SF Giants legend has stark warning for Zaidi's analytics department

With the SF Giants firing Farhan Zaidi, we are hearing more people in and around the organization speak out about him. This includes franchise legend Will Clark who recently sounded off on those in the front office who share Zaidi's approach.

Clark sounded off on the podcast he and former player Eric Byrnes have on No Filter Network. The clip can be watched here.

Clark does preface his mini-rant by saying that he does not want to be too hard on Zaidi and he stays true to that for the most part. For the first part of his rant he takes issue with the fact that Zaidi was the one dictating what the lineup should be. Clark believes that should be the job of the manager, especially veteran ones like Bob Melvin, Bruce Bochy, and Dusty Baker who have decades of experience playing and managing the game to draw upon.

SF Giants legend Will Clark sounds off on Zaidi's analytical approach

This is a fair critique from Clark. We do not know for sure how involved Zaidi was in dictating lineups but we do know that front offices have become much more heavily involved in that process and in-game decisions over the years.

Clark also believes that statistics should not reign supreme when it comes to putting together a lineup. If a manager can see that a batter is having good at-bats against lefties even though another player may have better numbers against lefties, he thinks the manager should go with their gut.

This sets up the end of Clark's mini-rant where he gets a little angry and issues a colorful warning to all of the "statistical guys" in the Giants organization that they had better watch out because their fate may be the same as Zaidi's, implying that because Buster Posey is now in charge he is going to gut the analytics department.

This is just simply not going to happen. In Posey's introductory press conference, he said that analytics are here to stay. Clark may have a point that the front office will not live or die by analytics to the same extent that the Zaidi regime did, but Buster is not going to clean house and remove everyone hired by Zaidi or anyone who has a FanGraphs subscription.

Many fans are hoping that Posey will represent a clean break with Zaidi, but like it or not the game has changed in many ways. This does not mean that the gut instincts of a manager do not matter, and in fact I agree with Clark that managers should be deferred to more when it comes to lineups, but those instincts must be balanced with the numbers and information available.

Posey represents more of a recalibration where gut instincts and relying on stats will be more in harmony rather than heavily skewed in the analytics direction. Nonetheless, it is always fun to see #22 get fired up and sound off about the Giants.