Last night, Andrew Baggarly posted to The Athletic what’s tantamount to breaking news. It appears that it would be a huge surprise if the San Francisco Giants did not hire former catcher Nick Hundley to be the 42nd
manager in franchise history. Given Baggarly’s longstanding relationship with Buster Posey, I’m inclined to believe that this is basically a done deal.
It would be a shocking turn of events. The article doesn’t totally shy away from the obvious, but Baggarly does wait until 2/3 of the way into it to mention that Hundley has no professional coaching experience. That’s quite a change of direction from the Bob Melvin hire to the point that it’s going beyond even what Farhan Zaidi might do. Instead, Buster Posey is — potentially — aligning the Giants with the game as it’s played in 2025, and that’s a total surprise.
The role of the manager these days is basically “manage the clubhouse” and get players accustomed to the decision tree as presented to the coaching staff by the front office. Last offseason, Giants greats got to take some whacks at this approach via the termination of Farhan Zaidi and here we are a year later with the Giants about to reinstate the hated “analytics-driven” approach but with Buster Posey’s smiling face installing the software.
Disagree? I’ll point to Posey’s own comments about what he’s looking for in a manager:
I want is somebody who’s going to be obsessive about the details, obsessive about work, obsessive about getting the most out of players, getting the most out of our staff, and somebody who will inspire confidence in our players on the field and all the interactions that happen off the field as well.
This is not a list of qualities you would say about Bruce Bochy or Joe Torre or Bob Melvin or even Tony La Russa (once one of the most cutting edge managers), but it’s what you would say about Gabe Kapler, Craig Counsell, Stephen Vogt, and other current managers. The job is more hands-on and it’s a lot more about meeting the players where they’re at versus making the players come to the manager. But, obsession is only part of the job.
Marty Lurie has a YouTube show and speculated about what the Giants might be looking for in their next manager and it basically amounted to Nick Hundley and his lack of coaching experience.
[6:28] They want a guy who can sit down with Zack, and sit down with Randy Winn, and sit down with Posey; who’s one of their contemporaries, who they can trust and work — and whatever Posey his the work ethic has to be. If they want more defense and to drill the players more and everybody takes batting practice, and whatever Posey wants to do, this person is gonna be on board and they can talk to him about doing it. Where, like Barry says, if you go to Melvin with these kind of things he’s gonna be repelled a little bit and it’s not gonna be as smooth.
This is also another key trait of the modern manager: a facilitator. A system QB. He does take marching orders from the front office and he’s not prone to freestyling. He’s on board with management’s program. They’re all on the same page. Hundley’s lack of experience — like other managerial situations where the new hire doesn’t have much on the resume — is a strength. It puts him in a position of needing to rely on the front office for guidance and it gives the front office sufficient cover if their plans go awry. “It’s his first season on the job!” is a great get out of jail free card, akin to the leeway Buster Posey is getting for being just one year into his new position.
On the other hand, Hundley’s lack of coaching experience doesn’t completely erase his actual experience from the equation. Presumably, his time as a rule change advisor in the Commissioner’s Office means that he knows the game rules like the back of his hand. That might prevent a Don Mattingly-esque gaffe (at the time, Mattingly was Joe Torre’s bench coach). His remote scouting work with the Rangers might help him hit the ground running in terms of game planning. And as for recently being a major league veteran, sure, that could make it a lot easier for him to relate to the players and create a positive clubhouse atmosphere.
But being a manager is not the same as being a player, and being a remote scout is not the same as being a major league coach, just as working in the Commissioner’s Office doesn’t add XP to one’s manager capabilities. This, of course, isn’t the first time a former catcher has effectively hopped career tracks. There is probably a more recent example or two, but the one that came to my mind first was when Bob Brenly jumped from the broadcast booth to managing the Diamondbacks in 2001.
That was a situation where the team was already pretty talented and all Brenly had to do was not screw things up, which he did quite well. I’m not so sure that the 2026 Giants are starting from a similar position of strength as that era of Arizona baseball, but that might not matter. There’s a decent chance that Buster Posey & co. think they can coach up a less-talented roster to make it competitive in the NL West and the fastest way to instituting that process is to revamp the coaching staff so that it’s easier to control.
Nick Hundley is a long way from John McGraw, Bruce Bochy, Dusty Baker, Roger Craig, and even Gabe Kapler. It could wind up being a Jim Davenport situation (not even finishing his first season) if they surround him with the wrong assistant coaches. But his growing pains in that job are going to be something players and fans alike will have to endure or overcome. Do the Giants have the talent to overcome a lack of experience in the manager’s office?
The reporting about this managerial search has suggested Hundley has been a top candidate all along, meaning he’s been on Buster Posey’s radar for a very long time, to the point that Susan Slusser’s reporting about Kurt Suzuki interviewing for the job might’ve been nothing more than the team fulfilling “the Selig Rule” (teams must consider minority candidates for open positions). In Baggarly’s piece, Max and Molly’s kid Will Venable is quoted as saying that Hundley would make a great manager someday. It’s likely Buster Posey has known this since they played together in 2017 & 2018. So, it’s not as though the team would be handing the job to a complete stranger.
But they would be handing him a job. In the past, manager felt like a job that had to be worked towards or earned, but the modern game has slow walked it towards total automation. From an in-game management standpoint, it is a job that can be done by a laptop. It’s the human element that makes Hundley such a desirable candidate — I presume. All of this is to say that Hundley would be entering the job with a lot of trust because he would be counted on to execute the front office’s game plans while making sure Devers and Chapman and Adames and JHL and whoever else Buster Posey and Zack Minasian throw into the mix get along and play their best at all times.
It’s still a big risk. Most fans probably won’t see this as Buster Posey managing the team without having to do all the traveling associated with that job, they’ll see it as Buster Posey taking a chance on an unknown quantity when all they want is to see their favorite baseball team make it to the playoffs. Only 15 people have managed the Giants for 4 or more seasons, so if this hire is intended to set the course of the Giants’ future, let’s hope Buster Posey is right; otherwise, the rest of the decade will feel like several as the team is forced to reinvent itself again.
