State of the Giants: What About Farhan Zaidi?

I think my loyal readers and commenters will back me up on this.  I never bought into the "In Farhan We Trust" hype but I also never joined the "Fire Farhan!" club either.  I expected and acknowledge both FZ and Kap have their strengths and weaknesses as leaders of a major league baseball club.  I crossed the line into believing the Giants needed a change in the Manager's chair somewhere around the time I started describing the end of this season as "chaotic".   Managers can make mistakes, they are often blamed for things that are out of their control but chaos is not an acceptable state for any organization to be in.  When an operation devolves into chaos it's sure sign different leadership is needed.  

That brings us to the President of Baseball Operations, Farhan Zaidi.  If the team he created is in chaos, isn't that ultimately his responsibility?  Does simply replacing the manager fix it?  Once again, a major root cause of the chaos was poor player performance and injuries.  When the POBO's roster construction is almost entirely dependent on bounceback performances and betting on players with injury histories staying healthy, isn't that on him?  

After 5 seasons at the helm I think it's fair to take stock of what FZ has and has not accomplished. What are his strengths and what are his weaknesses?  We'll start with what I think he has done well:

1.  He implemented a vision for coaching and player development across all levels of the organization.  It's a vision I completely agree with although the results so far are mixed.  Many players have clearly benefitted but how far up players can be coached is still a debatable subject.  IMO, it's clearly a better approach than Sabean's benign neglect where prospects either sank or swam on their own and the minor league system was for weeding out the weak as opposed to actively trying to improve them.

2.  Scouting and Drafting is also a bit of a mixed bag but overall the farm system, while not elite, is in much better shape than 5 years ago and this year's cohort of international prospect in the DSL is particularly encouraging, albeit not for the near term.  

3.  FZ has done a good job of finding "hidden gems" in minor league free agency and lower level trades.  YtY, LMWJ and Thairo Estrada stand out as examples.  I would point out, however, that Brian Sabean was not too shabby at finding undervalued players like Gregor Blanco, Joaquin Arias and Andres Torres.  

4.  FZ has stayed out of "albatross" contracts.  The organization had many underperforming players this season but only 1 of those(Haniger) is signed beyond next season.  The team is way under the CBT threshold, has zero long term under-performing investments and an improving farm system.  On paper that's great place to be.  The problem for FZ is this years free agent market is extremely top heavy with very limited opportunity for addressing the biggest need which is acquiring at least 2 middle of the order bats.  

So where does FZ come up short?  

1.  While the overall farm system is improved, 2 of the first 3 first round draft picks appear to be busts and the 4'th(Crawford) is not looking great so far.  That has delayed establishing an elite homegrown core that The Churn requires to be successful.  

2.  While the "hidden gems" are rewarding to see and root for, FZ has failed to pull off any "visionary", balance-of-power altering trades that takes the overall talent to the next level.  Not saying those kinds of trades are easy to make but they are usually necessary in any rebuild or organization turnaround.

3.  I am not convinced that FZ fully understands talent evaluation beyond the studying the statistical spreadsheets which honestly, most of us amateurs here can do just as well if we understand the basics of sabermetric analysis.  To my eye, FZ is still stuck back in the Moneyball era where every armchair GM identified the same players as "undervalued" from looking at OPS and BABIP's.

Based on his most recent comments, FZ sounds just as confused about the direction he wants to take as the fans.  He has a system which he believes in and has gotten good at but it has obviously not produced the results he expected.  While he said a few things that are right about needing to make some longer term commitments to players and get younger and more athletic, we've heard that from him in the past.  It's just that it's a whole lot less clear how he finds those players in this particular offseason.  I mean, if he couldn't do it last offseason(and he did try), how on Earth is he going to do it this offseason?

We'll dig deeper into Hot Stove strategy after the season ends but I do see a narrow window of opportunity here.  The market for pitchers is much stronger than for hitters.  The Giants have a relative surplus of young pitching.  I think there may be opportunity to sign a couple of ace or near-ace level pitchers in free agency enabling FZ to trade younger pitching for younger hitting.  It's a very small eye of the needle to thread.  Unfortunately his comments the past few days do not inspire confidence that he has the trading savvy to pull it off deals of that magnitude and it may be time to replace him with someone who does.