The top members of the Giants’ ownership group are probably working very diligently right now to try to find the right grounds to keep Farhan Zaidi as president of baseball operations beyond this disappointing season. They don’t want to fire him. They want to identify the reasons to keep him.
But at the tail end of the Giants’ third consecutive failed season, it’s getting harder to figure out what those reasons would be.
I do believe that chairman Greg Johnson, minority owner Buster Posey, and several other members of the ownership group would love to discover a compelling rationale to bring Zaidi back. I believe they planned for next season, not this one, to be the inflection point for Zaidi’s tenure, which began in November 2018 and has produced only one (albeit quite memorable) playoff season.
They hired Zaidi’s close associate Bob Melvin as manager last offseason and announced a contract extension for Zaidi, though the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Shea reported last week that the guarantees for both men are through 2025. Clearly, this was supposed to come to a head next season.
But in big-time sports and all endeavors, when you have a pretty firm idea that you’ll have to move on from somebody in a year, you might as well do it now. Waiting on the inevitable just makes things worse. Even if you don’t really want to fire the executive. Even if, as I believe, Giants ownership signed off on just about everything Zaidi has done, precisely on the budget he’s been given. Even if he’s gone about his job exactly as he said he’d do it almost six years ago. Even if there’s not really a clear-cut candidate to take his place, and there’s zero guarantee that the next executive will do better.
There’s always an expiration date for mediocre tenures, though. There’s always a clock running, a deadline. There’s always a prove-it moment, and everything I’ve seen and heard tells me that the time probably has come and gone for Zaidi and the Giants.
Zaidi is well-meaning and very smart. He’s not the most popular guy in the franchise, but he’s not a terror in any sense. He’s ridiculously smart. He’s sensible. He’s maybe too sensible — too disdainful of some of the more romantic aspects of this sport.
Of course, Giants fans are some of the most romantic and nostalgic in the world, and they back that up with their pocketbooks. They have seen their beloved team climb to the top of the mountain three times in the last 14 years and regularly fill up their beautiful ballpark. They want to feel that again. They want to watch great and entertaining baseball.
They want an executive who feels all of that, too, and who lets them know he’s feeling it — which Zaidi won’t do; it’s not who he is. I respect him for that, but for such a cool figure to gain the trust and love of these fans over the years, Zaidi had to pile up victories and big seasons. He had to do more than build that 2021 team that won 107 games. He had to keep doing it. He had to show fans he knew how to keep doing it.
And here the Giants sit, at 73-78 after Tuesday’s blowout victory in Baltimore, all but eliminated from the playoff race many days ago.
Zaidi may have run out of time. It’s just hard to see how this goes on for another offseason, another spring and potentially another empty fall.
But yes, Zaidi deserves the same kind of sensible analysis about his tenure and his future that he has given to every baseball decision he’s made in this job. You have to list the reasons he should keep his job into 2025, then decide if those reasons really stand up against practical logic.
Here’s how I worked it out.
Six reasons to keep Zaidi
1. The Giants’ owners hired him because of his analytical approach. If they fired him, they’d likely hire somebody just as analytically inclined.
But why are similarly focused front offices in Milwaukee, Kansas City, and Detroit (run by Scott Harris, Zaidi’s former general manager), among others, doing so much better than Zaidi’s Giants?
I don’t think use of analytics is the issue. The Giants are always going to want to be heavily into analytics. If you aren’t, you’ll be left in the dust in the new MLB era.
If the Giants move on from Zaidi, they need to find somebody who does what he’s done for six years, just better. Who can find superstars in the draft. Who can maybe emote a time or two along with the fan base.
A reason to keep Zaidi: He has made adjustments, especially going into this year, as encouraged by Johnson. He’s built a roster that needs fewer platoons and “openers,” with a lean toward a more stable starting rotation.
Zaidi has been more flexible than I thought he’d be. He was happy to hire Melvin, but it seemed pretty clear that firing Gabe Kapler last year wasn’t a pleasant move for him. Zaidi might argue that he’s been too flexible lately.
But do the Giants’ owners — and especially those looking to Posey for direction — really want a top executive who has to be nudged into doing these things?
2. Much of what has weighed down the Giants the past three years has been bad luck. They’ve had big-name stars turning them down or flunking the medical exam, first-round picks getting injured, young players showing promise early and then fizzling.
I don’t know of more than two or three important Zaidi moves over the last six years that were clear mistakes. But avoiding huge errors is only one part of the report card. You can’t win unless you hit big on multiple moves, year after year, and Zaidi just hasn’t been able to do that.
Maybe all of this would look different if $113 million man Jung Hoo Lee hadn’t messed up his shoulder in May or the Giants had signed Blake Snell in January, not March. But I don’t think it would’ve changed much.
3. You never want to make a big decision based on a fan popularity contest. Zaidi is deeply unpopular among vast segments of the fan base, but some of that is irrational and has been in ugly evidence even back to the 107-win season.
This is basically where I’ve been situated on the “Zaidi question” for years. He’s too talented for Giants ownership to discard him on the whims of the lunatic fringe. But unpopular executives eventually have to win and keep winning. They have to accumulate tremendous talent. And then they’ll be popular.
If the Giants keep Zaidi in charge into next season, maybe it turns around. But it’ll be hard without a superstar in the lineup and questions throughout the roster. And it’ll be even harder knowing that Zaidi is a lame-duck president, and heaven knows how tense it could get in 2025, and how bleak it might feel at Oracle.
Attendance has ticked up this season, it’s important to note. The Giants are 10th in MLB, averaging 33,038 per game. They were 17th in 2023, averaging 30,866. Those are important numbers for Giants ownership, not just in raw dollars but in proof of fans’ sustained faith.
But I can imagine that the prospect of 40 or 50 games just like the 25,096, 22,042 and 22,184 announced Oracle crowds during last week’s series against the Brewers absolutely sends a chill down Johnson’s spine.
4. The Giants aren’t far from being right back in the playoff race. They have potential superstar Bryce Eldridge racing through the farm system and once again will have money to spend this offseason.
But is Zaidi the guy they want making those decisions? Wouldn’t a top free agent shy away from the Giants if the guy who’s trying to sign him likely will be gone in nine months?
5. Melvin made it clear that he jumped from the Padres because he trusted Zaidi from their days together with the A’s. Firing Zaidi could destabilize the clubhouse, too.
I think Melvin is a good manager. He has the respect of the players, starting with Matt Chapman, easily their best position player this season and now signed to a long-term deal.
But Melvin almost certainly could adapt to a new top baseball executive if he had to. And if he can’t, or if the new executive wants a different manager, Melvin’s contract isn’t that hard to exit.
6. Even with Posey clearly moving into a position of major influence, Zaidi could stay on as the day-to-day decision-maker.
There’s a reason we all noted Andrew Baggarly’s story this week in The Athletic detailing Posey’s first-hand role in getting Chapman’s deal completed. Posey is close to Johnson and moved back to the Bay Area recently. He’s beloved by the ownership group and has immense credibility. I doubt Posey wants total control of baseball operations, but he has some authority inside Giants HQ, and he probably can have as much of it as he wants.
Would a Posey-Zaidi tandem work? Possibly, if both want it to work. But I think it’d be awkward. If the Giants turn this franchise over to Posey in a significant manner, they should let him pick his own top lieutenant. And if it happens that way, I think they will.
I don’t go lightly down this path. You never should blithely write about anybody losing their job, and I sure don’t want to do that with Zaidi. I’ve always enjoyed my conversations with Zaidi, dating back to his days as an A’s executive. I’ve had him on my podcast many times. My opinion in this column has nothing to do with Zaidi not choosing to appear on my podcast lately. I saw him at Oracle over the weekend, and he said he’d come on this week, but that hasn’t happened, and I understand. If he had come on, there would’ve been some tense moments, I imagine.
I would guess that he has done few media appearances recently in part because he feels increasingly uncomfortable in this situation and in this role for such a popular franchise. The whole thing is uncomfortable. Maybe everybody will be relieved when it’s over.