SF Giants GM hire misses opportunity to break with Zaidi era

Reporting suggests that the SF Giants plan to hire Zack Minasian, their Vice President of Professional Scouting, as the next general manager for the team. This hiring shows that there will be some overlap between the Farhan Zaidi and Buster Posey regimes.

One could argue that Minasian's hire was a missed opportunity to more fully and publicly break with the Zaidi era. Surely, some will bristle at the fact that Minasian was the one of the first people Zaidi hired when he took over in 2019.

New SF Giants GM may carry linkage to Farhan Zaidi

That is not fair to Minasian of course, nor is it all that practical. It would be impossible and unwise to let go of every person that Zaidi hired in the organization because odds are he hired a lot of smart people who are good at their jobs. However, the general manager role is a big one and who you hire for that role sends a message. I do not think the intended message of Minasian's hire is "expect more of the same," but one can understand how it may be interpreted that way.

Going off Minasian's bio on the Giants' website, he clearly has the background Posey was looking for. He has decades of experience in scouting and spent 14 years in the Milwaukee Brewers organization. With Milwaukee, Minasian supposedly had a hand in acquiring, "CC Sabathia, Zack Greinke, Carlos Gomez, Josh Hader, Corey Knebel, Jean Segura and Will Smith among others."

That is not a bad collection of players to be connected to. It certainly shows that Minasian knows what he is doing and that he should be very competent at the day-to-day workings of the job.

Yet, one cannot help but wonder whether he will continue some of the less popular practices of Farhan Zaidi's front office. For instance, constant roster churn was a staple of the Zaidi era. We know there is value in watching the waiver wire like a hawk, but Zaidi sometimes took it too far.

We should all keep an open mind when it comes to Minasian, but until he proves otherwise there will be fans who view him as one of Zaidi's guys. Posey could have hired someone from outside the organization to signal that this was a full turn of the page, but he did not.

Really, who to make general manager should not be decided on the basis of what sort of signal it will send. Rather, it should be about the best person for the job. If Posey has determined Minasian is that person then we will have to reserve judgment, even if suspicion abounds, until we see the moves he makes as general manager.