San Francisco Giants Have Their New President of Baseball Operations

After a long search, the San Francisco Giants have a new president of baseball operations, picking up Farhan Zaidi from the Dodgers.

On election day, the San Francisco Giants gave their own vote of confidence to a candidate for their open president of baseball operations position. Early in the day, Jon Heyman was among the many to report that the Giants had offered the position to Farhan Zaidi, and later in the day, Hank Schulman was the first to report that Zaidi accepted the offer.

After an extensive search that lasted more than a month and included a wide variety of candidates, the Giants set their sights on Zaidi, formerly the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. So not only did the Giants get their man, but they were able to poach him from their division rivals.

Zaidi has fairly extensive ties to the Bay Area. He earned a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, then joined the Oakland Athletics front office after college. He became the A’s assistant general manager in 2014, then moved to the Dodgers after the 2014 season, where he became their general manager.

Zaidi is an executive that will help the Giants as they attempt to bridge the gap between them and other, more analytical teams. He has a heavy background in sabermetrics and other similar analytical tools, but he also still relies on scouting. This passage from a 2014 profile written by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Susan Slusser highlights that:

"The sabermetrics crowd would be stunned to learn that Zaidi is now called the “Tools Police” in the A’s draft room – not because he disdains tools, the emphasis scouts often place on physical abilities such as running, throwing and power, but because he is such a proponent of them. “Moneyball” was about looking beyond tools, but Zaidi sees their value, to the point that he has a toy siren he hits whenever he hears reports that have too many stats."

The hirings aren’t over for the Giants yet, though. Zaidi will now have a chance to add his own general manager, with whom he will work hand in hand for the foreseeable future. One of the early names that has been tossed around is Billy Owens, who is currently the Oakland A’s assistant general manager. He’s been with the organization for 19 years, meaning he is connected to Zaidi.

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With free agency already started but yet to heat up, Zaidi and the Giants will now seemingly have their pick of who to chase on the market. The Giants are no longer bound by the potential luxury cap penalties that limited them last season, having reset the penalties this past season, and will be free to spend again.

Whether they do spend or not, though, is the biggest question. Zaidi will have work to do in his first offseason running his own front office. The Giants are already bound by many big money contracts for players who aren’t living up to them, and dishing out more of those contracts would be extremely risky.

If they decide to sell off some assets and attempt to rebuild the farm system, Zaidi has shown a knack for creative trading in the past. Most notably, he moved multiple big contracts from the Dodgers payroll last offseason, getting rid of Scott Kazmir, Adrian Gonzalez, and Brandon McCarthy, all players who weren’t living up to the deals.

The Dodgers have also done extremely well in picking up other team’s castoffs and turning them into key pieces in recent years. Chris Taylor, Max Muncy, and Andrew Toles are just a few, and Zaidi certainly had some role in picking those players up. San Francisco has had many problems in that area, so hopefully Zaidi can work some magic.

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This will be a big offseason for Zaidi and the Giants, but it will be just the beginning. It will probably take some time to clean up the messy state the team currently is in, but Zaidi sure seems like the right man for the job.

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