Post by klaiggeb on Nov 21, 2018 12:13:09 GMT -5
A friend of mine sent the following 2 articles to me.
I think they are quite good, and it gives me a much better feeling about the guy, and the future of our team.
I'm going to give him a chance to prove himself one way or the other.
He deserves at least that.
And any way you look at his hiring, we're stuck with him for at least 5 years, so let's make the best of it.
Kawakami: Farhan Zaidi is a premier problem-solver; the Giants have major problems; this is just about a perfect hire
By Tim Kawakami Nov 6, 2018 18
I don’t know Farhan Zaidi real well, but it was well enough exactly four years ago to realize that was him dawdling quietly in the back of a restaurant area at Oracle Arena — the one adjacent to the A’s offices — just hours after he’d been announced as the Dodgers’ new general manager.
Farhan, what are you doing here?
He shook his head quietly and said he was stopping in to meet some people who were watching the Warriors game.
I asked: They still let you in the A’s headquarters? Aren’t you a Dodger now?
“I’ve got some work to finish up for the A’s,” Zaidi said sheepishly. “I’d better hurry up!”
Then he turned around and went back to the A’s offices, presumably to fill out a report or whatever else he had to do before heading south.
I told that story to an A’s official a little while later, and he laughed, adding that of course Zaidi wanted to finish up some work because he’s always working on something and it’s always worthwhile.
That scene stuck with me through Zaidi’s four years with the Dodgers — all resulting in NL West titles — and that’s what popped in my head when news broke (first reported by the Chronicle’s Henry Schulman) Tuesday night that the Giants had hired Zaidi as their new president of baseball operations.
First: Zaidi is a really personable and interesting guy who has flourished alongside Billy Beane, David Forst and Dodgers president Andrew Friedman, and these are three guys not quite amenable to mediocre brains or personalities. But he’s also not a pushover. Because pushovers don’t last long in Beane, Forst or Friedman’s company, either.
Second: Zaidi is a guy who identifies problems and then works his butt off to find solutions, and that is — and I cannot stress this enough — exactly what the Giants need right now.
The Giants need a prime problem-solver running their operation. They need somebody who won’t prescribe incremental change just because it’s the comfortable route. They need somebody who will pore through the reports and the metrics and figure out all the big and little steps for a significant reset.
They need somebody who will change a ton of things about who they are … but also do it in a way that can be explained, understood, digested and embraced by the most important pieces of the roster, the remaining front-office staff and yes, the fan base. Because it is a huge and vital fan base.
The Giants need somebody like Zaidi and they identified and then got him.
Which tells me that CEO Larry Baer and the ownership group understand that things had gotten stale at 24 Willie Mays Plaza. There are decent reasons — three of them, gold trophies won in 2010, 2012 and 2014 — why Brian Sabean and Bobby Evans stayed the course and kept staying to it long after it seemed logical.
But you can only make so many moves at the margins and you can only bet on your core guys for so long before you end up with a roster built on memories, not actual value. Again, I always understood why the Giants banked on their stars, but this was not the time to keep doing it.
And Zaidi is the guy who will move this franchise into the new era. That’s no guarantee of success. But it’s the promise of a more creative future.
What will he do with the Giants? Right now, we can only guess, and it’s better to wait on even that until after he meets the media for the first time as the Giants’ shot-caller on Wednesday afternoon at AT&T Park.
Maybe he’ll go after Bryce Harper in free agency. That certainly seems like the splashiest option out there and the Giants are in a splashy mood. They also reset the luxury-tax clock just to make sure they could go after a huge free agent this offseason and Harper would alter the Giants’ dynamics, no doubt.
I don’t know that Zaidi wants his first offseason to be all about throwing $300 million at one player, though, and I think there might be more creative ways to disrupt the Giants’ status quo.
Maybe he’ll trade Madison Bumgarner. You have to believe that Zaidi will test the market for Bumgarner this offseason and I cannot imagine that a Zaidi-led front office will give Bumgarner $30 million a year starting in 2020. So … if there’s one big move I might predict out of Zaidi, it’s that Bumgarner’s 2014 World Series MVP will not be a point of emphasis, that memories are nice but the Giants need to restock their system and moving Bumgarner seems like the quickest way to do that.
Mostly, let’s just presume that Zaidi won’t be timid, he won’t be overly concerned about keeping fan-favorites (though that doesn’t mean he’s guaranteed to trade the popular guys, either), and he understands the most creative ways to use a big budget.
For years, I’ve heard suggestions that Zaidi was one of the main guys who devised the “secret formula” for identifying under-valued players from other rosters and acquiring them for the A’s (like Josh Reddick and Stephen Vogt) and then the Dodgers (like Brandon Morrow and David Freese). Obviously, it wasn’t just Zaidi — the A’s acquired Blake Treinen, Khris Davis and Ramón Laureano, among others, after Zaidi’s departure.
But he’s good at it. There is no doubt Zaidi’s very good at this. And could he hire A’s assistant general manager Billy Owens — a highly respected talent evaluator — as the Giants’ new GM? That would be another gigantic signal that the Giants are starting something very different here.
And by the way, if you’re going to point out that the Dodgers never won a World Series in Zaidi’s time there, and that analytics only took them so far and maybe hindered them against the Red Sox at the end … I will point out that the Red Sox are an analytics-based front office … that also was good enough to win 108 regular-season games.
Also, the Dodgers beat the Braves in the NLDS and beat Milwaukee in the NLCS. Overall, the Dodgers were 9-8 in the postseason, and 10-8 if you count their one-game playoff victory over the Rockies to win the NL West.
If you throw out games vs. 108-win teams, the Dodgers were 9-4 in October. What is it about analytics that ruined them, exactly?
No, Zaidi is an excellent choice by the Giants. He has the thoughtfulness and temperament for this and he has the Bay Area background. The Giants have a lot of problems. I can’t think of anybody better to dig down and start figuring out solutions.
(Photo: Jake Roth/USA TODAY Sports)
Kawakami: What does Farhan Zaidi bring to the Giants? An instant injection of IQ, charisma and analytical manifestos
By Tim Kawakami Nov 7, 2018 37
Billy Beane was a little annoyed; he got tied up with something, so he missed Wednesday’s broadcast of Farhan Zaidi’s introductory press conference as the new Giants president of baseball operations.
“How’d my guy do?” Beane asked on the phone a few hours later.
Just fine, I said. Zaidi was smart, self-deprecating, thorough and respectful of the franchise’s not-long-ago success — with his predecessor, Brian Sabean, sitting 10 feet away — but also honest about the work necessary to build it back up from the recent slide.
“Of course!” the A’s executive president bellowed. “I didn’t even need to ask.”
This was the essence of what hit me during the entire event — Zaidi is a whole different thing for the Giants and simultaneously very familiar to anybody who has followed and covered the A’s and understands the crackling kinetics of Beane and David Forst’s organization.
Maybe with a slightly softer touch, though.
This was about the sight of Sabean sitting there quietly in the first row watching Zaidi and CEO Larry Baer at the podium, nodding when Zaidi paid tribute to him, then exiting swiftly when the session was over.
This was about Zaidi carefully laying out his general ideas about the use of analytics, scouting, common sense and roster balance — all added up, this is going to be a vast departure from the way the Giants have operated for years but perhaps not so obvious up close.
This was about speeding up the Giants’ biorhythms, about the former A’s assistant general manager and Dodgers GM bringing over the best analytical tools and about Zaidi presenting it in the surest and the least threatening way possible to the mainstays of this proud franchise.
“If you didn’t know him and you just looked at his academic résumé, you go, ‘Oh, well. The leadership’s going to be a challenge,'” Beane said. “Then you get to know him and find out how charismatic, how funny, how smart, how well-spoken, how well-polished he is. Then you go, ‘Wait a second — he’s got a doctorate?’
“I don’t know if there’s any executive in our game that combines the two skill sets that he has. We usually need — including myself — multiple people to do the things he himself can do.”
For the record, Zaidi, of course, did not tip his hand when asked whether he will consider trading Madison Bumgarner or go after a mega free agent like Bryce Harper in the coming months. He said all the proper nice things about manager Bruce Bochy and the current roster. He didn’t come in with his finger already poised over the detonator.
“Talent identification is key,” Zaidi said. “There are many ways to do that. Having a strong scouting staff is obviously important. Having a strong analytics department is important. When you’re a franchise like the San Francisco Giants and you’re at that stature, your goal should be the best in everything. In shouldn’t be a choice of analytics or scouting or something else.”
But things will change for this team. They will change dramatically.
“I think where we are,” Zaidi said when I asked about Bumgarner, “everything’s gotta be on the table in terms of how we move this team and roster forward.”
You could tell Zaidi was more prepared for this than any of us were — he smiled and said “yeah” while listening to just about every question he got, including mine. And he offered several lines that landed perfectly, probably mostly because he planned it that way.
When asked if the Giants can be competitive right away, Zaidi said he wanted the team to “play meaningful baseball as deep into the season and as soon as we can.” Which is self-explanatory — they’re not going to outright tank 2019 — but potentially quite important for someone like Bochy, almost certainly in his last season with the team.
When asked about the tone of his leadership, Zaidi said the goal is to be “humble in process.” Which I interpret to mean not overdoing any specific philosophy or strategy just to prove it’s the right one.
When asked about Bumgarner and other big-name Giants, Zaidi said the franchise’s theme is to “maintain flexibility.” Which is his way of saying nothing is locked into place and that he might not be ready to dole out any more huge contracts.
When asked what he learned from his days in Oakland and LA, Zaidi used the phrase “no move is too small.” Which is a direct reference to all the miniature-to-middling transactions the A’s and Dodgers made over the last few years that did not win the offseason headlines but ended up winning a lot of games.
I could be reading this wrong, but this is why I don’t foresee Zaidi going after Harper or another splash name just for the winter applause. I see him trying to grab talent here and there, in minor-league waiver deals, late-round draft picks, trade throw-ins and anything else he can dream up.
But a massive financial commitment to any single player right now … doesn’t seem all that prudent. Harper might be the exception to this, because he’s still only 26, but it doesn’t sound like that to me.
“A lot of times in free agency, you’re kind of paying the premium to get the first few years of the deal and you have to be willing to take on the risk of the back-end years,” Zaidi said. “It just depends on what your long-term outlook is and how you’re valuing those first three or four years of the contract and whether you’re willing to take on that liability further out. That depends on where you are in your competitive cycle. That’s something we’re going to have to think through over the next few weeks.”
How about just adding big names to make sure AT&T Park remains jam-packed, the way the Giants have tried to do so many other times — including last offseason, when they acquired veterans Andrew McCutchen and Evan Longoria only to watch it all fizzle?
“Maybe this is old school of me, but I still feel like the fans want to see a winning team,” Zaidi said. “That’s in my view what drives attendance and fan interest and excitement. If you just try to put together a good baseball team that wins games, it’s almost like the stars will come out of that process, rather than going out and trying to target stars and then you’re not really sure what kind of team you’ve built and developed.
“I don’t see kind of targeting stars as a strategy for us as much as it’s going to be just trying to build the best baseball team we can.”
That’s not analytics. That’s just logic, explained well, without revealing his cards in any major way.
“This is a charismatic, transformational leader,” Beane said. “That’s what makes Farhan so unique. Some of us make the sausage, and there’s some people who sell the sausage. Farhan can do both. He’s literally one of the few guys in this game who combines the ability to actually understand and create the analytics with the leadership skills and the charisma to lead an organization. He might be the only guy I know who does it to that level.”
Beane continued with an important case in point — the revival of Brandon Moss’ career back in 2012, when Zaidi was on Beane’s staff and noticed something.
“Some of his analytical work is just unbelievable,” Beane said. “Brandon Moss was in Triple A playing right field. Farhan ends up writing — I call it the Moss Manifesto. It literally outlined what we should be doing, move him to first base. He would get these brainstorms and document this. And we did it. That success was all identified by Farhan in the Moss Manifesto. And then to combine that with the charisma and leadership skills — that’s an incredibly unique combination. I mean, it doesn’t exist. I know I don’t have his skill set.”
Then Beane paused a bit and maybe realized he’d been gushing for many minutes. But what the hell: “You mention all these superlatives, and maybe you wonder about it,” Beane continued, “but if you ask anybody who knows him in baseball, they’ll be nodding their heads, too.”
The Giants decided to do much more than nod about Zaidi, of course. They gave him a five-year deal to remake this franchise. They’re all-in for change. They’re committed to Zaidi. And I guarantee you he’s prepared for this and probably smiling the whole way.
I think they are quite good, and it gives me a much better feeling about the guy, and the future of our team.
I'm going to give him a chance to prove himself one way or the other.
He deserves at least that.
And any way you look at his hiring, we're stuck with him for at least 5 years, so let's make the best of it.
Kawakami: Farhan Zaidi is a premier problem-solver; the Giants have major problems; this is just about a perfect hire
By Tim Kawakami Nov 6, 2018 18
I don’t know Farhan Zaidi real well, but it was well enough exactly four years ago to realize that was him dawdling quietly in the back of a restaurant area at Oracle Arena — the one adjacent to the A’s offices — just hours after he’d been announced as the Dodgers’ new general manager.
Farhan, what are you doing here?
He shook his head quietly and said he was stopping in to meet some people who were watching the Warriors game.
I asked: They still let you in the A’s headquarters? Aren’t you a Dodger now?
“I’ve got some work to finish up for the A’s,” Zaidi said sheepishly. “I’d better hurry up!”
Then he turned around and went back to the A’s offices, presumably to fill out a report or whatever else he had to do before heading south.
I told that story to an A’s official a little while later, and he laughed, adding that of course Zaidi wanted to finish up some work because he’s always working on something and it’s always worthwhile.
That scene stuck with me through Zaidi’s four years with the Dodgers — all resulting in NL West titles — and that’s what popped in my head when news broke (first reported by the Chronicle’s Henry Schulman) Tuesday night that the Giants had hired Zaidi as their new president of baseball operations.
First: Zaidi is a really personable and interesting guy who has flourished alongside Billy Beane, David Forst and Dodgers president Andrew Friedman, and these are three guys not quite amenable to mediocre brains or personalities. But he’s also not a pushover. Because pushovers don’t last long in Beane, Forst or Friedman’s company, either.
Second: Zaidi is a guy who identifies problems and then works his butt off to find solutions, and that is — and I cannot stress this enough — exactly what the Giants need right now.
The Giants need a prime problem-solver running their operation. They need somebody who won’t prescribe incremental change just because it’s the comfortable route. They need somebody who will pore through the reports and the metrics and figure out all the big and little steps for a significant reset.
They need somebody who will change a ton of things about who they are … but also do it in a way that can be explained, understood, digested and embraced by the most important pieces of the roster, the remaining front-office staff and yes, the fan base. Because it is a huge and vital fan base.
The Giants need somebody like Zaidi and they identified and then got him.
Which tells me that CEO Larry Baer and the ownership group understand that things had gotten stale at 24 Willie Mays Plaza. There are decent reasons — three of them, gold trophies won in 2010, 2012 and 2014 — why Brian Sabean and Bobby Evans stayed the course and kept staying to it long after it seemed logical.
But you can only make so many moves at the margins and you can only bet on your core guys for so long before you end up with a roster built on memories, not actual value. Again, I always understood why the Giants banked on their stars, but this was not the time to keep doing it.
And Zaidi is the guy who will move this franchise into the new era. That’s no guarantee of success. But it’s the promise of a more creative future.
What will he do with the Giants? Right now, we can only guess, and it’s better to wait on even that until after he meets the media for the first time as the Giants’ shot-caller on Wednesday afternoon at AT&T Park.
Maybe he’ll go after Bryce Harper in free agency. That certainly seems like the splashiest option out there and the Giants are in a splashy mood. They also reset the luxury-tax clock just to make sure they could go after a huge free agent this offseason and Harper would alter the Giants’ dynamics, no doubt.
I don’t know that Zaidi wants his first offseason to be all about throwing $300 million at one player, though, and I think there might be more creative ways to disrupt the Giants’ status quo.
Maybe he’ll trade Madison Bumgarner. You have to believe that Zaidi will test the market for Bumgarner this offseason and I cannot imagine that a Zaidi-led front office will give Bumgarner $30 million a year starting in 2020. So … if there’s one big move I might predict out of Zaidi, it’s that Bumgarner’s 2014 World Series MVP will not be a point of emphasis, that memories are nice but the Giants need to restock their system and moving Bumgarner seems like the quickest way to do that.
Mostly, let’s just presume that Zaidi won’t be timid, he won’t be overly concerned about keeping fan-favorites (though that doesn’t mean he’s guaranteed to trade the popular guys, either), and he understands the most creative ways to use a big budget.
For years, I’ve heard suggestions that Zaidi was one of the main guys who devised the “secret formula” for identifying under-valued players from other rosters and acquiring them for the A’s (like Josh Reddick and Stephen Vogt) and then the Dodgers (like Brandon Morrow and David Freese). Obviously, it wasn’t just Zaidi — the A’s acquired Blake Treinen, Khris Davis and Ramón Laureano, among others, after Zaidi’s departure.
But he’s good at it. There is no doubt Zaidi’s very good at this. And could he hire A’s assistant general manager Billy Owens — a highly respected talent evaluator — as the Giants’ new GM? That would be another gigantic signal that the Giants are starting something very different here.
And by the way, if you’re going to point out that the Dodgers never won a World Series in Zaidi’s time there, and that analytics only took them so far and maybe hindered them against the Red Sox at the end … I will point out that the Red Sox are an analytics-based front office … that also was good enough to win 108 regular-season games.
Also, the Dodgers beat the Braves in the NLDS and beat Milwaukee in the NLCS. Overall, the Dodgers were 9-8 in the postseason, and 10-8 if you count their one-game playoff victory over the Rockies to win the NL West.
If you throw out games vs. 108-win teams, the Dodgers were 9-4 in October. What is it about analytics that ruined them, exactly?
No, Zaidi is an excellent choice by the Giants. He has the thoughtfulness and temperament for this and he has the Bay Area background. The Giants have a lot of problems. I can’t think of anybody better to dig down and start figuring out solutions.
(Photo: Jake Roth/USA TODAY Sports)
Kawakami: What does Farhan Zaidi bring to the Giants? An instant injection of IQ, charisma and analytical manifestos
By Tim Kawakami Nov 7, 2018 37
Billy Beane was a little annoyed; he got tied up with something, so he missed Wednesday’s broadcast of Farhan Zaidi’s introductory press conference as the new Giants president of baseball operations.
“How’d my guy do?” Beane asked on the phone a few hours later.
Just fine, I said. Zaidi was smart, self-deprecating, thorough and respectful of the franchise’s not-long-ago success — with his predecessor, Brian Sabean, sitting 10 feet away — but also honest about the work necessary to build it back up from the recent slide.
“Of course!” the A’s executive president bellowed. “I didn’t even need to ask.”
This was the essence of what hit me during the entire event — Zaidi is a whole different thing for the Giants and simultaneously very familiar to anybody who has followed and covered the A’s and understands the crackling kinetics of Beane and David Forst’s organization.
Maybe with a slightly softer touch, though.
This was about the sight of Sabean sitting there quietly in the first row watching Zaidi and CEO Larry Baer at the podium, nodding when Zaidi paid tribute to him, then exiting swiftly when the session was over.
This was about Zaidi carefully laying out his general ideas about the use of analytics, scouting, common sense and roster balance — all added up, this is going to be a vast departure from the way the Giants have operated for years but perhaps not so obvious up close.
This was about speeding up the Giants’ biorhythms, about the former A’s assistant general manager and Dodgers GM bringing over the best analytical tools and about Zaidi presenting it in the surest and the least threatening way possible to the mainstays of this proud franchise.
“If you didn’t know him and you just looked at his academic résumé, you go, ‘Oh, well. The leadership’s going to be a challenge,'” Beane said. “Then you get to know him and find out how charismatic, how funny, how smart, how well-spoken, how well-polished he is. Then you go, ‘Wait a second — he’s got a doctorate?’
“I don’t know if there’s any executive in our game that combines the two skill sets that he has. We usually need — including myself — multiple people to do the things he himself can do.”
For the record, Zaidi, of course, did not tip his hand when asked whether he will consider trading Madison Bumgarner or go after a mega free agent like Bryce Harper in the coming months. He said all the proper nice things about manager Bruce Bochy and the current roster. He didn’t come in with his finger already poised over the detonator.
“Talent identification is key,” Zaidi said. “There are many ways to do that. Having a strong scouting staff is obviously important. Having a strong analytics department is important. When you’re a franchise like the San Francisco Giants and you’re at that stature, your goal should be the best in everything. In shouldn’t be a choice of analytics or scouting or something else.”
But things will change for this team. They will change dramatically.
“I think where we are,” Zaidi said when I asked about Bumgarner, “everything’s gotta be on the table in terms of how we move this team and roster forward.”
You could tell Zaidi was more prepared for this than any of us were — he smiled and said “yeah” while listening to just about every question he got, including mine. And he offered several lines that landed perfectly, probably mostly because he planned it that way.
When asked if the Giants can be competitive right away, Zaidi said he wanted the team to “play meaningful baseball as deep into the season and as soon as we can.” Which is self-explanatory — they’re not going to outright tank 2019 — but potentially quite important for someone like Bochy, almost certainly in his last season with the team.
When asked about the tone of his leadership, Zaidi said the goal is to be “humble in process.” Which I interpret to mean not overdoing any specific philosophy or strategy just to prove it’s the right one.
When asked about Bumgarner and other big-name Giants, Zaidi said the franchise’s theme is to “maintain flexibility.” Which is his way of saying nothing is locked into place and that he might not be ready to dole out any more huge contracts.
When asked what he learned from his days in Oakland and LA, Zaidi used the phrase “no move is too small.” Which is a direct reference to all the miniature-to-middling transactions the A’s and Dodgers made over the last few years that did not win the offseason headlines but ended up winning a lot of games.
I could be reading this wrong, but this is why I don’t foresee Zaidi going after Harper or another splash name just for the winter applause. I see him trying to grab talent here and there, in minor-league waiver deals, late-round draft picks, trade throw-ins and anything else he can dream up.
But a massive financial commitment to any single player right now … doesn’t seem all that prudent. Harper might be the exception to this, because he’s still only 26, but it doesn’t sound like that to me.
“A lot of times in free agency, you’re kind of paying the premium to get the first few years of the deal and you have to be willing to take on the risk of the back-end years,” Zaidi said. “It just depends on what your long-term outlook is and how you’re valuing those first three or four years of the contract and whether you’re willing to take on that liability further out. That depends on where you are in your competitive cycle. That’s something we’re going to have to think through over the next few weeks.”
How about just adding big names to make sure AT&T Park remains jam-packed, the way the Giants have tried to do so many other times — including last offseason, when they acquired veterans Andrew McCutchen and Evan Longoria only to watch it all fizzle?
“Maybe this is old school of me, but I still feel like the fans want to see a winning team,” Zaidi said. “That’s in my view what drives attendance and fan interest and excitement. If you just try to put together a good baseball team that wins games, it’s almost like the stars will come out of that process, rather than going out and trying to target stars and then you’re not really sure what kind of team you’ve built and developed.
“I don’t see kind of targeting stars as a strategy for us as much as it’s going to be just trying to build the best baseball team we can.”
That’s not analytics. That’s just logic, explained well, without revealing his cards in any major way.
“This is a charismatic, transformational leader,” Beane said. “That’s what makes Farhan so unique. Some of us make the sausage, and there’s some people who sell the sausage. Farhan can do both. He’s literally one of the few guys in this game who combines the ability to actually understand and create the analytics with the leadership skills and the charisma to lead an organization. He might be the only guy I know who does it to that level.”
Beane continued with an important case in point — the revival of Brandon Moss’ career back in 2012, when Zaidi was on Beane’s staff and noticed something.
“Some of his analytical work is just unbelievable,” Beane said. “Brandon Moss was in Triple A playing right field. Farhan ends up writing — I call it the Moss Manifesto. It literally outlined what we should be doing, move him to first base. He would get these brainstorms and document this. And we did it. That success was all identified by Farhan in the Moss Manifesto. And then to combine that with the charisma and leadership skills — that’s an incredibly unique combination. I mean, it doesn’t exist. I know I don’t have his skill set.”
Then Beane paused a bit and maybe realized he’d been gushing for many minutes. But what the hell: “You mention all these superlatives, and maybe you wonder about it,” Beane continued, “but if you ask anybody who knows him in baseball, they’ll be nodding their heads, too.”
The Giants decided to do much more than nod about Zaidi, of course. They gave him a five-year deal to remake this franchise. They’re all-in for change. They’re committed to Zaidi. And I guarantee you he’s prepared for this and probably smiling the whole way.
