The Buster Posey Executive Era is finally putting some miles on its odometer — a general manager hire, a trip to his first-ever GM meetings, a 45-minute closed-door chat with Scott Boras, some signature quotes — and now we can start to take stock a little bit.
The verdict: Not bad, Buster.
What are you, like, smart or something?
We start with the GM, Zack Minasian.
I confess that when I awoke from my daily nap last Friday — free advice: 35 minutes is God’s perfect nap; no arguments — and saw Minasian was named the general manager of the Giants, my first Google search saw that he was a Farhan Zaidi hire, from 2019.
Heavy sigh.
I mean, sure, Farhan had some smart cats around him. And sure, Farhan did some good things. But what part of .500 ball over the last three years didn’t you understand? And Buster’s first move was to stay in house?
As it turns out, knee-jerk reactions are heavy on the ‘jerk’ and light on the ‘knee’. Minasian is not an analytics-head. Minasian is a baseball lifer. His old man ran the Rangers clubhouse. Tommy Lasorda is his godfather (I know, I know). He grew up collecting discarded stirrups off of clubhouse floors. He spent 15 years in the Milwaukee Brewers scouting and personnel department. He was a part of significant trades.
One would guess Minasian has a grip on what makes up a clubhouse; and one would guess if Buster Posey likes him, we should, too.
We’re in that stage of pure Buster Honeymoon.
More honeymoon imagery sprung from Buster’s two other notable occurrences.
One, his symbolic move of the data analysis center away from the entryway of the clubhouse of Oracle Park. When the clubhouse legend Mike Murphy retired, Farhan’s first move was to knock down a wall and install a cave for propeller heads (Mike Krukow’s favorite phrase) to push pencils and graphs and spreadsheets.
Now, we understand analytics help. But we also understand that a prevalence of said analytics can destroy the feel of a clubhouse, as I was just saying to the robotic device posting the lineup card last summer.
Creating an environment so that when you enter the clubhouse, your first thought isn’t “Oh, man, I did terrible in pre-calc in high school” is probably a good thing.
Two, his comments on the value of the RBI that Andy Baggarly of The Athletic posted the other day damn near made me emotional.
I will never forget an early social media interaction I had back in 2011 when some aggressively analytic Giants fans came at me for lamenting Carlos Beltran’s lack of RBI production. They scoffed at my 20th century ignorance, and guffawed at anyone who thought the RBI was a valued stat.
To say I was flabbergasted was to say Jack Clark took a mighty rip at a fastball.
And then along came Buster in San Antonio at the GM meetings, and he said this:
“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.”
Excuse me while I wipe a tear from my cheek.
So to recap: Posey hired a baseball lifer as his GM, decided the optics of a data center in the front of the clubhouse were not his style, and gave an impassioned defense of the RBI.
That’s a good start.
I can’t promise you Juan Soto. And in fact, I won’t promise you Juan Soto — that’s another Jock Blog for another day, given the Andrew Baggarly report on the Giants’ payroll plans for 2025 — but I can say that the first month-plus of the Buster Posey Executive Era is in the books, and there are some positive signs.
Then again, it’s Buster. What did you expect?