Why Giants decided now was right time for Zaidi exit

Why Giants decided now was right time for Zaidi exit originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area

SAN FRANCISCO — It took six weeks for the Giants to find their new head of baseball operations when they embarked on a search in 2018, but that wasn’t by design.

Farhan Zaidi was always at the top of ownership’s list, but because he was the general manager for the Los Angeles Dodgers, who were in the midst of a pennant run, the Giants had to wait for permission to meet with him. A phone interview led to an in-person meeting with Larry Baer, and then interviews with members of the board of directors.

The Giants found pretty quickly that Zaidi’s aspirations matched those of ownership. He did not recommend a teardown for a team that had lost 187 games over the previous two seasons, instead presenting a way to win games and develop at the same time.

That has been the goal in San Francisco since the blueprints were first drawn up for Oracle Park. This is not an organization that believes in full rebuilds, or even uses that word.

Zaidi was confident he could thread the needle, but on Monday, his bosses decided they had seen enough of his attempt. With a year remaining on his contract, Zaidi was let go, and in a shocking announcement, Buster Posey was immediately installed as his replacement.

Posey will address the media for the first time on Tuesday, and if the Giants were trying to hit a home run from a PR standpoint, they couldn’t have done any better. The future Hall of Famer has succeeded at just about everything he has tried in life, on and off the field, but this is a new challenge, and it will take time to know if he is perfect for this job, too.

What is clear right away is that the Giants are going in the exact opposite direction after six years under Zaidi. There are a lot of minor events and decisions you can point to as reasons for the change, but ultimately this all goes back to those initial conversations at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles.

Zaidi finished with a winning record in San Francisco thanks to a magical 107-win season in 2021, but he missed the playoffs in five of his six seasons. You can give him a pass on the first two — one of which was a goodbye tour for Bruce Bochy and one that involved a new staff trying to make adjustments during a pandemic — but the Giants are 240-246 since 2021 and just finished an 80-82 season despite committing about $400 million through free agency and trades this past offseason.

The recent mediocrity might have been more acceptable if the Giants did a better job of developing players, but they are generally viewed as having a bottom-third farm system, and while they graduated plenty of contributors the past two seasons, Zaidi was never able recreate the homegrown core that he inherited, one that played such a crucial role in that 107-win season.

His best young player — Heliot Ramos — was drafted by the previous regime and only broke through after it seemed the front office exhausted every other option. Tyler Fitzgerald was a Zaidi draft pick, but like Ramos, he found himself blocked by a struggling veteran for several months, a situation that frustrated many within the organization.

Pretty early in Zaidi’s tenure, it seemed that top prospects Kyle Harrison and Marco Luciano would lead the Giants into the future, but the latter was rushed to the big leagues and had the rug pulled out from under him at shortstop, designated hitter and second base during a lost season.

The Giants have struggled with player development, but also with simply acquiring enough good young players. Only one of Zaidi’s first four first-round picks has reached the big leagues, and there are real questions about the other three. He inherited a top pick in Joey Bart, but the decision to sign Tom Murphy this past offseason forced the Giants to trade Bart, who was one of the best offensive catchers in baseball this season as a Pittsburgh Pirate.

Zaidi did have some notable draft wins, led by Patrick Bailey, and it’s possible that everyone looks back in a few years and realizes the cupboard isn’t as bare as it seems. That was the case for Bobby Evans, who also got dinged for his lack of a farm system but left some underrated prospects like Camilo Doval and Randy Rodriguez.

Bryce Eldridge is one of the game’s top prospects, and even Zaidi’s detractors in the organization see the first baseman as a future star. In a few months, Posey will watch the Giants officially sign Josuar De Jesus Gonzalez, the top international teenager in this year’s class and a player Giants scouts compare to Francisco Lindor.

A better future might not be as far away as it seemed for most of this season, but Zaidi ran out of time to find out.

Six years ago, he said the Giants would win at the margins, and they certainly did at times. The 2021 season was about the core, but also about players like LaMonte Wade Jr. and Darin Ruf, who came over essentially for free and gave the Giants tremendous contributions. Too often, though, the Giants ran out of depth, which frustrated many within the organization who were led to believe that Zaidi’s greatest strength was building out a 40-man roster.

Zaidi almost never lost a trade, but most of them were minor transactions, and he held on tight to some prospects who did not pan out. He wasn’t able to land a Mookie Betts or Juan Soto type who could alter the entire outlook of a franchise.

Many of Zaidi’s most controversial moves actually made a lot of sense on paper, but there was a coldness to them, and over time that added up. The most notable example came a couple of years ago, when the Giants agreed to terms with Carlos Correa without giving Brandon Crawford a heads-up that he might be changing positions. This year, the handling of Luciano and Thairo Estrada raised red flags.

The decision to outright Estrada and have him finish the season in Triple-A — just in case the Giants somehow got back into the race, but also lost multiple infielders to injuries? — frustrated many in a clubhouse that already was confused by the general plan. The team’s stars were not happy with the one foot in, one foot out approach to the trade deadline, and there was anger over the decision to dump Alex Cobb, one of the more popular players in the clubhouse.

When the Giants couldn’t turn it around, the heat was turned up at Oracle Park for a second straight season. Exactly a year after firing Gabe Kapler, his hand-picked choice to be Bochy’s successor, Zaidi seemed to sense that he was about to be let go.

Zaidi rarely is on the field or in the dugout before games, but on Friday he watched batting practice while leaning on the cage. Three days earlier, he had made himself available to beat reporters in Phoenix, seemingly as a way to present some of his thoughts at a time when his job security was the only topic most Giants fans and many within the organization were talking about.

At one point, Zaidi was asked if he felt there was still confidence in his vision.

“I think I’ve evolved in my views of things, and some of that has to do with the culture around the Giants organization and the fan base and things our fans want, things that this organization has done when it has been most successful, which might not have been how I was successful earlier in my career,” he said. “I think there has been a meeting of the minds over time. I think I have made adjustments.

“I think we’re at the point now where I think we’re very much in sync with the vision of the team that we want. We want a younger team, we want a more athletic team, we want more consistency in the rotation and the lineup.”

It is true that Zaidi evolved, but for many, it was too late. The firing of Kapler set the Giants on a new course, and Zaidi chose the complete opposite as Kapler’s successor. It bothered him over the years that fans did not embrace the Giants’ use of platoons and openers — even last week, in answering questions, he pointed out how the Arizona Diamondbacks are platooning, too — but he adjusted, trading for Robbie Ray and signing Matt Chapman, Jung Hoo Lee, Blake Snell and others.

There were a lot of misses in free agency, though. Zaidi might be better than any executive in the game at dumping a bad contract, but a lot of those deals had his signature on them.

It’s hard to know exactly how many of them would have been offered had Zaidi built completely his way, but ultimately, this is what he signed up for, and this is a plan he felt he could execute.

As he leaned against a wall at Chase Field last week, Zaidi noted there has to be “balance in everything,” and that really was the perfect word. It is hard to balance winning with developing. As Zaidi tried to do it his way, the organization seemingly lost its identity.

Even as the end neared, Zaidi was hopeful that would change.

“I think as an organization we have to figure out our identity, and not feel like just because a strategy is successful, it’s the right thing for us,” he said last week. “I think that’s been a bit of a learning process for me. I think we’ve had a lot of discussions about that and are pretty well-aligned at this point.”

On Monday, it became clear that ownership feels differently.

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