"Hello, World Series" Edition of the Free For All Mailbag

The World Series is here — for many of you I’m sure that it represents the World Series of your nightmares! I’ll be honest — and maybe this will cause me to lose the respect of some of my readers — I have really fond memories of the 1977 and ‘78 World Series between the Yankees and Dodgers. I was a baseball-mad high school kid at the time, and in some way, those series were the apogee of the baseball of my childhood.

My Dad always had a pretty strong strain of pro-Yankees sentiment in him (pre-dating the days of MLB on the West Coast), so it was easy to join with him in rooting like crazy for the pinstripes against the hated Dodgers. And there was so much star power in those series. Those two Bob Welch-Reggie Jackson at bats in ‘78 stand in my memory still as some of the finest World Series’ drama I’ve ever witnessed (non-Giants division, of course). And I was able to enjoy them despite the fact that the Giants had actually spent much of that summer improbably occupying 1st place in the NL West before fading in September.

Those 1970s World Series — featuring the great A’s teams that are still my platonic ideal for a baseball club, the Big Red Machine, the Earl Weaver-led Orioles, and the Bronx Zoo — play out in my mind as the greatest era of Fall Classics ever. And I think it’s good for the sport to revisit the big market heavyweight match of NY-LA every now and again. I mean….Ohtani versus Judge….this is the first time that the two league’s home run champs have hooked up in the series since Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider back in 1956 (a truly legendary Series)! This is Bird versus Magic or Steph versus LeBron! This is theater, and I’m cooking myself up a vat of popcorn to enjoy it, personally! Someone else can enjoy a heapin’ helping of schadenfreude.

Now if you’re all done throwing rotten vegetables in my direction, let’s get on with our task at hand. It’s been a while since we had a mailbag! The 2024 minor league season is more than a month into the rearview mirror, we’ve had a sudden and shocking bit of regime change at the top of the Giants’ organization, and, of course, we have the normal roster machinations coming up to talk about. If you missed them, I had a few thoughts on the end of Farhan Zaidi’s time with the organization that I shared last Friday:

A Few Thoughts on Recent Events

And, on Monday, I kicked off my Rule 5 Decisions series, which will take us through the next couple of weeks.

Rule 5 Decisions: Setting Things Up

Before we get started with today’s bag, let me also drop a podcast that I think everybody who cares about baseball and its future should listen to. I don’t know John Ourand (he appears to work currently for a media outlet called Puck), but this interview he did with Commissioner Rob Manfred is absolutely fantastic. His questions are all fantastic, he shows real insider knowledge, and he touches on just about every really important behind-the-scenes topic that is really impacting the sport’s future. I know that fans have an ingrained tendency to view anything that Manfred says with suspicion — with good reason — but I think his comments here are quite illuminating and very sensible across a wide spectrum of topics. I also think this conversation gives a real sense of how incredibly complex, widespread, and difficult Manfred’s job really is, which is a good thing to keep in mind as well. Highly recommend! (Ourand spends the first few minutes talking about Tony Bennett’s retirement from the University of Virgina. The interview with Manfred begins at the 4:40 mark).

And finally, one last preliminary: we have some news on the renovations planned for Sutter Health park this winter. There are a few specific items in this piece, but the most important is that, based on feedback from the PA, the decision has been made to keep natural turf. Players and agents had serious concern about the heat that would result from playing on open air artificial turf in a Sacramento summer. So this is good news! But it’s not the end of turf trouble in this story. I spoke with the exceptional head groundsman in Richmond about this issue this year and he pointed to the fact that, with the A’s and River Cats trading home series, the grounds crew is never going to have time to maintain and resuscitate the grass. Road trips are a crucial time for ground crews to repair and nourish a grass field, and the Sacramento squad (or squads, as there will be a major league grounds crew and a minor league grounds crew trading off responsibilities as well) are simply never going to get that critical opportunity. Expect the turf to reach an extreme level of ragged and raw before the summer is done.

Ok, and now let’s open the bag.

Bryan Murphy

Roger, as someone who started watching the Giants a year after Will Clark's debut, I've basically been a spoiled brat. That cell of talent followed by Barry Bonds followed by the championship era (with a couple of dips in there, of course). I have never experienced this type of competition from the Giants in this phase that they're in... searching, drifting, flailing... is this the 1970s Giants all over again and are we really on a path to a decade of second division competitiveness?

Oh come on Bryan, have you forgotten ‘94-’96 so soon? Todd Benzinger, starting 1b! Or the pure drudgery of 2005-2008 (albeit with a couple of Cy Young Awards tossed in)? Jose Castillo, Ivan Ochoa, and Dave Roberts — all playing in the final season of their careers. That was a rough time!

But seriously, are we going back to the 70s? Bryan, we’re already there! At least by some measures. This club has had just one winning season in eight years — by that measure, they’re slightly worse than the period from 1972 to 1978, when they had two winning seasons in seven years. Of course, that 2021 season was more than just a winning year, which maybe tips the balance for the present over the ‘70s/80s, when they were only vaguely playoff relevant on two occasions (‘78 and ‘82) in the decade and a half following their 1971 division-winning team.

On the other hand, they did produce an awful lot of talent in that ‘70s decade. Just think how happy Giants fans (and most of my readers) would be if this year’s club fielded a team as young and talented as that 1973 lineup that featured 22-year-old Rookie of the Year winner Gary Matthews, 23-year-old second year player Garry Maddox, 23-year-old vet Chris Speier, 24-year-old Dave Kingman, and the 27-year-old All-Star, Bobby Bonds, who came one homer away from being baseball’s first ever 40-40 player that year (taking a massive September slump to avoid the honor). Why they even had a 25-year-old lefty in Ron Bryant who earned 3rd place in Cy Young voting that year, and a 21-year-old fireballing youngster in John D’Acquisto! Who knew that 88-win team would be the only .500 season that group would ever have together! Doesn’t seem right, to be honest.

That stretch of ball that defines the worst of this organization, from 1972, when Willie Mays was traded, through 1986, when Clark debuted, saw the club post just four winning seasons over 14 years. It was a rough time! (Though, somewhat ironically, it was probably the period that really forged my allegiance as a life-long fan of the club — not sure what that says about my emotional life). Still, to match the worst-ever stretch of SF Giants ball, Buster Posey needs to oversee at least three winning seasons in the next seven years.

Can the Giants do that — or better? Of course! Turning around ball clubs doesn’t necessarily take a long time. Want proof? David Stearns took over a 94-loss Brewers club in 2015. He didn’t have a big budget to work with, the best player on the team was a 31-year-old who had posted just one 2.0 WAR season over the previous three years, and the farm system was almost completely bereft of talent (just two members of the team’s top 30 in 2015 have had major league careers of any significance, with reliever Devin Williams being by far the standout). But it took just one losing year for Stearns to build a machine that would spend the rest of his tenure earning 1st and 2nd place finishes, churning out five playoff teams in his final six years with the club. Or, to take an example for your early days as a Giants fan, Bryan, Al Rosen took over a moribund Giants team mired in unhappiness and decades of losing in late 1985 and had it in the playoffs less than two years later — and in the World Series another two after that. Turnaround doesn’t take decades, but it does take change…sometimes difficult changes.

We’ll see what changes are in store for this club.

Kent Iverson

Hi Roger, thank you for all the great content - looking forward to your Rule 5 piece!

My question is:  Is there a player in the system who seems to be in a similar place to where Tyler Fitzgerald was at this time last year?  Someone who has produced a wide range of assessment across scouts and perhaps within the SFG organization?

Hi Kent, thanks for the plug! Yes, Rule 5 content will be flowing out for the next few weeks as I examine several of the key players whom the Giants might be considering adding to the 40-man in my upcoming posts. Stay tuned!

Let me just slightly amend your characterization of Fitzgerald’s position a year ago. While I certainly knew and spoke with some people who were fans of Fitzgerald, I do think it’s fair to say that the broad consensus view of him around the industry was that he was not going to be able to hit enough to be an effective major leaguer. I heard that over and over from scouts of other organizations, prospect writers, and even some places within the Giants’ organization itself. Tyler proved a lot of people wrong with his work in 2024 — and a lot of those people were very happy to be on the wrong side! (I will say once again that it’s an ironic coda on the year that the two people I knew to be vocal advocates of Fitzgerald were let go by the Giants at the end of the year when their positions were eliminated in the budget that Farhan Zaidi submitted just weeks before he, too, was let go).

That said, I think the obvious comparison here is Grant McCray. Like Fitzgerald, McCray brings an elite level of athleticism, top-end speed, and one of the best power-speed combinations in the entire organization. But, also like Fitzgerald, McCray has always engendered skepticism among scouts regarding his hit tool. His advocates (mostly inside the organization) believe he’s too good an athlete not to figure things out eventually. His detractors (mostly outside the organization) see too many mechanical issues in his setup and swing to overcome.

As a bit of a detour, I should note that it’s not uncommon for there to be this kind of gap between internal and external evaluations. Setting aside the obvious motivations for painting one’s own players in the best light, it’s important to understand that optimism is the life’s blood of player development work. If you don’t really believe in the best-case outcome for all of the players under your charge, you cannot be good at that job! You can’t help kids become their best without real, dogged belief that they can get there. In the same regard, some level of skepticism is an important tool for scouts. All of these kids have real tools and gifts, but the majority of them are not going to see big league success, and being able to visualize where and how players might get tripped up along the way is a crucial part of that work (as is visualizing how things might go aright). Some of this comes down to simple employment incentives: coaches are evaluated on successful development and scouts are evaluated on correct recommendations, and those are two different windows through which to see the world. So neither of these voices are “wrong” or “right” per se — they are just presenting different probabilities from a spectrum of outcomes.

Fortunately, as has been the case with Fitzgerald, McCray will get to prove his case on the field, and there he’s already shown the kind of ability that will continue to engender opportunities. He should have plenty of chances to show growth and improvement. Farm Director Kyle Haines long ago characterized McCray as the type of player who could be the most talented kid on the field if it all comes together for him. I think we’ve seen the thrilling set of skills that excited Haines to such a high degree, and now it’s a case, as Brian Sabean used to say, of trying to polish up the areas that need fixing. In the end, it will be his play on the field that will provide the final word in the analysis.

JB

I’m dying to know your thoughts on the change at the top generally, but if I have to boil it down to one question—do you have any thoughts on how the approach to drafting and development might change in moving from Zaidi to Posey?

JB, I think we’re all dying to know the answer to that question. But I’d be lying if I said that I — or anybody, really — has any insight into what Buster Posey the Executive is going to be like. Obviously, a lot will hinge on the hire, or hires, he’s currently working on.

But really, I think it’s probably one of those tricks that our brains play on us in general to think that we can easily characterize the sort of complex processes that are drafting and developing. Farhan Zaidi led the organization for six years — but can I really sum up what his approach to the draft was over those six years? I don’t see any neat way of doing that. We can see in the 1st round picks that there were some high-risk picks, like Hunter Bishop and Reggie Crawford, and some very safe, conservative high-floor picks, like Will Bednar and James Tibbs III. There were heavy pitching drafts and drafts that tilted more towards position players. There were drafts that were bereft of high school players, and drafts that focused on high school players at the top.

So what is the through-line that encapsulates all of that? What can we say was the Giants’ drafting DNA under Zaidi? I’ll be damned if I could say.

A lot of draft success is simply luck — what falls to you. If the Rockies hadn’t taken a bizarre and unexpected turn towards Greg Reynolds, instead of Evan Longoria, with the 2nd pick of the 2006 draft, we know that Tampa Bay had a deal struck with Tim Lincecum, and all of Giants’ history is very different. The Giants appear to have struck gold in 2023 with its selection of Bryce Eldridge, but I’ve been told by multiple people in the front office that, had Matt Shaw still been available at that pick, his name would have been the one that the team called. As it happens, Shaw has also had a tremendous start to his career in the Cubs’ organization. But what are we to make of that exactly? Did the Giants become a “smarter” drafting organization in 2023 than they were in 2022? Or has fortune — so far — simply fallen their way a little more? Some combination of the two? Success in drafting, scouting, and player development are highly contingent on a wide array of circumstances — only a small few of which are in any team’s control. And consequently, almost all attempts to “bottom line” things — this team is good at X, that team is bad at X — are liable to result in exaggeration and mischaracterization.

With all of that said, I think it is fair to say that, typically, chief executives are highly involved in top picks and overall strategies of the draft, and somewhat involved in specific picks as the draft goes along. And, over the six years that Zaidi led the Giants, it is true that the 1st round picks, for a variety of reasons (often related to health), mostly haven’t provided the return on investments that the team had hoped for. It is also true, that the success of those drafts often fell to excellent scouting finds in lower rounds (think Cole Waites, Trevor McDonald, Hayden Birdsong, Landen Roupp, etc) where maybe the hard work of area scouts and cross-checkers pulled a little more weight. You can, perhaps, concoct a scenario where Posey’s full-throated support of the importance of scouts will empower the work of the scouting staff a little bit more and maybe lessen some of the impact of a “draft model” determining picks. But we’re going to have to wait a few years to see if we can identify any “characteristic” trendlines.

I do think it’s important to say that every top player selected under Zaidi was taken right about where the consensus had that player going off the board, so it’s not like the org was doing anything bizarrely outside of the general scouting view with its picks. Maybe we’ll see a little more emphasis placed on athleticism and a little less on swing decisions in some of the picks going forward, but even that is probably just a broad generalization.

As I wrote last Friday, my greatest hope for a Posey-led front office is that the organization, and its many hard-working, talented members, gets a little more synced up than it has seemed to be in the last few years. But even that is something will take a long time to really determine, and even then will be seen only dimly. Success engenders happiness much more than the reverse!

Nick Yatsko

Saw your mention of Bishop in the Sac write up. Any thoughts on where he goes from here and/or how he fits (or doesn't) fit in the future with the Giants? (crystal ball time - lol) Thanks much!

Sometimes when “regime change” happens in an organization, you’ll see the incoming boss jettison the high-profile players who haven’t succeeded from the previous regime. I think of Jerry DiPoto giving away disappointing #3 overall pick Alex Jackson in a minor deal shortly after grabbing the reins in Seattle, for instance, or, more disastrously, A.J. Preller shipping Trea Turner out of the org quicker than a bottle of long-expired milk found in the back of the executive refrigerator..

But, in this case, I don’t think you’re going to see that sort of thing happen. While there is change at the very top of the organization, it seems clear that a lot of the staff infrastructure is going to stay the same under Posey. And within that infrastructure, there are still a lot of believers in Bishop — the athlete and the person. At the start of this year, in fact, Farm Director Kyle Haines said in a text to me that he still believed Bishop had an excellent chance to be a “great Giant,” and I doubt anything that happened over the last 10 months has dimmed his enthusiasm on that score. Of course, this brings us back to my comment on the importance of optimism in the player development process, but I see no reason to think that we’ll see Bishop shipped out under a new PoBO.

Bishop was, as the Giants have admitted, tossed into the deep end this year — in part, due to exigencies of an injury-riddled summer, and in part in acknowledgement of his advancing age. He struggled through a large part of the summer in Sacramento, and somewhat unusually for him, his chase rates were pretty high this year. But that seems pretty reasonable for someone who was, for the first time, seeing upper-level pitchers — including many with MLB time on their resume — who could really command breaking balls. Getting through a full season was really the challenge for Bishop, and he successfully met that challenge. As a cherry on top, he ended the year on a nice upswing, hitting .327/.363/.404 over his final month of play.

The challenge for Bishop, of course, will be catching up on all the lost reps he’s had over his career, thanks to a laundry list of different health issues. We shouldn’t understate how significant of a challenge that is, and, of course, he’s fighting against time, as he’ll turn 27 next June. But I think we’ve seen enough late bloomer development stories over the last few years to know that it would be foolish to close the book on his chances. Mike Yastrzeski’s career arc may be one of the most unusual ones in history, but Fitzgerald, Donovan Solano, Ryan Walker, Tyler Rogers, maybe even Jerar Encarnacion, have all proven that there is still life — and development! — after 25.

If I had to guess, I’d say that the day will come when Bishop dons a San Francisco uniform for the first time. Certainly, he’s not at the top, or maybe even in the middle, of an outfield depth chart that is currently somewhat crowded. But there are a lot of people rooting for him within the Giants’ organization, and the 162-game schedule has a way of emptying out depth. Bishop is still a tremendous athlete and a very impressive young man. I would expect he’ll keep plugging away to prepare himself for that moment, if it should ever come.

Jim Dowd

It seems like there are baseball analysts who aren't especially complimentary of the Giants' minor league system, as in they think it's really crap. But I don't know; it seems that we benefitted from the arrival of several young players and there are at least three or four more potential true major league players in the pipeline. So what gives here, do you think? Is it the case where I simply don't know about other teams' minor league systems, which might be much better than the Giants' system, or is it that there's just a bunch of haters out there who want to jump on our recent mediocre seasons and see nothing but incompetence in the front office? I would like to know your objective, albeit biased, views on the state of our minor league system.

Hi Jim, I don’t know that I would agree with you that there are a lot of analysts who think the Giants’ org is really crap, and I would certainly object to your characterization of people seeing “nothing but incompetence in the front office.” In fact, I don’t know of any who would paint the Giants’ player development as any kind of bottom-tier disaster right now. Just looking around at major outlets, I see the MLB Pipeline had the Giants listed midseason as #23 in their org rankings, and Baseball America had them at #20 in their August rankings. That’s not “first in class,” obviously, but it’s certainly not tire-fire disaster either.

My long-held belief is, when it comes to organizational rankings, there is meaning in being considered one of the top four or five, and there is meaning in being considered one of the bottom four or five, and everybody else is more or less in a similar situation in the squishy middle — some good players, maybe one really good player, and some depth of complementary types, but not exactly a tidal wave a-coming.

The Giants are currently seen as being in the squishy middle — and if they’re on the lower side of that middle tier, that has mostly to do with the amount of young talent that they just graduated, as you yourself note (Kyle Harrison, Marco Luciano, Hayden Birdsong, Heliot Ramos, and others). Lots of graduations, especially of Top 100 type prospects, will naturally lower the profile of an organization, as evaluators wait to see if the next wave of players will take the kind of forward steps that helps buoy an org’s reputation back upwards again (or contrarily, if injuries or other sorts of development pitfalls will pop up to derail expectations for high-profile prospects).

Friends of the pod, Baseball America’s Carlos Collazo and Ben Badler have a podcast called Future Projection, and, in a recent episode, they discussed the Giants’ farm system in some depth. Though Badler was highly skeptical of Buster Posey’s move to the top of baseball ops, I think their view of the current talent pipeline was reasonably tempered. Badler praised what the org has been doing on the international front (if you want to hear him talk about the recent talents coming in through Latin America, as well as Joshuar de Jesus Gonzalez, those comments are around the 13:30-14:30 mark). Both were enthusiastic about picks like Eldridge, Harrison, and Patrick Bailey, and I think they quite reasonably characterized the current talent pipeline as “ok.” OK might not set the world on fire, but it’s a long way from “total crap.”

And I think that’s absolutely correct. Their current state seems ok from a talent perspective. Not great — not top of the class! But by no means a disaster that needs cleaning house. Eldridge looks like a clear major league starter and maybe a star (though I think it’s an element of the modern game that there aren’t a lot of “star” level 1b any more, when shortstops and center fielders are bashing 40 home runs or more). Guys who have now graduated, like Harrison and Birdsong and Roupp look like they should have at least solid careers and hopefully something more than that.

However, even with Ramos’ All-Star appearance, it’s not clear that the Giants graduated players who can play the starring roles in a competitive core — the way that some of their competitors might have done this year with youngsters like Jackson Chourio (Milwaukee), Jackson Merrill (San Diego), Paul Skenes (Pittsburgh), or even the Mets’ Mark Vientos (who had a heck of a post-season!). Baseball America just published a ranking of the 2024 NL rookie class based on expected peak value, and the Giants had just one player make the end of the top 10 (Harrison), and two more get 50 FV Grades for an average starter (Ramos and Birdsong). Is that being a “hater?” I think it’s probably about accurate. I think the Giants have some pieces that will fit in as solid starters, but I don’t think that we’re going to find a potential Bobby Witt, Jr. in the Giants’ latest crop of youngsters, and maybe not even a Riley Greene — and that makes a real difference! It’s the difference between clubs like Kansas City and Detroit and the Mets participating in the post-season and the Giants sitting it out.

On the long-term front, international hitters like Gonzalez, Rayner Arias, and Jhonny Level and recent draftees Tibbs and Dakota Jordan could provide that sort of impact down the road if things go right — but we’re still a long way away from having a clear idea of what the shape of their careers will look like. If a cluster of those players start to soar, they will take the organization’s PD reputation upwards with them. But wherever you have a lot of players whose careers have barely started in your top 10 (as the Giants will in the upcoming There R Giants’ Top 50), you’re going to have to expect a high variance of outcomes.

If you want my best opinion, I can tell you that I will have fewer 50 grades (or average major league starting caliber players) in my Depth Charts this year than I think I’ve had in the history of this website. Of players currently in the organization officially, I think there will be no more than two 50s, and I’m not 100% sure on the second one just yet (I’ve only just started to circulate my list around with industry sources and collect feedback). However, I have a lot of players in that 45+ area that signifies I’m hedging my bets on young players with a long path ahead of them. Some of those players could easily jump up into higher ranges if things go well for them over the next year or two.

As I say, the Giants sit in the squishy middle. There’s talent here. There will be useful players who come out of this system. There are talented young players on the major league roster who should be around for a while. But I don’t know that I see them sprouting a fully-formed competitive core of star-level players any time soon. The best you can hope for is that Eldridge quickly turns into the type of impact hitter he appears to be, Ramos continues to make the gains we saw from him this year, and Harrison starts to look more like the impact arm he was in the minors. With some of the other players who impressed this year filling in as solid complementary big leaguers, that would definitely put the organization in a better place to fill out of a competitive roster than we’ve seen in several years. But they’re still likely going to need to bring in impact from some external sources to make it all come together.

Dan from NM

Hi Roger!

For the GM candidates linked to the Giants so far, are there any you think would be a particularly good fit for the organization?

Is there someone whose name hasn’t come up yet who you’re hoping will be a candidate?

Oh goodness. I think for those of you who read my post last Friday, you understand that for me, so-called “soft skills” should always be a priority in good hires. Someone who is a good collaborator, a good active listener, a good communicator — those are skills that translate across any industry to success in my opinion. And, not actually knowing any of these people personally, I wouldn’t want to hazard an assessment of those skills.

I think people have reasonably raised some questions of whether the candidates mentioned in the press recently — including Billy Owens (Assistant General Manager) of the A’s, De Jon Watson (a long career that has included stops with the Dodgers and a long tenure with Nats’ GM Mike Rizzo), and Logan White (legendary scouting director for the Dodgers, now with the Padres) — is that they all seem to come from an “old fashioned baseball mind” scouting perspective, rather than from some of the more cutting-edge front offices. Watson, for instance, has an outstanding scouting pedigree — it’s notable how much better the Nats did in the Juan Soto deal than virtually any other major trade in recent memory, and that return was all about good scouting. Rizzo and Watson also worked together in an extremely productive Diamondbacks draft room for years. However, he was also the Farm Director for a Nats’ system that was uniformly viewed around the industry as somewhat behind industry development trends and not very productive.

So I think there are two things going on: 1) a reasonable excitement over re-empowering the voice of traditional scouts in the organization going forward, along with 2) a fear that this is going to be a backwards-looking front office that ignores modern trends, technology, and data in an attempt to swim against the tide.

Hopefully, what we’re going to see is a more blended approach with good personnel evaluators in the top chairs, and not a full-on atavistic “we don’t need no fancy computers to succeed” outcome. I do think that Owens has a very long track-record of finding talent, and White’s skills in that regard are absolutely legendary (he’s the architect in a lot of ways of the Dodgers’ incredible run). Having someone who is something of a scouting savant is absolutely a competitive advantage in this game — what Dick Tidrow meant to the Giants and White to the Dodgers is something that is hard to capture in any other way. But there’s a reason that neither of those guys were in the top chair at the time — in fact, I think you can draw a straight line from Tidrow’s becoming Assistant GM (and thus spending more of his time assisting Sabean with the major league roster) to the Giants’ lack of success in subsequent drafts. Running an organization has much more to do with synthesizing information coming in from others than with going out and finding the information oneself.

Personally, I’d love to see candidates with experience of scouting within data-friendly organizations. The Dodgers blend the two as well as anyone, and I absolutely think there are some good candidates in their front office (I think Jeff McAvoy, for one, is both a strong scout and an excellent communicator and collaborator, and Billy Gasparino is someone J.P. Ricciardi singled out when he was on my podcast as one of the sharpest baseball minds he’d ever hired — which is saying a lot for J.P.’s hiring history). I think the Giants’ ownership might be leery of going back to the Dodgers’ well again — though I don’t think fear of public backlash is a good basis for making important decisions. From that perspective, Owens might be the best fit of the names that are out there right now. Of names we haven’t heard, I also do think that Sam Fuld would make for a great hire, but as he’s already at the GM level, I doubt the Phillies would allow him to interview for the same position elsewhere. His assistant, Anirudh Kilambi, is a Bay Area native who grew up a Giants’ fan and went to school at Cal-Berkeley. Kilambi would be an interesting candidate as well, though his background, coming up through the Rays’ organization, is much more towards R&D side of things and less traditional scouting that Posey seems to be pushing for.

Graham L

Any insight on JP Martinez? Additionally, any on Bryan Price? I’m curious how up to date he could have been on current pitching tech and development given that Melvin plucked him out of retirement.

I don’t know that I can add much that hasn’t generally been touched on before. Martinez seems to be very well respected. People I’ve spoken to who know him describe a smart, open-minded person and voracious reader who is always trying to learn. He’s worked for two organizations that have seen success in pitcher development. By all accounts, he’s well versed in analytics, is a strong communicator, and — an important touch — he’s fluent in both English and Spanish. I also tend to like hiring from within and continuity as general principles, and Martinez represents both of those things. He knows the young talent that makes up the bulk of this staff, and has historical knowledge of their professional journeys to help continue them onwards to success. Martinez has also been a part of two different coaching staffs and (now) front offices — so it seems clear that he’s a person who impresses those he works with.

As an aside, I think it’s maybe worth noting that Gabe Kapler, though he had his faults as a team leader, really did prove to be an outstanding judge of coaching talent. Craig Albernaz has zoomed from catching coach with the Giants to a true managerial candidate (the Marlins are reportedly interested in him) in just a couple of years. Donnie Ecker has been interviewing for managerial openings as well. Andrew Bailey is as respected a pitching coach as you’ll find in the big leagues these days. And I, for one, think the Giants really should have made a stronger push to keep Kai Correa around — that’s a talented man who can really coach. I also think that Kapler’s philosophy of “practicing dirty” is something that we are increasingly seeing in successful player development around the industry (if you have a Baseball America subscription, read this article on the how the Red Sox overhauled their hitting development — this is a blueprint that I certainly hope the Giants just copy going forward).

Martinez wasn’t part of Kapler’s original staff, but Kapler did hire him, which probably speaks well to Martinez’s intellectual approach to the game. And he’s proven to be a solid communicator whom the pitchers trust.

As for Price, yes, I think it’s fair to say he was an old school type. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and I don’t think he did a bad job with last year’s staff. Indeed, I think holding that club together while they were trying to operate with 1.5 starters for nearly two months was a minor miracle. As for being versed in modern philosophy and technology, I do think that that’s maybe overstated. Every organization has a phalanx of analysts supporting the staff — with the Giants, that burgeoning group has taken over what used to be the interview room, directly across the hall from the manager’s office. It’s not necessary for a pitching coach to be able to write their own software code, so long as they have an open mind and good collaboration skills.

I tend to think that the pitching coach’s primary importance comes on a game management level: knowing who’s available for how long, helping the manager get the right guy ready on time**, watching for mechanical red flags from pitch to pitch, and, of course, serving as a combination therapist/cheerleader/butt kicker when needed mid-inning. These are really the skills that define a pitching coach in my opinion.

Somewhat inelegantly, I guess I’ll wedge into this question the news that broke yesterday that Justin Lehr had been hired to oversee Toronto’s minor league pitching. Lehr had spent six years in the Giants’ organization, most recently as their Minor League Pitching Coordinator. The team has had quite a few vacancies on the minor league side that have gone unfilled recently (though they’ve also bulked up positions elsewhere), but this is one that definitely will need to be filled this winter, possibly through promotion of Clay Rapada (Assistant Minor League Pitching Coordinator) or Matt Yourkin (Rehab Pitching Coordinator).

**This, I think, might well be the single least understood and most complicated aspect of baseball at a game level. The window of opportunity for making these decisions can be incredibly tight and very easy to miss at game speed. A couple of years ago, I was chatting with Bruce Bochy, and he took me through a game that had happened the night before when a team had blown a six-run lead in something like 15 pitches, and explained very carefully exactly when and where the decision points were, and how it hard it would have been logistically to ever make the “right” decision to stem that tide. Truly fascinating insight from a brilliant baseball mind.

Ezra

There is now a 2-year streak of the top international amateur playing state side the year they sign. Do you think there is any chance we see three in a row?

Yes, over the last two years, Ethan Salas and Leo de Vries have both begun their careers stateside, and both have leap-frogged over the complex level and started their careers in the Low-A California League. Now the other thing that ties that pair together is that both were signed and developed by the hyper-aggressive San Diego Padres.

What I suspect you’re asking, Ezra, is if the Giants would be inclined to start Gonzalez in San Jose (whether he ends up with the #1 bonus signed this year or not, Gonzalez has already been listed by MLB as the top ranked prospect in this year’s class). My guess would be “No,” but, of course, there’s the wild card here of a new head of Baseball Ops.

I remember having a conversation with Kyle Haines one time on the topic of Salas starting his career in A ball (and ultimately being pushed up to Double-A as a 17-year-old), and Haines was quick to point out that Salas had spent some of his youth in the U.S., the child of a minor league catcher for the Braves, and also had a lot of familiarity with pro ball from his family (in addition to his father, his grandfather and uncle both played pro ball, and his brother had signed with the Marlins for nearly $3 million just a couple of years earlier). So there were special circumstances with the player, in addition to Preller’s gunslinger ways with hyping up talent.

Most of the top dollar signings the last few years across MLB have started their careers in the DSL — in part because the new January signing date has created tax implications for players that didn’t use to exist when players signed their deals the year before their careers officially began. But aside from that consideration, the Giants have traditionally been conservative in pushing young players, and, especially with young international players, they’ve been cognizant of the importance of letting the youngsters taste success and get their feet under them. It was clear from conversations I had with people in the organization last year that the Giants never seriously considered pushing Rayner Arias up to San Jose to start the 2024 season, for instance. They didn’t want him to feel overwhelmed by more experienced, higher-level competition right off the bat. And that was in his second professional season.

So, it would certainly be a new direction for this org to suddenly be starting a 17-year-old in the Cal League. But then, maybe now is the time for new directions! Gonzalez does draw a lot of the same sort of hype that De Vries did last year — and De Vries ended up having a solid Cal League season, hitting 11 home runs and posting a .361 OBP (though he did hit .196 over his first couple months in the league).

I’d lean a strong “no,” Ezra, but I’m always open to being surprised! I will say that I would expect to see Gonzalez at Papago Park this spring — the Giants have brought both Ryan Reckley and Arias to spring camp prior to their first seasons, even though those seasons would come in the DSL. So subscribers should look forward to video and first-hand reports on the youngster when my Camp Notes’ posts starting coming in March.

Alexi Zemsky

Hi Rog! Like all Giants prospect heads, I am eagerly awaiting Posey's fleshing out of the front office so that we can read the tea leaves about the future of our scouting/dev group. But before moving forward, I wonder if we can engage in some hindsight? Were you as confused/distressed by the demotion of Pete Putilla as I was? From afar, I have been impressed by Putila's apparent influence on our draft strategy the past 2 drafts. His vision seemed "scoutier” with an emphasis on physicality and upside missing from the preceding Harris regime?

Hello Alexi! Thanks for your question.

Let’s see…hm…. “confused?” Definitely not! “Distressed?” I wouldn’t say so, no.

I really like Putila, and I have very much enjoyed the times he’s been generous enough to speak with me about baseball, whether in person or via text. He’s a bright mind, a really engaging person, and I think he’ll have a long career in this game. At the same time, it’s only fair that when a new boss comes in, they have the opportunity to find the right fit for their vision of the future.

I once had someone in the know describe the change from Scott Harris to Pete Putila as replacing one Farhan-clone with another, and, I think that does capture the similarity of priorities, values, strategies, and philosophies that all three of those men share. The Venn Diagram of their strategic values would be close enough to a pure circle not to argue about it too much. So it makes sense that if Posey chaffed at Zaidi’s direction of the club (as it certainly seems he did), then Putila wouldn’t be the right thought-partner for him to move into the future as he sees fit.

I also think that there has always been some measure of misunderstanding of the GM role in this “enhanced title” setting. I don’t want to damn with feint praise, but I think the GM under Zaidi has acted as a kind of Executive Assistant — gate keeping, accumulating and synthesizing desired information, acting as a sound board, yes. But there was no “Harris regime” and no “Putila regime.” There was always a “Zaidi regime.” Decisions on draft priorities — very much including direct oversight of the draft model — draft picks, acquisition strategies, top prospect assignment and promotion….these things were always done, from December of 2018 to September of 2024, under the close direct of Zaidi. And I think it’s somewhat fruitless to sift through the data looking for the fingerprints of his direct reports in any specific moves — there’s a lot more noise than signal there. Just to take your specific example, to suggest that the Giants emphasized physicality and upside more after Putila joined the organization is to forget that Zaidi (without either a GM or a Scouting Director in house) selected Hunter Bishop with his very first pick, and took Reggie Crawford at the end of the 1st round in 2022. Those are pretty physical guys!

So, no, Alexi, I’m neither confused nor distressed (at least no more than I am when any good baseball person is sent packing, which happens quite often in this game). I think that Zaidi is an incredibly capable baseball mind who will have a long career in the game. I think that Putila is a smart baseball mind who will have a long career in the game. And I think that corporately they didn’t get the results that they or their bosses (or fans) hoped for, and the inevitable reckoning took place. And now I think that Buster Posey needs to find his particular brain trust to help enact his vision of the Giants’ future. We shall see how well that works!

Which feels like I’ve come back to where I started this week’s bag. “We’ll see” is the theme of the week, probably the offseason. What does a Buster Posey regime look like? I’ll leave you with this thought. At some point this summer during one of his many radio hits, broadcaster Dave Flemming was asked to compare the leadership qualities of Patrick Bailey and Posey. Fleming noted that it’s not really not fair to compare anyone to Posey, who, he noted could be a prickly sort who could make things really uncomfortable in the clubhouse for teammates when the club was losing. I have always believed that the force of his personality, and his single-minded focus on preparing to win, had much to do with that era of Giants’ baseball. You really need someone like that in the clubhouse to force players out of the day-to-day comfort zone and really keep a competitive edge. And I think Farhan Zaidi just found himself on the management side of that prickliness this fall.

The question going forward might be: how much can Posey’s personality impact the clubhouse from the management suite? Step One might just be finding more players like himself.

We’ll see…