What Buster Posey can offer

NOT JUST A PHOTOGENIC SMILE

I have been, let’s say, intensely skeptical of the Giants hiring Buster Posey as President of Baseball Operations. It’s not that I doubt his drive or intelligence or will to win, but it’s hard to predict success for anybody doing a massively complex job with no relevant experience.

But I do think that there’s at least one plus that specifically comes from hiring Posey. Two, I guess, if you count the PR benefit, but from a team building perspective, there is something he can give the Giants that they didn’t have under Farhan Zaidi: credibility with the players.

I don’t have a good bit to go out on before I put in the Please Subscribe To My Newsletter button, and I’m sorry about that.

Under Farhan, there were things the Giants did well. They made Drew Pomeranz a reliever, for example, which got him a four-year deal. They turned Kevin Gausman and Logan Webb into aces, turned Alex Cobb into an All-Star, got a great year from Carlos Rodon, got a great half-year from Blake Snell, and eventually did well enough with Sean Manaea that he got a $28 million guarantee from the Mets. Hell, even Drew Pomeranz’s five relief appearances netted them a future Gold Glove winner (with the Astros, sure, but that’s neither here nor there).

Their work also got Anthony DeSclafani a 3 year, $36 million contract. Great job by his agent, but I’d hate to be the team that got roped into that deal!

However, players around the league couldn’t help but notice one thing: you just couldn’t trust those guys.

In 2023, they promised both Manaea and Ross Stripling the same fifth starter spot, went back and forth between them, and eventually put them both in the bullpen and had bullpen games. They signed Jorge Soler to a 3-year deal and traded him a half season in, when he was putting up exactly the performance his career suggested he would. They would trade for guys, or pick them up on waivers, and then immediately discard them. They would call Spencer Bivens up from the minors, watch him throw the game of his life in an emergency start, and then send him down just to give the roster spot to someone who would not throw a pitch for them, and then, a couple days later, would trade Austin Slater for someone who also would not throw a pitch for them.

It is understandable, from a business perspective, to treat players as fungible commodities. It is insulting as shit, from a baseball player perspective, to be treated as a fungible commodity. When you, a minor leaguer in some other system, are told the Giants just claimed you on waivers, it’s appropriate to think, “I’ll wait a couple weeks to unpack my bags.” When you sign up for three years in a place, you don’t want them to jettison you five months later. When they tell you you’re going to be a starter, you don’t want to be in the bullpen on Opening Day. That’s not what you signed up for.

And that behavior is exactly what I’d expect to calm down a whole lot under Posey. Because as worrying as it is that his publicly released list of GM candidates is decidedly old-school, that is a school that believes in…not doing that shit. When they sign Jorge Soler to a 3-year deal that’s a clear overpay, it’s because they believe in him, dammit, even though they objectively shouldn’t. When they pick a player up off of waivers, it’s because they think they can maybe make him a major leaguer, not because they think they can maybe sneak him through waivers in four days when they pick up a new guy.

The shift in attitude from treating players like they’re on a fantasy team to treating them like they’re on a baseball team might have a minimal impact, or it might have a large one. I don’t want to claim that this one simple trick will fix everything that’s gone wrong. But, assuming I’m not wildly wrong about the character of both Posey and the executive he’s going to bring in, it will be refreshing on a human level.

Honestly, watching Farhan discard players like cocktail napkins was exhausting, it was infuriating, and it was embarrassing. I expect that it will stop under the new administration. My guess is that Posey’s presence will mean that players know someone in the front office knows what it’s like for them. I would suppose that Posey will give the Giants a kind of credibility around the league that they haven’t had since winning cured everything in 2021.

Will that be enough to make the team competitive? I mean, probably not. There is so much work that needs to be done, and so many things that have to go right, that it’s impossible to predict that before the offseason has really even started. But we’ve been rolling our eyes at the same old tricks for years now, and at the very least, it’ll be nice to have some new ones to roll those same eyes at.