San Francisco Giants: Top 7 candidates to replace Bruce Bochy

It’s an end of an era as we enter the final day of Bruce Bochy as manager of the San Francisco Giants. While we celebrate his career, Farhan Zaidi is rapidly looking for his successor.

It’s been an emotional farewell tour for longtime San Francisco Giants manager and inevitable Hall of Famer Bruce Bochy.

Bochy, who has been with the Giants since 2007, has earned three World Series rings for a franchise that seemed to fumble peak Barry Bonds years. He’s dragged what should have been an awful San Francisco team to 77 wins this season.

That might not sound like much, but the over-achieving has allowed him to eclipse the 2,000-wins mark as a manager.

After 13 seasons with the Giants, Bruce Bochy will surely enjoy his retirement, hopefully leading a healthy life where he can check in to share some of his undeniable managerial IQ with broadcasters here and there.

The San Francisco Giants are taking a step into the next era of their franchise.

Hiring Farhan Zaidi as the head of baseball operations in November 2018 was a move into a new, aggressive, analytical direction. Though no media outlet would want to admit to it, had the move come earlier, there might have been a disagreement in styles between he and Bruce Bochy.

But Bochy has finally accepted his retirement after an incredible career that spans two and a half decades. It’s Zaidi’s show to run now.

While trying to savor every last bit of Bruce Bochy’s managerial tour, fans have turned their focus to ways to incorporate nostalgia during the final weekend of the season — a call for Tim Lincecum’s return to Oracle park, a closing appearance by Madison Bumgarner, anything to relive the glory days that are quickly being left further and further behind us.

But nostalgia can only do so much.

While the pomp and circumstance continue over this last weekend, Zaidi has carefully crafted a list of 20 or so names that he is interested in to take this transitional team and morph them back into a World Series contender.

This list has remained a secret and will likely remain a secret as Zaidi looks forward to an offseason where much work is expected to be done.

But when the weekend comes to a close and Bruce Bochy rides off into the sunset of retirement, Giants fans will have to turn their interest in nostalgia into a curiosity of who could possibly replace their Hall of Fame manager.

The task surely will not be easy. But the franchise is still in good hands so long as Zaidi is at the reins.

Hushed speculation has gone on throughout the season. Betters are already placing wild bets on everyone from Barry Bonds to Pete Rose to Jose Canseco becoming the next leader of the orange and black.

But Zaidi is surely smarter than that, no?

Here are seven names that might end up being considered as Bruce Bochy’s replacement as Giants manager in 2020.