Why Giants decided now was the right time for Zaidi to leave

Why the Giants have decided now is the right time to move on from Zaidi originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area

SAN FRANCISCO — When the Giants began their search in 2018, it took them six weeks to find their new director of baseball operations, but that wasn't intentional.

Farhan Zaidi was always at the top of the owners' list, but since he was the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who were in the middle of a pennant run, the Giants had to wait for permission to meet with him. A telephone interview led to an in-person meeting with Larry Baer and subsequent interviews with members of the board.

The Giants discovered fairly quickly that Zaidi's ambitions aligned with those of the owner. He did not recommend demolishing a team that had lost 187 games over the past two seasons, but instead presented a way to win games while continuing to develop.

That's been the goal in San Francisco since plans for Oracle Park were first drawn up. This is not an organization that believes in complete rebuilds or even uses that word.

Zaidi was confident he could thread the needle, but on Monday his superiors decided they had seen enough of his attempt. With a year left on his contract, Zaidi was released and, in a shocking announcement, Buster Posey was immediately installed as his replacement.

Posey will address the media for the first time on Tuesday, and if the Giants were trying to hit a home run from a PR perspective, they couldn't have done better. The future Hall of Famer has accomplished almost everything he's tried in life, on and off the field, but this is a new challenge and it will take time for him to figure out if he's perfect for the job too.

What is immediately clear is that after six years under Zaidi, the Giants are headed in the exact opposite direction. There are many smaller events and decisions that you can cite as reasons for the change, but ultimately it all goes back to those initial conversations at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles.

Thanks to a magical 107-win season in 2021, Zaidi finished with a winning record in San Francisco, but missed the playoffs in five of his six seasons. You can give him the first two — one of which was a farewell tour for Bruce Bochy and one where a new team tried to make adjustments during a pandemic — but the Giants have a 240-246 record since 2021 and have just finished one 80-82 season despite spending about $400 million through free agency and trades last offseason.

The recent mediocrity might have been more acceptable if the Giants had developed their players better, but they are widely considered to have a bottom-third farm system, and while they graduated many contributors over the last two seasons, Zaidi was never able to catch up the homegrown core he inherited that played such a pivotal role this 107-win season.

His best young player – Heliot Ramos – was drafted by the previous regime and only came through when it seemed the front office had exhausted all other options. Tyler Fitzgerald was a Zaidi draft pick, but like Ramos, he was blocked by a struggling veteran for several months, a situation that frustrated many within the organization.

Fairly early in Zaidi's tenure, it appeared that top prospects Kyle Harrison and Marco Luciano would lead the Giants into the future, but the latter was forced into the big leagues and found himself stuck at shortstop, designated hitter and second baseman moved away during a lost season.

The Giants had problems with player development, but also with simply acquiring enough good young players. Only one of Zaidi's first four first-round picks made it to the big leagues, and there are real questions about the other three. He inherited a top pick in Joey Bart, but the decision to sign Tom Murphy last offseason forced the Giants to trade Bart, who was one of the best offensive catchers in baseball this season as a Pittsburgh Pirate.

Zaidi had some notable draft wins led by Patrick Bailey, and it's possible that in a few years everyone will look back and realize the cupboard isn't as empty as it seems. That was the case with Bobby Evans, who was also criticized for his lack of a farm system but left behind some underrated talents like Camilo Doval and Randy Rodriguez.

Bryce Eldridge is one of the game's top prospects, and even Zaidi's critics in the organization see the first baseman as a future star. In a few months, Posey will watch as the Giants officially sign Josuar De Jesus Gonzalez, the top international teenager in this year's class and a player Giants scouts are comparing to Francisco Lindor.

A better future may not be as far away as it seemed for most of this season, but Zaidi ran out of time to find out.

Six years ago, he said the Giants would win on the edge, and they did at times. The 2021 season was about the core, but also about players like LaMonte Wade Jr. and Darin Ruf, who essentially came for free and made huge contributions to the Giants. However, the Giants too often lacked depth, frustrating many within the organization who led them to believe that Zaidi's greatest strength was building a 40-man roster.

Zaidi almost never lost a trade, but most of them were smaller transactions, and he held on to a few prospects that didn't pan out. He failed to land a Mookie Betts or Juan Soto type that could change the entire outlook of a franchise.

Many of Zaidi's most controversial moves actually made a lot of sense on paper, but there was something cold about them, and over time that added up. The most notable example came a few years ago when the Giants agreed to a deal with Carlos Correa without Brandon Crawford to announce that he might be changing positions. This year, the treatment of Luciano and Thairo Estrada raised alarm bells.

The decision to cut Estrada and let him finish the season in Triple-A, just in case the Giants somehow get back into contention but also lose several infielders to injuries? — frustrated many in a clubhouse already confused by the overall plan. The team's stars weren't happy with the one-foot-in, one-foot-out approach to the trade deadline, and there was anger over the decision to dump Alex Cobb, one of the most popular players in the clubhouse.

When the Giants failed to turn things around, the heat was turned up at Oracle Park for the second straight game. Exactly a year after firing Gabe Kapler, his hand-picked successor as Bochy's successor, Zaidi seemed to sense that he would soon be fired.

Zaidi is rarely on the field or in the dugout before games, but on Friday he watched batting practice while leaning on the cage. Three days earlier, he had made himself available to beat reporters in Phoenix, apparently to offer some of his thoughts at a time when job security was the only topic on most Giants fans and many within the organization languages.

At one point, Zaidi was asked if he felt there was still confidence in his vision.

“I think I've evolved in my views on things, and some of that has to do with the culture around the Giants organization and the fan base and the things that our fans want, things that this organization has done, when she was at her most successful,” which I might not have been successful earlier in my career,” he said. “I think there has been a difference of opinion over time. I think I made adjustments.”

“I think we are now at the point where we are largely in line with our vision of the team we want. We want a younger team, we want a more athletic team, we want more consistency in the rotation and the lineup.”

Zaidi did evolve, but for many it was too late. Kapler's firing set the Giants on a new course and Zaidi chose the exact opposite as Kapler's successor. It bothered him over the years that fans didn't approve of the Giants' use of platoons and openers — even last week, in answering questions, he pointed out that the Arizona Diamondbacks also platoon — but he adapted and traded for Robbie Ray and the signing of Matt Chapman, Jung Hoo Lee, Blake Snell and others.

However, there were a lot of mistakes in free agency. Zaidi may be better than any other manager in the business at dumping a bad contract, but many of those deals had his signature on them.

It's hard to say exactly how many of these would have been offered if Zaidi had built entirely the way he wanted, but ultimately that's what he chose to do, and it's a plan he believed he could carry out.

Leaning against a wall at Chase Field last week, Zaidi noted that “there has to be a balance in everything,” and that really was the perfect word. It's difficult to balance winning and developing. When Zaidi tried to impose it his way, the organization seemed to lose its identity.

Even as the end approached, Zaidi hoped that would change.

“I think as an organization we need to figure out our identity and not feel like just because a strategy is successful, it's the right thing for us,” he said last week. “I think it was a bit of a learning process for me. I think we’ve had a lot of discussions about it and we’re pretty much in agreement at this point.”

On Monday, it became clear that ownership feels different.

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