Scott Harris is headed to Detroit
He's from Redwood City but didn't grow up a Giants fan. Suspicious.
It’s important to remember that, as outsiders, we have no idea who does what in the Giants’ front office.
As much as I like to just give Farhan Zaidi 100% of the credit (2021) or blame (2022) for the team’s performance, that’s obviously very incorrect. There are tons of other guys crunching numbers and making decisions and reading scouting reports and collating information. It’s a veritable collatathon, which I’m sure is a delightful time for everyone.
But sometimes new challenges await. There are new horizons to explore, new obstacles to overcome, and, yes, new data to collate. For someone with ambition and at least a shred of an ego, it’s a chance to make your name, a chance Scott Harris was never going to get with the Giants, since idiots like me just assume Farhan does everything and never even consider anyone else making a decision.
Scott Harris, former Giants GM, has taken a new job with the Detroit Tigers. In Detroit, he’ll be the President of Baseball Operations, which is the job that we used to call GM until an enterprising team — I’ll just assume it was the Dodgers — realized they could hire an extra smart front office guy — I’ll just assume it was Farhan Zaidi — by cleverly inflating some titles, thus preventing the A’s from preventing then-Assistant GM Zaidi from interviewing with them for the GM job. There are rules about that sort of thing, you know.
This would be a good spot to point out that the loss of meaning in that title inflation is a good metaphor for the loss of meaning in baseball as a whole, but we don’t have time for that today. I’m sure it’ll come up organically1 in the next month or so.
We have no way to tell what exactly the Giants are losing with Scott Harris because we don’t know what he personally brought. All we can tell is what he’s been part of: the surprising improvement of 2020, the very good of 2021, and the somewhat less good of 2022. We know that whatever his influence was, it didn’t land the Giants a generational superstar, but they also didn’t make any big mistakes that will haunt them for the next decade, unless Prelander Berroa has something to say about it.
Maybe over the offseason, Harris was pushing a 5-team deal that made sense for every side that would have landed the Giants Christian Walker. Or maybe Zaidi was, and Harris talked him out of it. We don’t know and we can’t know.
Here’s what we can know, though: The Giants have been playing it safe and Scott Harris was, some way, somehow, a part of that. They have been content to repeatedly iterate on tiny improvements, trusting that this would make the team better without risking making the team worse, whether by losing players or by losing payroll room.
This is the Smart Baseball playbook. If you listen to the McCovey Chroncast — Give us 5 stars on iTunes! — then you’ve heard Bryan make a lot out of this old Zaidi quote from 2014:
You can build a 75-win team just based on sound analytical principles, and you can do that year in, year out even with a $50 million payroll. The question is how do you get beyond that point?
Something that I began but didn’t finish to articulate this week was things have changed. Almost every team is now using those sound analytical principles, and so you can’t just set your team’s floor at Mediocre because you’re doing smarter stuff than everyone else. Everyone else is doing the same smart stuff. They all have the playbook, so you can’t just run it and trust that you know something about baseball no one else does. Everyone knows what you know now, so you need to move on to the next advantage, and the Giants don’t necessarily have that advantage in roster construction.
Friend of the Newsletter Roger Munter theorized on Twitter yesterday that it’s possible Harris and Zaidi agreed too much, and bringing someone new into the front office might help shake things up:
So this could work out well for the Giants. It could! There are plenty of reasons to think that losing Harris won’t be a disaster for them.
But on the other hand, they’re losing a smart guy who’s well regarded around baseball. That’s…probably not a good thing. He was a big part of planning out the team’s strategy, both big picture and game-to-game — Alex Pavlovic mentioned that Harris and Kapler were in constant contact on the field — and while that strategy hasn’t gone great in 2022, that’s probably more on the players than the theory. The Giants are built to push every tiny advantage, and while it would be nice to have big advantages due to more talented players, they’re still doing their best with what they have.
2021 proved that Harris was probably doing a good job with that. It showed that he has the capacity to not only come up with good game plans, but communicate with his manager and work together with the coaching staff to get results during the game. That’s what you want out of a front office guy. For all the qualities that we don’t know about Scott Harris, I think we can be pretty sure about that one, and the Giants will miss him.
So where does this leave the Giants? They are down one (1) Smart Front Office Guy, which is unfortunate, but hopefully they’ll be able to go out and find another Smart Front Office Guy to step into his role. For a long time, the Giants have been spared exactly this kind of move because they were viewed as behind the curve. Now they’re a well respected organization that’s ahead of said curve. The price of doing business is sometimes someone will see the guy who does all that business and go, “Hey, I want him to do business for me.” That’s what the Tigers did. It’s a good thing overall, I think, even if I don’t know if it’ll be a good thing next year.
When I find an excuse to force it in while discussing an unrelated topic
I think Roger makes a good point. I’m hoping for a slightly different focus going forward. And they could certainly improve their first-round draft results.