The San Francisco Giants are still without a figurehead at the top of their baseball operations department, and it’s a gig for which Cubs Senior VP Jason McLeod has reportedly interviewed.
As scary as that is for Cubs fans, this has gotta be much, much scarier for Dodgers fans:
Sources: #SFGiants interested in #Dodgers GM Farhan Zaidi for president of baseball operations role. Unclear if the scenario is viable, but this could explain slower pace of Giants search in comparison to #Mets. @MLBNetwork @MLB
— Jon Morosi (@jonmorosi) October 30, 2018
Zaidi, who made his bones with the A’s under Billy Beane and is now the number two man with the Dodgers under Andrew Friedman, is widely considered one of the brightest front office members in all of baseball.
I understand that it would be for a promotion, and the “right” thing for the Dodgers to do would be to let Zaidi (assuming he’s still under contract) leave for the promotion … but this isn’t Theo Epstein going from the Red Sox to the Cubs or Jeff Luhnow going from the Cardinals to the Astros. This would be an organization’s number two going directly to their biggest, fiercest, most hostile rival. Think about the CRITICAL information he’d be taking with him – not only stuff that’s implementable by the Giants, but stuff that’s specific to the Dodgers that the Giants could exploit against the Dodgers. That’s gotta be a horrifying proposition for the Dodgers.
To put it in context: imagine if the Cardinals were about to poach Jed Hoyer to be their President of Baseball Operations. YIKES.
We’ll see if the Giants can make this work, or if they’ll have to go with another option like McLeod. Or maybe they try to get both:
#SFGiants are not yet close to announcing a new president of baseball operations and/or general manager, sources say. Decision could wait until next week, when @MLB GM meetings begin. It remains possible they will hire two top execs. @MLBNetwork
— Jon Morosi (@jonmorosi) October 31, 2018
A Zaidi-McLeod combo front office would be quite a coup, and could set up the big-market, big-money Giants for a tremendous run in the coming years. Fair to wonder whether, whoever comes in, they’ll want to do a mini-rebuild given the aging core, or if they’ll simply try to use their financial weight to strike it big in free agency. Either way, there are definitely possible Cubs-related implications there, so this bears watching closely.