not scroll down on that page to the part where I said that there was no way in hell the Giants were winning the division, by the way. No one needs to see that. We’re all going through enough right now.
Now that will all be in the past. We’ve seen Buster Posey as the young kid, the Chosen One, leading the Giants to the promised land for the first time in San Francisco. We’ve seen him rising from the ashes of a broken ankle, a crime for which Scott Cousins has never atoned, to vanquish the vile Latos-monster and bring a second championship to 3rd and King. And we’ve seen him absolutely exhausted, willing himself through 2014 as Madison Bumgarner carried the team to a third ring.
We saw him fade over the next few years too, culminating with a hip surgery in 2018 and a 2019 where he looked like a shell of himself. He sat out in 2020, and then came back with a vengeance in 2021, looking like vintage Posey as the team worked itself into contortions to ensure he got enough rest to stay productive. 2021 was his second Comeback Player of the Year award (the first being 2012), and the story of his shocking success was the story of the team’s shocking success.
Posey was the rare massively hyped prospect who lived up to the massive hype. He came up a little after Matt Wieters and a few years before Mike Zunino, both top prospects who turned into perfectly decent catchers with good careers that were never able to stay at the next level. Posey was the exception, though, the can’t miss prospect who didn’t miss and made you believe in the next 19 can’t miss prospects, most of whom would end up disappointing. But you still had to get hyped about them, because what if this guy is the next Buster Posey?
Despite all of Brandon Belt’s jokes, Posey was the captain of the Giants. He was the leader, the one people turned to in good times and bad. He was a great hitter and a greater defender. He was a franchise icon. He had the ultimate baseball career, and he walked away when he could have had more of it, because it was time to go. That’s a hell of a legacy.
There was also a Buster Posey that we never saw from the outside. He spent his whole career being as buttoned down as possible, the professional one, the calm one. But very, very occasionally, there was another Buster that would emerge, one that wasn’t holding back the full force of his personality.
After the 2014 World Series, Buster Posey was exhausted. He’d had a bad series offensively, hitting just .154/.241/.154 across 29 plate appearances. He hadn’t been much better in the NLCS either, with a line of .200/.261/.200. The grind had worn him down, and he made it to the end, but he was running on fumes.
When MLB Network brought him out for their postgame coverage after Game 7, he was giddy. He was too tired to keep up the facade, too happy for it to seem worth it. They’d made it. Bumgarner had pitched the team to a championship, Posey had caught every pitch along the way, and for the third time they were champions. Posey was, for one of the very few times in his career, like a kid out there, making jokes and absolutely unable to stop smiling.
I don’t want to say that was the real Buster Posey and keeping the public at arm’s length was an act. I don’t think that’s true. But it was a side of him that he usually kept private, reserved for friends and family, people he’s close to. It was a delight to see him let that out on a night when Giants fans were so ecstatic to have won. Sometimes you wondered if he really was human, and there was your answer, live on the field in Kansas City. It was a pleasure to watch him play baseball. It was something more to see him let loose, if only for a few minutes, and actually have fun out there. It was a special moment, and one I’ll remember for a long time.
Also, I’ll remember the three World Series, because that’s an awful goddamn lot of World Series to win.