Buster Posey's trade deadline burden? Telling Giants fans to wait till next year

San Francisco Chronicle​

5 days ago

Buster Posey appeared on the Zoom camera, his chin heavy with gray stubble, looking like any other worn out baseball executive at the trade deadline.
The man who directed the San Francisco Giants from behind the plate for a decade is finding out just how difficult it is to direct the team from behind a desk.
'It's a really rough stretch,' Posey said. 'We wish we weren't in this spot, that we weren't trading away and that we were adding.'
Before his first trade deadline as the president of baseball operations, Posey had plenty of reason to think he'd be a buyer. Heck, he was a buyer just a little over six weeks ago when he made the biggest trade of the season, landing Rafael Devers while his team was just a game out of the NL West division lead.
But the Giants forced Posey's hand, plummeting in the standings and playing some of the most un-Posey-like baseball imaginable, making mental errors, lacking composure, unable to come through in the clutch. Though Posey had appeared on ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball just four days earlier expressing optimism about his team, the Giants' collapse against the lowly Pirates and the overall disastrous homestand made the directional decision obvious.
'I don't know if there was like an 'a-ha' moment when we said, 'All right, we've got to do this,'' Posey said. 'As poorly as we've played since the All-Star break, we all felt it was the best decision for the organization to try to get some pieces coming back that'll help us in the future.'
The Giants were sellers at Thursday's deadline. After trading away reliever Tyler Rogers the day before, Posey traded closer Camilo Doval and outfielder Mike Yastrzemski right at the 3 p.m. deadline. In return, the Giants acquired a total of eight players, seven of them prospects.
Posey has always been a pragmatic person and this was the pragmatic move. It wasn't a total dismantling. He kept the core of the team together while unloading two older players who will be free agents after this season in Rogers and Yastrzemski, and a talented but erratic closer in Doval.
The rest of the season will be devoted to taking a look at some younger players and — most importantly — trying to play better baseball.
'I think regardless of where you are and in the standings or how poorly you've played, you're just hoping to see that there are tiny, little incremental gains daily, whether that's in your work leading up to the game or whether that's in the game itself,' Posey said.
Clearly something is missing with the Giants. And the man who was so thorough in his preparation before every game and so singularly focused on every task he faced seems baffled by what he's been seeing.
'At the beginning of the year, we harped on doing the little things,' Posey said. 'It was clean baseball, and we've kind of taken a 180. We've somehow got to recapture that form, that style of baseball that we had at the beginning of the season.'
In June, Posey did what players and fans have always longed for: he took a big swing for Devers to help his contending team. Instead of giving the Giants a boost, the team went in the opposite direction.
'I can't explain it,' Posey said.
A tenet of sports is that great players have a hard time coaching because they don't understand why others can't perform to their level. Perhaps that also holds true for great players moving into the front office. If Posey could put together a roster of Poseys, his problems might be solved.
Posey's team has a third of the season left to try to right themselves and — at the very least — set the tone for next season. When asked if he thinks the team can contend in 2026, the questioner hadn't even finished asking before Posey interrupted to say, 'Yes.'
But there's a lot of work to do. Posey mentioned manager Bob Melvin a couple of times, including saying, 'We've got confidence in Bob and his staff.'
Gulp.
'I had the conversation with Bob after the Rogers trade, and said, from my end, the expectation is for us to go out and we're going to play hard.' Posey said. 'We're going to play hard the rest of the way. The expectation is we need to play better.'
With such an historic collapse, and such terrible aesthetics, everyone and everything has to be looked at, including the coaching staff. The team has exhibited horrendous fundamentals, which speaks to players' preparation throughout the minor leagues and in spring training. Devers is learning to play first base on the fly, daily embodying the famous 'Moneyball' quote about playing first, attributed to A's coach Ron Washington: 'It's incredibly hard.' Some players are struggling with the pressure of the game.
This collapse may serve Posey and his staff better than a pursuit of a third wild card and a near miss or quick bounce out of the playoffs. There are hard truths to be learned.
One may be that it is easier to squat behind the plate than sit in the big office.