The Matt Chapman contract renewal should've been a positive thing for San Francisco Giants fans who have had to watch the most average team in baseball. But after reading the reporting on the who, what, when, why and where, it doesn't seem all that positive for the current front office regime.
I love the large majority of reporting about the Giants. With The Athletic, the San Francisco Chronicle, my old home newspaper The San Jose Mercury News, we have smart reporters covering this baseball team. So when there is a difference in a story, even a small one, it stands out like a sore thumb.
In his September 15 piece on the Matt Chapman contract renewal, The Athletic's Andrew Baggerly dropped a small bomb on Giants fans.
According to sources, the Giants’ executive board led by Buster Posey became so frustrated by the lack of immediate progress between Zaidi and agent Scott Boras after talks began in August that the ownership group took action. Sources said Posey personally dealt with Chapman to hammer out the basic structure of the contract, which includes a full no-trade provision — one of the sticking points that Zaidi had not included in the team’s initial proposal.
On the most recent episode of our podcast about the Giants, Thompson 2 Clark, my co-host Brad Evans and I talked about how while that paragraph doesn't make the President of Baseball Operations, Farhan Zaidi look great, it does show that Buster Posey was beneficial to the process of moving the renewal along. And when Buster Posey is more involved, it usually means good things.
Susan Slusser and John Shea wrote a story on September 17, which was mostly about Zaidi being under the gun by ownership because of the Giants being the most average team of all average teams. But they wrote that Posey's involvement in the Chapman contract was not to the extent that was reported by Baggerly in The Athletic.
Those familiar with the Chapman negotiations said while Posey played a role in the talks, as expected, it was not to the extent described in a story by the Athletic over the weekend and that the structure of the deal was consummated by Zaidi and Scott Boras, Chapman’s agent.
Slusser and Shea also wrote that Zaidi had been hospitalized twice in recent weeks with an undisclosed ailment and continued to work on the deal from the hospital.
Baggerly's piece also suggested that Posey's influence helped cut through Boras interference, which I'm sure Boras himself didn't like reading, especially since it was clear that Chapman wanted to stay in San Francisco. Boras was recently blamed by Jordan Montgomery for not hitting the lottery in his own free agency period before this current season.
Zaidi, as expected, at least publicly is playing the collaboration card. But what does it mean for his future? It recently came out that both he and manager Bob Melvin don't have guarantees past next year. Zaidi is an easy punching bag for fans because of the way in which he adds fringe players to the roster, all while trying to rebuild a farm system that was decimated before he took over.
If ownership is also tired of the coming up in second place in every negotiation for the best players on the market, it makes you wonder if there's a different way to do this. But that in itself could be yet another step back before moving forward because a new baseball ops team means another reset.
