) in the upper right of this page.Search term(s):
Quick page jumps:
It is currently fashionable to denigrate Buster Posey’s work as President of Baseball Operations, owing mainly to the disastrous performance of the team in 2026. Is that fair?
By my subjective count, Posey has made seven notably bad moves since taking on the job (including one before he formally assumed that title)…but he has also made fourteen notably good ones. So you can see what I’m talking about, here is the list:
I reckon “good” and “bad” by whether the move significantly changed the team, and in which direction: made it better or made it worse. The “probably” sub-category is moves that look good, but for which the fruit has yet to ripen.
But note also that not all of those moves are of equal weight, or close to it. In my view, the Bad moves are by and large weightier than the Good moves. There are two criteria there: how greatly it affected the team, and how much it cost the team in dollars (which also means how hard is it to eventually undo). As you will see (or have seen) on the other pages of this site, I strongly believe that right now Adames, Chapman, and Houser are, as I like to put it, clogs in the pipes. (So is Lee, but that one is not on Posey.)
There are also the many lesser moves the front office has made, running pretty poor ball players on and off the roster with dazzling speed. And an awful lot (literally) of those guys should never have hit the roster of any team that takes itself seriously. Yes, I well know the almost incredible number of IL hits the team has taken. But there just have to have been better men available than what they used. I won’t embarrass those men by putting up a roll call, but if you look at the career stats of the men who have worn the orange and black this season, you can see for yourself. Remember the cutoffs: for batters, not under a 790 TOP; for pitchers, not over a 625 TPP.) For career numbers, only five batters (one of whom is gone now) out of the 31 so far to appear make that cut (though, in fairness, a few are small-sample-size victims); and only 8 of the 35 actual pitchers do (but same caveat).
What we have here is simple: an inability to tell gold from brass. For the IL-forced roster shuffle we can charitably make allowances; but for major pieces like a starting shortstop or a rotation pitcher, the excuses run dry.
Buster Posey is no sort of fool, but he seems to still have his head in the 1970s, by which I mean one feels he is looking at things like batting average and RBIs for batters, and wins and saves for pitchers. Mind, I don’t know that that’s how he thinks, but his moves do make one wonder. They are not, by and large, the way one should be doing things this far into the 21st century.
Before we talk about Tony Vitello, a word about his coaches.
It is somewhere from difficult to impossible for someone not very close to the team to critique coaching. One does wonder about the post-departure success so many of those coaches who left the organization in the past few years, and about why they left the Giants organization. Eyeballs suggest that Pettis has been a good addition to the staff. Washington seems a good infield instructional coach. Whether Mense (hitting) and Meccage (pitching) are good, bad, or middling, I for one cannot say. But one does wish that Giants batters would mind Buster Posey’s oft-repeated concept: “make contact; put the ball in play”—rather than their apparent preference for “swing, brother, swing” (or “They shall not pass!”). And being fifth-highest in MLB at issuing walks is not what one wants from a pitching staff. The batters walk too little, and the pitchers walk men too much. Coaching? Or just not-so-good players?
As to Tony Vitello: he, like Buster, is the target of a lot of pretty hot criticism; and he, again like Buster, deserves some, but not an awful lot.
What I see are two problems: one, as the new kid on the block, he has been too easy—far too easy—with his players. He has, to use an old phrase, let the inmates run the asylum. A team is not a collegial group: it is a group with a boss, and the boss needs to be the boss. He can and should listen to his players, but it needs to be crystal clear that in the end, it is he who makes the decisions. I do believe that as the season has gone on, he has come to realize all that, and act more like the guy in charge.
That part is personality. The second, and bigger, issue is game management. There are, in baseball, two diametrically opposed strategies, each of which brings along its own bucketful of tactics. The two approaches are usually called “Small Ball” and “Big Inning”; their archetypal managers were Gene Mauch for Small Ball and Earl Weaver for Big Inning ball. (It may be of interest that in 27 years as a manager, Mauch only twice took a team to the post-season (where they both lost); Earl Weaver, in 18 seasons, took his team into post-season 6 times, winning three Pennants and a World Series. Just sayin’.)
But aside from those records, there is the cold, hard fact that modern analysis completely supports the big-inning approach, and finds small-ball tactics decidedly counter-productive. (It is ironic that weak-hitting teams’ managers often fall back on small ball, thinking—wrongly—that only hot-hitting teams can benefit from the big-inning approach; they make a bad situation worse.)
My concern with Mr. Vitello is that he seems to like the small-ball tactics: sac bunts, base stealing, hit-and-run, and the rest of that sad array. Stolen bases may be exciting, but they don’t do much for scoring, owing to the great cost of caught-stealings. The break-even point for steals is about 73%; 8 MLB teams out of the 30 do not exceed that 73% rate. The MLB average rate is 77%; the Giants’ rate is 76%. While there is a gain for rates over 73%, it works out to be rather trivial, and if a team’s rate falls to 73% or under—which it could readily do if the rate, like that of the Giants, is close to that 73%—it becomes an actual loser. And sac bunts are far worse: pure anathema (as Casey Stengel once famously said, “You could look it up.”)
It concerns me that Mr. Vitello seems to use those unfortunate small-ball tactics with regularity. I wish someone would send him a copy of Tom Tango’s book titled simply The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball (as in the old baseball saying “Well, the book says to…”).
The Giants are currently valued at $4.05 billion by Forbes and $4.36 billion by Sportico, and that may go higher owing to the Angels’ sale. Unlike many other teams, the Giants are not owned by some one billionaire: instead, they have a conglomerate ownership comprising about 30 persons and entities. But the dominant ownership block belongs to the Johnson family: Charles Johnson, age 93, rabid far-right-politics supporter; Greg Johnson, his son; and Rupert, Charles’ brother. The rest include individuals—like David Jenkins, at a reported 25%—and business entities such as Sixth Street at 10%, Thrive Eternal at something less than 10%, and Arctos Sports Partners at circa 2%.
But it is the Johnsons who run the show, with Greg as the Chairman, though Charles presumably still has a big say, especially as regards expense.
I won’t go on at length here: criticizing Charles Johnson as a person is shooting fish in a barrel (politics, general orneriness).
As to what concerns one might have about this ownership, I daresay one need look no farther than Greg Johnson’s reply pre-season to a reporter who asked him what he felt were the Giants’ goals and priorities for 2027. His answer? “To break even.”
All content copyright © 2026 - 2026 by The Owlcroft Company.
This web page is strictly compliant with the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) HyperText Markup Language (HTML5) Protocol versionless “Living Standard” and the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Cascading Style Sheets (CSS3) Protocol v3 — because we care about interoperability. Click on the logos below to test us!
This page was last modified on Thursday, 17 September 2026, at 8:21 pm Pacific Time.