Who the heck is Giants owner George Drysdale?

Part 8 in the series

This is the seventh installment in our series on who exactly owns the Giants. So far, we have covered real estate mogul Scott Seligman, private equity guy Phil Halperin, real estate mogul Jed Walentas, medical technology investor David Schnell, radio station owner/former Yahoo board member Arthur Kern (Art to his friends), lady of mystery Nancy Olsen, and Republican super-donor Charles Johnson. Time to look at the big board!

It’s getting hard to find anyone left!

Now, there is one thing I should mention here before we start: Art Kern is, according to the Giants website, no longer an owner. So while he has already been profiled, and his name will live on in the intro paragraph, he does not seem to be associate with the team any longer.

With that out of the way, it’s time to focus on today’s sideshow in Lockout Theater: George Drysdale!

George Drysdale was born in the Philippines, presumably sometime in the mid-1950s. He grew up in both the Philippines and the United States, and attended high school in the Philippines, before graduating from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA with a bachelor’s in engineering in 1976. He then went on to Stanford, where he received a law degree and graduated with an MBA in 1980.

After graduation, Drysdale (as far as I can tell, no relation to Don Drysdale) worked in corporate law for three years, then worked in venture capital until 1987, when he took a White House fellowship, working with Dick Lyng, Reagan’s Secretary of Agriculture. After that, Drysdale went into the agriculture business for himself, founding a leveraged buyout firm called Westar (pronounced West-R) Capital. He then went out on his own. He claims his company — Marsman Drysdale Corporation — has businesses in agribusiness, food processing, communications, IT, tourism, and healthcare, with the largest business now being agriculture.

MDC, as I’ll call it, because who wants to type or read all those letters, is a 6,000 employee business that has agriculture as its core business, with a 4 square mile banana plantation in the Philippines. They have one and a half employee per hectare! Apparently that would be a lot in the United States. Drysdale claims that all the employees doing all the work by hand means that the company sets up towns with services like hospitals and whatnot. I am skeptical of how good this deal is for the workers.

Drysdale describes baseball as a business, “But it’s also a passion and it’s a public trust.” He was part of Peter Magowan’s original group that bought the Giants after the 1993 season. He claims that the entire ownership group sees the team as a public trust for the city of San Francisco, but with that being said, it is still a business and the owners will develop the team as a business.

Politically, George Drysdale is a Republican. He is a committed Republican. Not only does he consistently donate to Republican candidates, giving $81,000 to the Trump Victory PAC last year alone, while also throwing some money at the Alabama GOP, Jim Costa, Mike Braun, and Dana Rohrabacher, but as mentioned earlier, he also took a White House fellowship under Ronald Reagan. He has not, it appeared, donated to Lauren Boebert or anyone of that ilk, so he’s more of a party line guy than an insurrectionist guy.

Now, if you Google George Drysdale, you will find a series of letters to city councils and newspapers, as well as some not particularly well written comments on the internet, from someone by that name who is extremely angry about rent control in San Jose. I do not think that this is the Giants owner, though I have to admit, if it is, that is extremely funny. Check out page 12 here if you want the good stuff (in this context, “good stuff” means bringing up Lenin and Stalin in paragraph 3).

Drysdale has five children, and is said to split his time between Hillsborough, CA and Manila. As of May, he was listed as a Director, Ex-Officio of the American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines (he had previously served three terms as president) and also served three terms as Chairman of the twenty-six member chambers of the Asia-Pacific Council of American Chambers of Commerce, and if you’re wondering if I copy and pasted that from another website, yes, I absolutely did because I have no shame.

Well, that was fun. And now, since the Giants website has changed, it’s time to bust out the new Big Board!

Jerry Yang? Yahoo’s Jerry Yang? Oh boy, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do.