SAN ANTONIO — Tampa Bay Rays president of baseball operations Erik Neander was waiting in a Starbucks line at the GM meetings Tuesday morning when he glanced behind him and saw a guy with an athletic physique and workout attire.
It was one of his 29 major-league counterparts. It was the guy that, 16 years ago when Neander was a low-level staffer in baseball operations, his bosses should’ve taken with the first pick in the draft.
Instead, Buster Posey fell to the Giants with the fifth pick in the 2008 MLB Draft. And everything fell into place. Posey was a rookie catcher in 2010 when the Giants won their first World Series in their 53-year history in San Francisco. Two more championships followed over the next four years. Now Posey is a rookie all over again, settling into the role of Giants’ chief decision maker at the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort and Spa, attending breakout sessions with his fellow top baseball executives, getting face time with agents, and familiarizing himself with an entirely new cohort.
Neander couldn’t help but consider an alternate reality. The Rays felt good about selecting high school shortstop Tim Beckham. But Posey was the other player at the top of their draft board. The discussion went back and forth. Hindsight is less kind.
“None of us are perfect, that’s for sure,” Neander said with a laugh. “I thought, ‘What do I say here? Congratulate him on his career?’ I just said hello and told him, ‘We didn’t have a lot of luck developing catchers back then. So I’m glad everything worked out for the best for you.’ Maybe I threw a joke or two in there. But I’ve got to make sure I read him right, too.”
Posey was named the Giants’ president of baseball operations last month. (Robert Edwards / Imagn Images)
Posey spent his major-league career sizing up hitters and exploiting their weaknesses. His rival executives already have their guards up, fully expecting those skills to translate when Posey calls and tries to acquire one of their players. But mostly, they’re thrilled that a former star of Posey’s stature is willing to take an active role in shaping the future of the game — along with accepting the constantly buzzing cell phone and 24/7 burden that the job demands.
“We all love baseball and I have an incredible respect for all he’s accomplished in the game as a player,” Neander said. “There’s very little left for him to prove. So I have a lot of admiration for him taking this on. It speaks to his love for the game.”
“To know Buster as well as I’ve gotten to know him, and then to see him want to take on this challenge, it’s really impressive,” said Detroit Tigers president Scott Harris, who was the GM in San Francisco for Posey’s final season in 2021. “His resume stacks up against anyone in the game, and for him to want to jump into this because he cares so much about the Giants and restoring their standing, I’m just really impressed. He’s a guy who doesn’t need to do that.”
“I think he’s going to do unbelievably well,” said Texas Rangers president and former MLB right-handed pitcher Chris Young, who was one of Posey’s primary advisers while he contemplated stepping into the Giants’ top job. “He’s a caring person.”
Posey is doing this because he cares about the game and about the Bay Area. He is doing this because he believes that leaders should lead from out front. He is doing this because he welcomes the accountability that he views as a prerequisite for the job. He is doing this because he does not want to be a shadow power with a board seat. He is doing this because he is humble enough to understand he has everything to learn yet confident enough to trust that, when surrounded by quality people, he’ll be able to figure it out.
It’s also becoming increasingly clear that Posey will do the job his own way. For those who might complain that groupthink pervades the industry, who bemoan that more and more teams are using the same data and same models to assign the same value to players, Posey represents their portrait in courage.
He continued to assert Tuesday that the Giants’ analytics and R&D departments will have a meaningful role in decision-making. But notably and symbolically, he acknowledged that those departments won’t be front and center anymore. Not in terms of clubhouse layout, anyway.
Until a couple years ago, when you walked into the Giants clubhouse, the first sights you’d encounter would be the manager’s office on your left and emeritus clubhouse manager Mike Murphy’s office on the right. Then the Giants reorganized the space, knocked down a couple walls, and repurposed Murphy’s office as a hub for the analysts to crunch game-level decision-making data. The implications of the cultural infrastructure were clear to anyone who walked through the clubhouse doors — including Posey, who said on Tuesday that he plans to move the analysts somewhere else.
“It’ll change,” Posey said. “It’ll be somewhere they are accessible to players and coaches but it’ll change. I want to be clear: They’re a valuable piece to the entire picture. But trying to figure out where they can be available for the coaches and the players where maybe it’s not right when you walk in the door? That’s going to be a good thing.”
Michael Schwartze, who joined the Giants in 2018 under the Bobby Evans regime and served as their director of baseball analytics under former president Farhan Zaidi, is leaving to join the Atlanta Braves, Posey said. Former GM Pete Putila also accepted a vice president of scouting position with the Braves.
Other prominent Giants department heads — amateur scouting director Michael Holmes and farm director Kyle Haines — will remain in place, Posey said. The club is in the process of hiring a pro scouting director to fill the former role of newly promoted GM Zack Minasian. Paul Bien, who started with the Giants in 2012 and was promoted to vice president of analytics in 2022, will lead the effort to replace Schwartze.
Their pro and amateur scouting staffs had begun a reorganization and a reduction in head count before the Giants fired Zaidi on Oct. 1. Three pro scouts were laid off and another, retiring longtime crosschecker John Castleberry, was not going to be replaced. At the time, Zaidi described the changes as part of a restructured scouting effort that would pivot away from blanket coverage of minor-league systems, especially in the upper levels where there is ample video and game-generated data, and toward a more targeted approach.
Minasian oversaw those staffing changes while executing Zaidi’s directives. On Tuesday, neither Minasian nor Posey were prepared to say whether any of those scouts would be hired back, or whether the department would ramp up staffing. Those conversations are ongoing, Minasian said.
But Posey considered Minasian’s scouting background a prerequisite when he elevated him to the GM role. And while other organizations like the Chicago Cubs are leaning harder into trusting predictive models when evaluating amateur and pro talent, Posey continues to signal that he believes data should be well tempered by professional scouting expertise.
“You have to measure what the information is telling you with scouts and what their years and years and years and years and years and years of evaluating players and what their eyes tell them,” Posey said. “There’s probably subtleties that they pick up, whether it’s on-field stuff or interactions that they see with the player and their parents or a player and their friends that maybe they can’t even articulate. But after seeing it for so many years, there’s something that they (recognize instantly) as either a good thing or a bad thing. I think that is really important when you’re talking about bringing a player to your system.”
And when there’s a quantitative case to be made?
“We’ve had these conversations already: whether it’s offensively or defensively, it’s trying to highlight three things, three points of data, offensively or defensively, and then be really good at those,” Posey said. “Sometimes when I’m sitting there listening, and these brilliant minds are going all over the place, I’ll think where I can be helpful for the group is just to shrink it in. Like, ‘OK, if these things are important for us, let’s go find those players.’”
Of all the ways the industry has changed since Posey signed his first pro contract, this might be among the most complete transformations: players have a keener-than-ever understanding of how they are valued by a modern major-league front office. On this score, Posey was ahead of his peers. He understood as a sophomore at Florida State that he didn’t have the speed to be valued by MLB evaluators as a shortstop and wouldn’t have the same ceiling as a left fielder or first baseman. The colloquial tale is that Posey converted to catcher because the Seminoles had a need behind the plate. But it was a calculated decision to boost his draft stock as well.
Now part of the challenge, as Posey explained, is to convince newly drafted players and minor-league prospects that their development is less about spiking the metrics that the industry prizes — among them, exit velocity and zone/chase swing percentage for hitters, velocity and spin rate for pitchers — and more about enhancing all-around ability and competitiveness.
“How does a player feel like they’re valued? It’s playing time and how they’re paid, right?” Posey said. “If the industry is paying a guy to have an .850 OPS, but he only drives in 40 runs, well, where’s the incentive to drive in runs if it doesn’t matter? So the challenge, from my perspective, is that driving runs does matter to me. There’s probably a lot of people who’d disagree with me and say (RBIs) are all based on luck, right? I disagree with that. I don’t think it is (totally context dependent). I think it’s a mindset and a want-to.
“But how do you convince your players to do that when (they’d say), ‘Well, if I drive in 80 but I’ve got a .770 OPS instead of an .850 OPS, am I going to be penalized for that?’ So that’s what I see as the crux of the issue.
“Hopefully we can make headway in the minors. If we set standards, whatever we decide those standards are going to be, then it’s, ‘You’re gonna move up if you’re doing these things, and if you’re not, you’re not gonna move up.’ That’ll be the fun part to piece that together.”
If those developmental changes result in more young pitchers who can match raw stuff with some semblance of command, and with hitters who aren’t asked to prioritize versatility over defensive proficiency, then perhaps it’ll lead to another of Posey’s stated ambitions: fostering a more aesthetically pleasing game.
But here’s the thing about having a philosophical baseball conversation with Posey: He doesn’t allow it to go too deeply into the weeds before he tries to bring it back.
“The way I look at it, it’s people, you know?” Posey said. “Whether you’re a player or you’re this (president) role, you’re trying to get to know personalities, understand how to communicate with different people. As a catcher, you’ve got to know so many different personalities. So I think you take a little bit of that. It’s just life in general.”
Rangers special assistant Nick Hundley is another former catcher who used his experience behind the plate while transitioning to a front-office role. Hundley served as Posey’s backup in 2017-18 and is one of his closest friends in the game. They’ve spoken frequently over the past two months.
“It’s an unbelievable challenge, and on a much, much larger scale, it reminds me of calling a game,” Hundley said. “There’s a lot of different options and ways to attack problems. So he’s well suited for it. The biggest thing he has is vision. You can’t really teach that.
“I’m just ecstatic for the game of baseball. Anytime you keep leaders like him involved, it fills a huge void. When he retired, the game missed his talent and his personality and his aura, and I think it’s really exciting to have him back in the game in a really high-level decision-making capacity on one of the blue-chip franchises.”
But it’s one thing to go from former player to special assistant. Isn’t it a whole different challenge to ascend directly to an organization’s top baseball job?
“Oh, it is,” Hundley said with a laugh. “But so is winning MVPs and winning World Series and being a Hall of Famer.”
Between Posey and Young and Boston’s Craig Breslow, among others, there’s a trend toward former players becoming leaders for MLB clubs. Posey wasn’t sure whether that representation might lessen the risk aversion that has led to a static trade market in recent years. But in his personal experience, he agreed with the suggestion that his playing experience — and learning to accept that failure is part of the job — could be a valuable trait.
“I know we’ll be very diligent in our decision-making,” said Posey, “but also, something I’ve tried to inject with the group, is for us not to be hamstrung from that potential fear of failure.”
The Giants’ most visible recent offseason failures have been their efforts to sign a free-agent franchise star. This winter, they have roughly $70 million to spend before crossing the $241 million luxury tax threshold. They are likely to target one or two major free agents as opposed to filling out the roster with six or seven.
Juan Soto is the biggest prize but Willy Adames is a better match for Posey’s expressed top priority: a shortstop who could stabilize the infield and allow Tyler Fitzgerald to move to second base. Both Soto and Adames will have qualifying offers attached to them, though, and it’s very possible that the Giants will seek to avoid signing players associated with draft penalties.
For one, their system took a hit in this past draft when they sacrificed their second and third picks plus $1 million from their international bonus pool to sign Matt Chapman and Blake Snell. For another, because the Giants also surged past the luxury tax threshold last season, the draft penalties are even steeper this time around. This winter, signing a free agent with a QO would cost them their second and fifth picks plus $1 million from their international bonus pool. Signing two such free agents would cost them their second, third, fifth and sixth picks.
Two consecutive compromised amateur drafts is hardly the way a new president of baseball operations wants to begin his tenure — especially a development-minded executive like Posey, who has stated that the path to sustained winning is through the farm system.
But the Giants are sure to pursue free agents on one level or another this offseason. And that’ll likely involve interfacing with agent Scott Boras, whom Posey circumvented at the end of August while dealing directly with Chapman to finalize his six-year, $150 million extension.
If there were any fences to mend with Boras, Posey said it’s already been addressed.
“We’re all good,” said Posey, who spoke on the phone with Boras last month without addressing any free agents. “We were just talking baseball. It was good. This guy’s been around forever and has been one of the best in the game. I told him, ‘I have a tremendous amount of respect for you because I know how hard it is in anything that you do to stay at the top of your game. And for you to do it as long as you have, hat’s off.’ It’s pretty impressive. He’s just as passionate after all this time.”
Posey, who has been on the job barely a month, pointed to his phone when asked about how he’s experienced these first few weeks. He’s tethered to calls and texts as soon as he wakes up. He said he’s “probably not the best at juggling seven or eight messages or emails or phone calls and then trying to gather them together. As I go along, some of my blind spots will probably become more apparent.”
It’s a lot of volume. Young, another constant lifeline over the past month, told Posey to expect it.
“As a player, the day sort of revolved around me,” Young said. “And in these jobs, your day belongs to everybody else. Your day is spent really helping others and providing vision and wisdom and standards. You’re outwardly focused in these roles. I didn’t understand just how immense the job is. As a player I never saw how many different departments there are and how big baseball operations groups are.
“It’s people management. These jobs are truly general managing. You’re managing a lot of different areas and so it’s learning how to divide your time and determine on a daily basis where the most important areas are to spend your time that day. That’s one of the big challenges, but Buster will be great at it.”
(Top photo: Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)
