Giants replace Zaidi (a baseball man) with Posey (a baseball player)

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So the San Francisco Giants have decided to replace executive Farhan Zaidi, a baseball man, with Buster Posey, a baseball player.

And the question after consecutive losing seasons is not so much why but why not?

That Zaidi schooled in the beauty and agony of analytics couldn’t turn the Giants into winners in his five seasons as their director of baseball operations, probably wasn’t entirely his fault. Still, you can’t finish under .500 three years in a row and get pounded by the dreaded, despised Los Angeles Dodgers, without some consequences.

Posey, an MVP and star catcher of the Giants’ World Series Teams of 2010, 2012, 2014, was one of the most popular players of the recent era. Whether that popularity translates into success in the front office remains to be seen. After retirement, Posey, who has a young family and resides in Georgia where he grew up, has worked for the Giants in an advisory role. The plan was for him always to move up into a power position, but who knew it would be this quickly.

Everyone understands how dominant the Dodgers have been—although they only have one World Series title in the last few years—and that has made it unsettling for the Giants’ situation.  The San Diego Padres came along with the intent of catching L.A., and in the process have made life more difficult for San Francisco.

The Dodgers and Padres have slugged it out and as expected both are in the postseason.  However, the Giants failed to get to the playoffs and maybe even worse, were unable to win as many games as they lost. The Giants, indeed attempted to sign big-name free agents, including this year the remarkable Shohei Ohtani, but were unable to make a blockbuster deal that in retrospect would have given Zaidi job security as well as a place in baseball lore. Zaidi repeatedly said the Giants budget was large enough to sign Carlos Correa in 2023 or Ohtani in 2024 but those deals never came to fruition.

One of the frequent rumors in baseball is that top players don’t want to come to San Francisco for one reason or another, having nothing to do with baseball in particular, but the city’s reputation as a haven for the disenfranchised. And yet when Oracle Park is packed and fans are cheering, that seems to be less of an issue, as most likely it gets down to the team winning or losing. They stopped winning with Zaidi in charge. Will they be able to restart when Posey takes over?

We will know sooner than later.