Shaikin: The new marquee battle in the NL West: Andrew Friedman vs. Buster Posey

And now for something completely different in the venerable history of a storied rivalry: Andrew Friedman matching wits against Buster Posey.
Six years ago, with great fanfare, the San Francisco Giants recruited Friedman’s Dodgers lieutenant, Farhan Zaidi, to return the Giants to glory. After one season with a winning record and no postseason series victories, the Giants on Monday fired Zaidi as their president of baseball operations.
His replacement: Posey, the franchise icon, the only Giant to win a most valuable player award in the last 20 years, the catcher when the Giants won the World Series in 2010, 2012 and 2014.
“We believe it is time for new leadership to elevate our team so we can consistently contend for championships,” Giants chairman Greg Johnson said in a statement.
In 2022, the year after he retired as a player, Posey bought an ownership stake in the team and joined its board of directors. Posey will surround himself with experienced advisers — one of whom, manager Bob Melvin, is keeping his job even as Zaidi lost his.
In one critical way, Posey already was on the job. Under Zaidi, the Giants had struck out on big-dollar pitches to Bryce Harper, Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. When the Giants’ ownership group recently pushed to retain third baseman Matt Chapman, the Athletic reported that the man who essentially closed the $151-million deal was Posey, not Zaidi.
The inability to land a superstar — and, in fairness, Zaidi did land Carlos Correa before the Giants called off the deal because of concerns raised by a physical examination — canceled out one of Zaidi’s strengths.
With the Dodgers, Friedman and Zaidi excelled at finding talent on the margins: signing Max Muncy as a minor league free agent, for instance, and acquiring utilityman Chris Taylor in a minor league trade. Even if those supporting players do not develop into stars — and Muncy and Taylor did — they provide the depth that every successful team requires.
Without a Posey in the lineup, the Giants were far too dependent on the likes of first baseman-outfielder LaMonte Wade Jr. and outfielder Mike Yastrzemski. And, once the prized free agents signed elsewhere, the Giants all too often filled out their rosters with more free agents better suited for depth roles than starring roles: the 2023 collection included outfielders Michael Conforto and Mitch Haniger, and pitchers Sean Manaea, Taylor Rogers and Ross Stripling.
The draft did not provide help. In Zaidi’s six drafts, no player has produced even a 3.0 career WAR. Neither has any of the Giants’ first-round picks since 2011. The Giants’ first-round picks that preceded their run of three championships in five years included Posey (2008) and pitchers Madison Bumgarner (2007), Tim Lincecum (2006) and Matt Cain (2002).
Chapman ranked fifth in WAR among NL position players this season, according to Fangraphs, and Logan Webb ranked fifth among NL pitchers. The Giants had no other player in the top 30 for position players, or in the top 30 for pitchers.
Maybe Posey can persuade Blake Snell, who can opt out of his contract, to stay in San Francisco and give the Giants two aces atop their rotation. But the NL West is crazy good now: The Dodgers won 98 games, the San Diego Padres 93. The Arizona Diamondbacks, who stormed into the World Series last year with an 84-win team, won 89 games this year.
A little trivia: Posey becomes eligible for the Hall of Fame in 2027. Over the past 65 years, the only player inducted into the Hall who later became a general manager: Ted Simmons, who ran the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1992 and 1993. He resigned midway through the 1993 season, after suffering a heart attack.
In his first and only full season in charge of the Pirates’ baseball operations, Simmons led his team to a division championship. Simmons, of course, had Barry Bonds on his roster. Posey needs to find his Posey.