Giants New GM Pete Putila Comes with Strong Player Development Background
The San Francisco Giants announced last night that they have filled their vacant General Manager position by hiring Pete Putila, who was a candidate for the position when Scott Harris was hired in 2019.
The 33-year-old Putila (pronounced: puh-TELL-uh) has worked for the Houston Astros his entire career, starting with the club as an intern out of the University of West Virginia in 2011. Putila worked his way up through the organization, reportedly becoming a key conduit between the organization’s cutting edge analytics department and the players. Putila’s work in communicating advanced information to players to help them buy into suggested changes made him a rising star in the organization, ultimately leading him to the head of Player Development and (before coming to the Giants), Assistant General Manager.
As quoted in the Giants’ official press release, Farhan Zaidi said of the hire: “We’re all excited to have Pete joining our Baseball Operations leadership team. Pete has a stellar reputation in the industry as a creative thinker and strong collaborator, and we view him as a seamless fit with our culture of embracing a growth mindset on and off the field. We’ve prioritized player development up to and including the major leagues, and Pete’s experience and thought leadership in this space will be a tremendous asset as we continue to strengthen our talent pipeline and build a sustainable winner in San Francisco.”
Parsing through the copious amount of corporate-speak in that release, it’s pretty clear that the Giants have identified their player development pipeline as a gap that can stand to be shored up. Zaidi spoke often over the second half in various conversations with the media about the gap that exists between the Giants and Dodgers in terms of bringing more and better talent into the organization (through various means) and the Giants failure to be able to solve some of the issues that cropped up this season from their internal sources. The failure of Heliot Ramos and, to a lesser extent, Sean Hjelle, to play more of a role on the team in 2022 (as well as previous players who were counted on in previous years, like Tyler Beede), as well as some notable issues in the progress of the top draft choices under Zaidi (Hunter Bishop, Patrick Bailey, and Will Bednar) has inhibited the club from moving forward in the way it had envisioned. It was one thing for the club to set a record for players used in 2019, as the newly-installed President of Baseball Operations cycled through the roster looking for found gold, it was quite another for the team to break that same record three years later, when it should have been expected to be further along in its overall organizational development (though the pandemic in 2020 certainly plays a large role in that).
Bringing Patila into such a situation thus makes a lot of sense. Houston’s player development has been a model of the industry for a decade now, and Patila spent several years in the middle of that decade as the club’s Minor League Operations Coordinator and Farm Director. Of course, much of Houston’s success has come from nailing their run of top draft picks in the wake of pioneering the “tanking” stratagem. Getting Carlos Correa and Lance McCullers, Jr. at the top of the 2012 draft signaled their rise, and the 1-2 punch of Alex Bregman and Kyle Tucker in the first five picks of the 2015 draft is one of the great draft coups of all time (their third pick in that same draft, Daz Cameron, ended up being a key piece in their acquisition of Justin Verlander).
But Houston has also had tremendous success, especially in the last few years, at turning little-regarded prospects into big league pieces. The current team has built around Verlander a home-grown rotation of incredible development success: Framber Valdez, Jose Urquidy, Luis Garcia, and Cristian Javier were all lightly regarded, low five-figure signings out of the international market. Valdez wasn’t even signed until he was 21 — which is ancient as far as IFAs go. Javier and Garcia were signed for a total of $30,000. None bring huge traditional tools, but all have motored through the Astros’ player development system thanks to an ability to control the strike zone, turning themselves into incredibly productive big leaguers. Valdez moved from the DSL to the majors in just three years, and Urquidy picked up a win in a World Series game in 2019, despite having never appeared above A ball at the start of that year. For this year’s post-season, the Astros will add top pitching prospect Hunter Brown to their roster. Brown was a 5th round pick just three years ago out of Wayne State University, and now he, too, looks like he could be playing a crucial role in a playoff run.
The Astros have developed players well above the “Future Values” on their scouting cards, and shown great faith in integrating young players into teams that were in the middle of World Series runs. That’s not just on the pitching side either. When Carlos Correa left as a free agent last winter, it was widely assumed that the Astros would need to spend big to replace him in their lineup. Instead, they confidently turned to Jeremy Peña, a 2018 3rd round pick from the University of Maine, who had a reputation as a slick fielding but light-hitting player. Instead, the Astros developed Peña into a slick fielder who belted 22 home runs in his rookie year, leading to a WAR of 3.4 in just 136 games. One aspect of the Astros’ offense that has been striking for years now has been their ability to produce top of the line power without sacrificing contact. That’s an aspect of the game that the Giants — who had the fourth most strikeouts in the NL this year — could definitely stand to improve on. Their current farm system is loaded with players for whom the crucial caveat is “if they can find a way to make more contact….”
Much of this development success can be (and has been) credited to Putila’s work in the organization. During his time in Houston, Putila has worked to integrate modern technology into the scouting and development departments, and integrate the R&D departments work seamlessly throughout the organization.
Of course, there are less seemly aspects that tend to follow a member of Jeff Luhnow’s organization as well. The cheating scandal hangs over much of the organization’s success (Zaidi told media last night that he had checked with MLB’s head office to see if Patila was, in any way, connected to their investigation of the 2017 scandal and was assured that he was not). And the “win at all costs” culture Luhnow established has many down sides, including the organization’s eagerness to view highly unsavory elements in players’ personal background as “value gap” to be exploited. This was famously the case when they acquired Roberto Osuna from the Blue Jays fresh off of his 75-game suspension for domestic violence (which in the Astros’ view, simply deflated the cost of acquiring a useful player). It’s been creditably reported that Luhnow pushed heavily to acquire Oregon State pitcher Luke Heimlich, who went undrafted despite stellar numbers in college after he pleaded guilty to molesting his nine-year old niece, though in that case, other voices in the organization vetoed the idea. While Patila isn’t connected to any of these unsavory incidents, it’s worth noting that he was a rising star within the culture that created them. Of course, the industry’s stance on domestic violence and other assorted issues has been, at best, extremely inconsistent, if not outright hypocritical over the years, and certainly members of many front offices (including the Giants) have some past connections to questionable events. Still, it bears mentioning.
What is most evident with this hiring is that the organization is looking to bolster its player development to get to the level of sustainable competitiveness that has, so far, escaped them. As the Giants go through their internal evaluations of where 2022 went wrong, there are several areas where self-analysis can lead to better results in the future — trade choices, roster management, drafting, and player development were all areas where the org could have done a better job this year. But, especially as they enter an offseason where there is pressure to spend big on some marquee items, ensuring that they are getting major league ready talent up to and into the major leagues has to be a point of emphasis for the organization going forward.
In hiring Pete Putila to take over the General Manager position, the Giants are essentially making a Statement of Intent that getting more big league production out of their farm system is a critical path going forward in getting to where they “hope and intend to be,” as Zaidi has put it.
Kapler: "...I feel strongly that we need some work on athleticism, speed, the power side..." sure feels he was talking about Vaun Brown clones.
Sounds like a second deck home run hire!