Hey Buster!!! My Giants Business Plan

This provides easy access to my Giants business plan and captures what I've been discovering and saying are the best ways to run a baseball team for competitive advantage and, in particular, to be more successful in the playoffs, and particularly, ways that has made winning the World Series more likely.  The Giants have followed a good portion of this plan, though not all.  

Zaidi followed much of it, but did not have enough successes to get to finish his contract, which had another year to go.  My kinder side wonders if the Giants replaced him because he was hospitalized, twice, near the end of the 2024 season.  But unforced errors like the furor in hiring Kapler and the waiver wire musical chairs, ate away at public and internal support, and he got replaced by Buster Posey, who installed Zack Minasian as his GM and right hand operational man, who has had GM level experience when he was with Milwaukee.

I'm happy with the ascension of Buster Posey to be the President of Baseball Operations because the strategy and tactics he talked about in his interviews so far is exactly what I think the team needs to be competitive in the playoffs:  elite pitching and defense, which leans into the park that they have.  He will also emphasize intangibles like character and make up.  

[Note:  I've re-written the original starting post to be addressed to Buster Posey, new President of Baseball Operations of the San Francisco Giants, but the original series of links were to Bill Neukom, soon after he was hired, with additional ones after Zaidi was hired.]

Your 2025 Giants: New Front Office Leaders - Buster and Zack

As most Giants fans know, Buster Posey was named to replace Farhan Zaidi as President of Baseball Operations. In that announcement he noted that Pete Putilla would no longer be the GM, and is being reassigned (to what, no news so far).  He recently promoted Zack Minasian, who was the Giant's Pro Scouting Director, to be his GM, his right hand man to execute their strategies.  

I wrote on this in my last post, but wanted to cover that and other thoughts here.  These are two good articles highlighting what Posey is thinking about what the Giants strategy is under his leadership:  Chronicle and MLB (capttures their vision).  There are nice quotes from Bailey and Chapman as well.

“I think it’s a huge advantage that we have this blueprint from not too long ago on what works in this ballpark,” said Zack Minasian, who was introduced as Posey’s new general manager on Friday. “Buster’s talked about [it]: We’re going to pitch, we’re going to play good defense and we’re going to find ways to score runs. Having position players that can beat you in a variety of ways is very important in this ballpark. It’s pretty simple. It starts on the mound and then having the right players defending to help the pitcher every given day and just scratch and claw every run we can get.”

As Posey said in his initial press conference, they will take advantage of the park by winning with pitching and defense.  

Your 2024 Giants: Why Six Years Is Not Enough (also: Posey/Minasian)

[Wrote most of this in mid-October, just never got around to finishing until today's announcement of Zack Minasian as the new GM, so I've added some comments about that]

Just read an article on Fangraphs, written a while ago, regarding how long draft prospects take to reach the majors.  It was going to be a key rebuttal regarding the six years people have been complaining that Zaaidi’s had enough time to rebuild the team. Then reality took a left turn.

I was taking off for a vacation in SoCal, to visit my daughter, and was away from my phone since I was driving my wife and I down.  So after we checked in, I checked my phone and my brother who also follows the Giants text me "Posey!"  And I'm wondering what happened.  Then I see The Athletic notifications of articles about Zaidi being replaced by Posey.

So, now, after he’s been fired and replaced by Posey, instead this post will simply be a learning experience for those who don’t understand the player development process very well (which, based on the vast majority of people commenting on The Athletic, is a vast majority of Giants fans; which aligns well with what I experienced when defending Sabean back in 2007-2010).