The Padres will have a Giant-sized problem to overcome if Buster Posey the baseball ops president matches Buster Posey the ballplayer.
Posey was the rare catcher who could really hit. He solved tougher pitchers, also overcoming a home park that played bigger than Yosemite.
The 2010 Padres wished Posey had stuck with football or basketball and that former Padres executive John Barr of the Giants hadn’t drafted him out of Florida State, where he excelled at catcher, closer and shortstop.
In that rookie-of-the-year season that helped initiate San Francisco’s best baseball era, Posey rocked the Padres with key hits in several games. He homered and caught a shutout in a decisive 162nd game, helping the Giants edge the Padres for the National League West title.
A few weeks later, he prevented A.J. Preller from winning a championship.
Preller was a Texas Rangers executive at the time, and his team might have won it all had Posey not hit .300 with a home run against the Rangers in that year’s World Series.
That was then, this is now, and for now, it feels like the roles have reversed.
Posey is a rookie again, having assumed the president of baseball operations role last September 30th. But it’s the Padres who are acting like bullies.
Preller’s Padres were 4-0 against Posey’s Giants entering Wednesday’s game, the third of four played in San Francisco.
It’s too soon to know if Posey’s aptitude as a team-builder will come close to his greatness as a ballplayer who deserves election into Cooperstown when he goes onto the ballot in 2027.
For now, the advantage goes to Preller.
Since outgrowing his Dennis the Menace phase, the obsessive Preller has become one of the sport’s better team-builders.
The Padres’ president of baseball operations and his fellow scouts and analysts have been hitting for a very high batting average since the 2020-21 offseason, particularly in their decisions involving starting pitchers (Blake Snell, Yu Darvish, Joe Musgrove, Seth Lugo, Michael Wacha, Michael King, Dylan Cease, Martin Perez and Nick Pivetta), relievers (closers Robert Suarez, Josh Hader and Tanner Scott, swingman Nick Martinez, Jason Adam and Jeremiah Estrada) and teenage amateurs either drafted highly (Jackson Merrill, CJ Abrams, MacKenzie Gore and James Wood) or paid top dollar in the international market (Leo De Vries).
As a player, Posey saw a lot of mediocrity from the Padres teams.
As a team president, Posey can expect to see well-paid Padres teams that are attempting to leverage younger stars Fernando Tatis Jr., 26, and Merrill, 22, into the franchise’s first World Series winner.
Winning the franchise’s fourth wild card in six years is the team’s most realistic path to the postseason, and the Padres have fared well against fellow wild-card candidates.
San Diego went 6-1 against the Braves, widening the gap between the teams in the wild-card race.
The Padres’ success against the Giants, who entered Wednesday 10 games above .500 against teams not from San Diego, is in part due to stellar pitching and partly because the Giants lack any hitter who is as good as Posey was in his prime.
The Giants scored just nine runs in their first four games against the Padres this season. They batted .176. Their strikeouts were more than triple their walks.
A key piece to the Giants-Padres rivalry is the two teams’ decision-making in regards to center fielder Jung Hoo Lee two offseasons ago, when Posey was in his third year as a Giants assistant to president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi.
The former Korean league star was linked to both the Padres and Giants before San Francisco signed him to a six-year, $113-million contract in December 2023.
Preller had ticketed Merrill for center field instead. Merrill had a great rookie season last year, while Lee looked overmatched before suffering a season-ending shoulder injury crashing into a wall.
Lee, 26, has overcome that setback to post a good start to this season. He looks like he might become a pretty good player. Against the Padres, though, he was 3-for-18 with no walks or extra-base hits entering Wednesday, ing a long list of key hitters Padres pitchers have stifled this year.
Posey showed on Wednesday that he’s willing to shake up his team during the season. The Giants made a flurry of moves, designating first baseman LaMonte Wade (a former teammate of Posey’s) for assignment and g Dom Smith to replace him, designating backup catcher Sam Huff for assignment, sending down infielder Christian Koss and calling up both outfielder Daniel Johnson and catcher Andrew Knizer.
The player to keep an eye on is prospect Bryce Eldridge, 20, who was promoted to Triple-A Sacramento as part of Posey’s sweeping changes. Eldridge is a left-handed-hitting slugger who could provide an enormous lift if he pans out as hoped.
Can Posey’s first Giants team reach the playoffs?
A turnaround may be needed from Willy Adames, Posey’s splashy offseason acquisition at shortstop.
The 29-year-old Adames was allowed to leave by the low-budget but also consistently smart Brewers. He has so far returned below-average defense and subpar offense on the seven-year, $182-million contract.
As a player, Posey got the better of the Padres at a high rate. He batted .310 with 11 home runs, 23 doubles and 48 RBIs in 73 career games at Petco Park.
Preller is making life tougher on Posey the executive than most Padres teams did against Posey the player.
