Yesterday’s thrilling 4-3 win in Milwaukee was the 63rd win of the season, which means the San Francisco Giants will not lose 100 games in 2025. This is not to damning my favorite baseball team with faint praise or backhandedly complimenting first-year baseball exec Buster Posey, it’s a simple thing to celebrate in what’s otherwise a lost season. As Steven pointed out earlier, it’s time to root for individual achievements, and Buster Posey getting off the couch to lead an MLB team to fewer than 100 losses
is an achievement!
We’ve seen a recent trend of teams going back to former players to lead their Baseball Operations and it has led to mixed results. At the top of the pyramid there’s Texas’s Chris Young. He won a World Series in his first full season as the team’s President of Baseball Operations (promoted from GM), but his two teams since have gone just 144-150 (though, still counting). Right behind him is Boston’s Craig Breslow. Despite being despised by most of the industry, he has something Buster Posey will never have: tremendous financial resources and a robust player development pipeline. Still, given that, Breslow’s two-year stint is mixed-positive, with an 81-81 mark last season and, currently, a 71-60 mark; this, after dumping Rafael Devers on the Giants. Then there’s Chris Getz, whose two-year tenure of the Chicago White Sox has been one of the worst ever (88-204). The Giants are nowhere near as bad as that, and Chris Getz has more experience in a front office than Buster Posey had before taking the job.
So, is Buster Posey the greatest baseball exec in the history of the world? TBD. However, not just anybody can pop off the couch and run a multimillion dollar international operation with budgets, unions, security, and travel concerns on top of the on-field stuff like fielding a good team or making an entertaining product that people want to pay to see. You can’t just play Out of the Park Baseball and then run a team in real life. And lest you think I’m putting too much focus on Buster Posey, well, that’s the new normal. Ever since Moneyball made the general manager a celebrity, the media ecosystem has gathered around the One Great Man premise — the auteur theory of baseball GMing — and, so, that’s just the way we talk about these things now.
On the one hand, that’s great for players who underperform. It’s not their fault! They’re merely a part of A Smart Man’s Algorithm, and if they come up short individually, it’s a flaw in the process and not them! You can see it this season in how it’s very hard for fans and the local media to acknowledge that the players just aren’t good enough; because they want to give cover to neophyte Posey, it falls on the Humm Baby coaching staff for the reason why the Giants are underperforming. Alex Pavlovic’s recent “tirade” underscores just how much this is the team that was intended and, on paper, these are supposed to be good players — and they have been, for the most, part healthy! They simply haven’t been good for most of the season.
But, enough about the team’s shortcomings. There are still 31 games to go. The Giants could go 31-0! Or, if the Giants can keep up the pace that started this past weekend in Milwaukee (.667), that’s 21-10 and would get them to 84 wins, plausibly scaring whichever team winds up with the 3rd Wild Card until the week before the final game of the season. But they really don’t need to win any more games because they’ve already solidified their front office’s performance by avoiding 100 losses. That’s only happened once in franchise history, so they’ve already avoided that and the narrative tempted by hiring Posey. The most likely outcome for a former athlete becoming the top executive of an organization is a colossal failure on the scale of 100+ losses.
Running a team is a hard job even with plenty of experience. Senior advisor Bobby Evans was a baseball rat who had been with the organization for years and years before taking over, and all he did was oversee one of the greatest second-half collapses in history (2016), one of the worst records in franchise history (64-98 in 2017), and the absolute worst September in franchise history (5-21 in 2018). To be fair, Buster Posey’s 2025 Giants will be remembered for one of the worst home performances in franchise history and they’re not likely to do much better than Evans’s final season (73-89 after that September collapse); but again, it’s Buster’s first year.
It’s hard to say that the Giants are in good hands, though, because at the end of the day, they are still owned by the same group that has foisted mediocrity upon it for a decade and a half in spite of the team’s success. Yes, Buster’s one of the owners, but he’s not entirely the final word. He might be able to sway the group to invest more in other areas now that he’s had time to evaluate the organization, and I suspect he’d be able to make the case better than his predecessors, but the owners have been pretty consistent about making sure most of the money goes to the major league club.
All that’s happened is that the team has gained some confidence in its decision-making to the point that they’ll allow some of their decisions to play out over a few weeks instead of deploy slapdash, anxiety-fueled strategies designed to control reality. It’s not so much an “old school” vs. analytics battle, it’s simply a steady hand vs. a shaky one, and while that might not make the Giants better on the field — indeed, they do seem on track to have a worst record than at any point during Farhan Zaidi’s tenure — it might give Buster & co. more confidence as they head into the offseason and prepare for 2026. That’s not nothing.
The franchise regained some swagger when it installed Buster Posey at the head of its Baseball Operations and that has certainly been diminished as the losses have piled up, but some of it remains. In our wildest dreams, Buster Posey would’ve rolled out of bed and managed the Giants to a postseason run, but deep down, we knew this was a flawed team with an unreliable (at best) player development pipeline. Posey didn’t wave a wand and make this a good organization again, but even at this point, when it looks like they’ll lose 90 games, it feels like a future exists. Vibes are important, and as has been the case since Posey’s hire, it’s all we Giants fans have got for now. I think you’d agree that’s better than nothing, and it’s certainly better than 100 losses.
