Giants Knew They Couldn’t Compete With Dodgers Last Few Years, Says Fired GM
The Los Angeles Dodgers’ bitter rival up north, the San Francisco Giants, have always been a major competitor.
Both franchises have eight World Series championships — although five of the eight for San Francisco came before 1954 — and both have shared many players, managers, and even moved from New York to California in the same year (1958).
A familiar face both in northern and southern California is Farhan Zaidi.
Zaidi, an MIT graduate with a Ph.D from University of California Berkeley, was once the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. After a decade working for the Oakland Athletics, Zaidi joined the Dodger front office in 2014 for four successful seasons and two World Series appearances.
Since 2019, he has served as the president of baseball operations for the Giants, was named MLB and Baseball America’s 2021 Executive of the Year, and even clinched the NL West after just three seasons with the team.
In late September, Zaidi was dismissed from his role despite a guaranteed year left on his contract, as San Francisco missed the playoffs for a third year in a row.
On the Foul Territory podcast last month, Zaidi revealed the tribulations that came with taking over a struggling roster.
“When I came to the Giants, the team had been 50 games under .500 in the two years before I arrived, it was an aging roster, we had a big payroll, didn’t have a great farm system, and we weren’t going to rebuild. That’s just not something you do in San Francisco. So the question was, ‘How do we compete as quickly as possible?’ One of the things I would say at the time was, ‘We can’t out-Dodger the Dodgers.’ They’ve got this head start on us but maybe we can build a talent base to compete with them,” Zaidi said.
“Look, you’ve got 29 other organizations – not just the Giants – that have to look at the Dodgers as the standard for what they’ve been able to do. That’s not to say other teams can’t compete, can’t knock them out of the playoffs – which we’ve seen quite a few times in the last few years – but it’s a big-market team, they spend, they’re smart, they do great with free agents and I do think L.A., you have an advantage there. It’s somewhere guys want to play, and they use that advantage to the maximum when they’re able to bring star players in.”
During Zaidi’s tenure in Los Angeles, he was responsible for making trades to bring in current Dodgers such as Austin Barnes and Kiké Hernández, as well as drafting Gavin Lux, Will Smith, and the recently departed Walker Buehler.
Photo Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
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