Posey may have to embrace controversial Farhan Zaidi practices to help SF Giants

SF Giants president of baseball operations Buster Posey is different from his predecessor Farhan Zaidi in many ways, but he may have to emulate some practices that were controversial amongst fans to help the team.

Zaidi leaned heavily on contracts that featured opt-outs and player options during his tenure. That allowed the Giants to add some good players like Carlos Ródon and Blake Snell, but it also meant that the Giants only had those guys for one season (really half a season in the case of Snell).

Posey may have to embrace opt-outs to improve SF Giants

This frustrated some fans because the Giants would get a good player for one season only to see him depart in free agency and go to another team. In the Snell case, it has had some pretty gut wrenching consequences as the Giants are still paying him $17 million even though he is helping the Los Angeles Dodgers win more titles.

Opt-outs are not necessarily evil even though they have not always worked out for the Giants. But Posey seemed to come into the job wanting to sign free agents who wanted to be in San Francisco for a long time. Matt Chapman and Willy Adames both made long-term commitments to be with the team for the rest of this decade.

But Andrew Baggarly of The Athletic speculated that Posey may be coming around on some practices that were heavily associated with Zaidi, writing: "I haven’t had a conversation with Posey about this, but my hunch is that he’s come around to a more nuanced stance, whether the subject is opt-outs, or running guys through waivers, or making incremental roster moves that necessitate a little bit of churn."

Opt-outs? Waiver claims? Roster churn? Saying those three things in quick succession causes Zaidi to appear like he's Beetlejuice.

Obviously, Zaidi is not the only executive to operate this way. The Houston Astros just signed Tatsuya Imai to an opt-out heavy deal and all sorts of teams use the waiver wire to their advantage.

But perhaps Posey and the front office is now understanding the grim reality of trying to field a winning team when ownership clearly did not want to spend a lot of money on a starting pitcher which was the team's biggest area of need.

For whatever Zaidi's faults may have been, he did know how to raise the floor of a roster so it would at least be mediocre. His struggle was getting the roster to the next level where it could be competitive every season, not just when everything went right like it did in 2021.

Posey now has that same struggle, so maybe embracing opt-outs and waiver claims will help the Giants field a more competitive team even if those are the same practices that drove some fans crazy about Zaidi.