The Giants hired a new GM yesterday, naming Houston Astros Assistant GM Pete Putila as the newest member of their front office, replacing Scott Harris, who has now moved on to run the show in Detroit. Putila has been with Houston since 2011, making him almost certainly the longest tenured member of their front office (I am not going to do any research on this). This brings me to the following joke:
Finally someone takes something from the Astros!
That was a cheating joke.
Because they stole signs.
Putila graduated from West Virginia in 2010, and not Harvard, which you would have assumed from looking at his picture:
There is currently no credible evidence that he is the third Winklevoss twin. We will keep you updated as the situation warrants.
At West Virginia, Putila studied Sport Management, Business Administration, and Communications, and was the president of the Sport Management Club. He also spent what appeared to be a semester at the American University in Rome, where he was a member of the school’s soccer team, and if you think that’s too trivial to mention, well, Pete Putila’s LinkedIn page disagrees with you.
Putila was hired by the Astros as a baseball operations intern in January 2011, got promoted to Baseball Operations Assistant in September of that year, got promoted to Baseball Operations Coordinator in October 2013, got promoted to Assistant Director of Minor League Operations in September 2015, got promoted to Director of Player Development in November 2016, and then got promoted to Assistant GM in October 2019.
Now he’s getting promoted again, but with another team. Way to rise through the ranks, New Guy.
As you would expect from someone who had so many job titles, Putila also had a lot of different responsibilities, making him knowledgeable in all sorts of areas of baseball operations. Early in his career, he did a lot of work involving minor league player development and amateur scouting; he then shifted to doing a lot more player development, including bringing those minor league development strategies to the majors, where players could continue developing.
During that time when Putila was overseeing development, the Astros had one of the premier farm systems in the game. During his time with the team, they also had a somewhat famous cheating scandal, which cost a lot of smart front office people there their jobs. Not Putila though; his hands were actually clean or at least plausibly clean, and he got to stick around as AGM, though it might have been bittersweet for him, considering that over that offseason he had interviewed for GM jobs with the Pirates and Giants, and hadn’t gotten them.
“Guess I’m still stuck here in Cheaterland,” he probably didn’t say to himself while drinking a single-malt scotch. But he could have! And isn’t that the important thing?
Why are the Giants so interested in Putila, to the extent that they would pay him to do work for them? One of his main responsibilities in Houston around 2015 was to take TrackMan data and use it to improve player development. The Giants have based a lot of their success on their ability to do something similar, so having someone with longtime firsthand experience in that type of video analysis has to be an asset to them. He also has spent a lot of time with the minor league teams in Houston’s system, implementing mechanical changes that the organization wanted to see and learning how to work with coaches and players to get results, and you certainly can’t say that the Astros haven’t gotten results over the last few years.
Some of Houston’s results during Putila’s tenure were also trash can-related, of course, but we haven’t heard that he knew about any of that, so we can safely assume the absence of evidence is evidence of absence and say he’s totally clear there.
So how much do we know about how Pete Putila will fit into the Giants’ front office? Not a ton. But will we know more over the coming months and years, as he and Farhan shape the team’s future? No, not really. Like I said when I talked about Scott Harris, the internal workings of the Giants are purposefully opaque, and we will never know who had what idea or who pushed for what trade or anything.
All we can do is wait and hope. Wait for the Giants to start making moves, and hope that they win 108 games next year and we totally forget about #ForeverGiant Scott Harris.