A Few Thoughts on Recent Events

Vacations never seem to fail to bring sudden, momentous news in one’s absence. I remember a couple years ago feverishly rewriting in the wee hours in a hotel room in Salzburg to make sure that the Depth Charts piece that was scheduled to post later in the day made reference to the newly signed Carlos Correa — and then a week later thinking I shouldn’t have bothered.

Anyhoo, while I’ve been away — far away — on my family’s annual fall vacation, stuff happened in our Giants-centric world. And now that I’m ensconced back in my home, I think that I need to step out of my cloistered lane and address some of that larger stuff that is roiling the hopes of the Giants’ world, offices, and fanbase.

The Farhan Zaidi Era is now over, and, more shockingly, the Buster Posey Era II has begun. I want to say, first of all, that I think, in a lot of ways, Farhan Zaidi was treated somewhat unfairly by a cross-section of Giants’ fans. Being disappointed in the success of the team under his direction is one thing, but the sort of vitriol that has followed Zaidi’s presence for years has always, to my mind, involved some levels of dark matter. I think it would be naive to think that Zaidi’s race, his name, his “otherness” has not been some factor in the heat that has always been raised against him. And then there is his background in mathematics. A lot of the hate — and I think that’s an accurate enough word for some of the sentiment — was based on atavistic sentiments against “analytics” and “quants” (recently voiced somewhat boorishly by Will Clark in a podcast rant).