The biggest topic in the world is here: Giants front office hires

My breath...it's so bated!

When Buster Posey was named President of Baseball Operations, I had some concerns. I then said it would likely be hard to tell how good he personally was at the job, and then I expressed hope that at least one of his personal qualities would be a net positive for the franchise.

I like to examine every angle of the issues here, especially when I don’t have anything more interesting to talk about.

But we’re now several weeks into the offseason, Posey has made some key hires in the front office, and together, we can all do the important work of figuring out just what shape the organization is going to take over the next few years, and we can also do the equally important work of freaking the fuck out about it because they’re doing it wrong, they’re doing it all wrong, WE’RE DOOMED!

Okay, let’s all pull ourselves together, especially people who are not me because I am perpetually rational and right about everything and it’s everybody else who needs to relax, and look at the situation.

At his introductory press conference, Posey announced that Pete Putila would not continue as GM, and instead the team would find a new role for him. Instead of that, Putila found a new role for himself as Assistant GM with the Braves, leading their international scouting department. The Giants, now needing to replace Putila as GM and also add some scouting expertise, had a couple of big hires to make.

The first one was, if not itself expected, then at least in the neighborhood: They promoted Zack Minasian to GM. Minasian had been with the team since 2019, and from all accounts had impressed just about everyone just about every step of the way. Even if Minasian’s name was not the internal candidate bandied about the most — that would probably be Jeremy Shelley — the idea of the Giants promoting from within seemed eerily plausible throughout the process.

The second, though, was a little bit more out of right field. The Giants named Randy Winn their vice president of player development, where he will work together with farm director Kyle Haines, who Roger Munter has described as being massively overworked, so it does make sense that the organization would bring someone in to take some of the load off.

But Randy Winn?

I don’t mean this as a dig at Winn, who certainly came off as one of the more intelligent players on the team when he was playing. And without a clear definition of what his responsibilities will be, you can’t really point at Winn (like you can at Posey, for example) and say “I’m not sure he’s qualified to do this job.” Winn was a special assistant to the GM for two years, and then became a scout for the Giants, and that scouting experience was something that Posey emphasized when he got hired. There are boxes we know Winn checks, and boxes we can assume he checks, and combined, they paint a picture of a good candidate.

But Randy Winn has been around the Giants for a while. So has Zack Minasian, for that matter.

Doubling down on your own expertise and your own institutional knowledge is an interesting choice for an organization that has been massively mediocre for the last three seasons. One would think that the team would welcome new blood and new ideas into the fold, instead of sticking with the same people who drove the car into the ditch. It’s possible that everyone in the room knew that Minasian was right and that evil Farhan wouldn’t listen, but it’s more likely that he was part of a collaborative process where a lot of things went wrong.

That’s not to say that Minasian is a bad hire, but if the team would like a better collaborative process, then it would make sense to hire different collaboraters. Get people from outside who can say, “No, this doesn’t make sense,” or, “Nobody but you thinks that and everyone thinks you’re weird.” Otherwise, you’re running a real risk of spinning your wheels because you don’t know how to stop.

This comes back then to probably my biggest trepidation about the Posey regime, which is that he will follow bad instincts to do things in a way that is not just out of line with industry trends, but behind the times. The Giants will go back to being a backwards organization because Posey will simply replicate what worked when he was a young player instead of pushing forward to figure out what will work in 2025, 2026, and 2027.

I think Buster is a smart guy, and he cares, and he will do his best, but I would have also said those things about Bobby Evans, and that went poorly. I worry that the Giants, after having been probably too aggressive in pushing analytics into the organization, will now be too aggressive in pushing them out. Posey’s first couple hires have looked like old school baseball, which can have its place, but it means that from the outside, the beginning of the Buster Posey Era (Front Office Edition) seems like a step into the past.

When everyone else is in the future, that doesn’t generally end well.