Hello, Mr. Future Hall of Famer, sir, Mr. Buster Posey Man. I am but a lowly sports blogger doing that thing that bad baseball columnists do and writing you an open letter. Here’s why.
It’s unfathomable that there’s just 17 months or so remaining on your deal to be the Giants’ President of Baseball Operations. It seems like you just got here and it feels too soon to run away from the scene of a potential crime. That three-year deal you signed up for has always felt like hedging at best and at worst
the length of a deal, say, The Music Man might’ve signed. Yes, you’ve got trouble! Trouble with a capital T!
I wouldn’t blame you or the rest of ownership and especially Tony Vitello if y’all were having second thoughts about this embarrassing 20-30 situation. That doesn’t mean I think the President of Baseball Operations and his manager hire being able to walk away after accidentally burning down the house. Oh no. Everyone involved in the fire should be made to smoke the entire pack of cigarettes that led to it. Tony Vitello might just have to lose 300 games before returning to the NCAA and you might have to create even more negative history with the team failing to record a winning season for 5+ seasons.
The state of the major league team might be dire, but that doesn’t mean anyone should be on a hot seat. You shoved aside Farhan Zaidi because you wanted the responsibility of setting the course for the future of the Giants. It was the right call in one respect (Zaidi is no longer in the baseball industry) but with the easy part out of the way, it’s time to see if your vision can survive the harsh elements thrown at you by reality. You took the keys away and now you’ve stalled the engine. It’s time to see if you can recover.
The team is losing. The fans are booing. Industry types have seen the San Francisco Giants and now wonder aloud, “What are they doing?” Yes, the sensationalism has begun, as the Giants — an irrelevant franchise for a decade now — finally has some good grist for the content mill. Not history-defining losing a la the White Sox or Rockies of recent years, but cataclysmically awful performance from an organization that has blithely turned away from some tenets of the modern game like scouting and stats to reimagine itself as a team from your championship days or whatever.
At least, that’s what it looks like from the outside. I’m sure the organization still does scouting reports and provides them to the players, but when I watch the team play, I don’t see much in the way of understanding what the opponent is doing or anticipation of what they might do. It’s true that I could live 10,000 years and still not accumulate .000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the baseball knowledge that you possess, Good Sir, my obvious better in every way imaginable, but as a mouth-breathing consumer of your product, it’s a very dumb team you’ve put together. As in, they play dumb and look dumb while doing so. I doubt that’s your vision! But also, there’s no chance you’re going to turn things around in the next 17 months. It’s not a rebuild, as you suggest, but it’s more of the same that we’ve seen since 2020.
I’ll close with two much stronger points. In your recent KNBR hit, you talked up how much talent there is brewing in the farm system right now, which you hope to add to with the upcoming draft. This is an unassailable fact at the moment and you yourself are the evidence that the Giants have at some point in their San Francisco history been able to draft and develop All-Star talent. You might be the one who breaks the curse of the franchise’s overall track record on that front, however. In the San Francisco era, it really has happened so few times that the farm system has been as reliable as luck. You ought to be around to see those prospects develop and graduate to reap the full reward of your work. That usually doesn’t happen in three years!
You also owe it to yourself to stick around so you can master how to manage a bench and 40-man roster!
Your “we’re in the memory making business” line needn’t be repeated back to you mockingly because it was a great line; but right now, the memory would be that you made a mess and walked away from the business. Why not stick around and setup the Giants to be relevant again in the 2030s?
