Buster Posey scanned far and wide to hire a general manager with a background in scouting and player evaluation. He sought an innovative thinker who also saw the game through a traditional lens, someone who would be in alignment with the Giants’ organizational culture yet also firm in their own convictions.
And Posey, who had no front-office experience when he replaced Farhan Zaidi as the Giants’ president of baseball operations, needed a GM who already knew how to swing a trade or close a deal.
At the end of a month-long process, Posey found the ideal candidate in his own backyard.
Zack Minasian, who has served as the Giants’ pro scouting director since 2019, will be promoted to general manager, a source confirmed. Minasian’s hiring was first mentioned by former major-league manager Bobby Valentine in a since-deleted social media post. USA Today’s Bob Nightengale was first to report that the announcement would be on Friday.
Zack Minasian was the Giants’ pro scouting director, hired by Farhan Zaidi. Has tons of experience in trade negotiations from his time under Doug Melvin in Milwaukee. Minasian and Jeremy Shelley meshed well and found a lot of unpolished gems in other orgs over the past few years. https://t.co/uKMzufDqW5
— Andrew Baggarly (@extrabaggs) October 31, 2024
Apart from hiring a former player, it’s hard to imagine that Posey could have landed on a candidate who better understood the makeup of major leaguers and the clubhouse dynamic that tends to govern winning teams.
Minasian, 41, literally grew up in a major-league clubhouse. His father, also named Zack, managed the Texas Rangers clubhouse for two decades. One of Minasian’s brothers, Perry, is GM of the Los Angeles Angels. Another, Calvin, is the current clubhouse manager for the Atlanta Braves.
For the first time in baseball history, two siblings will occupy major league GM roles.
Zack Minasian has extensive experience managing a pro scouting department. Before Zaidi made him one of his first front-office additions, Minasian worked for 14 seasons in the Milwaukee Brewers organization under Doug Melvin, beginning as a minor-league scouting administrator and rising at age 27 to become the youngest scouting director in the major leagues. The Brewers ended a 26-year playoff drought in 2008 largely through player development but also through key trade acquisitions including CC Sabathia, Zack Greinke, and Josh Hader.
One trade fell through, though. The Brewers had a verbal agreement in 2015 to trade outfielder Carlos Gómez to the New York Mets for budding ace Zack Wheeler and infielder Wilmer Flores. (Yes, this was the infamous non-trade that resulted in Flores shedding tears at Citi Field when he thought he’d been shipped out.) Melvin and his staff went to a steakhouse to celebrate. Then he received a phone call in the back of the room. The Mets didn’t approve something in Gómez’s medical review and scuttled the deal. Minasian slammed his plate so hard on the table that it broke into pieces.
The next day, the Brewers pivoted and sent Gómez to Houston for a trade return that included Hader.
Minasian was replaced as scouting director in Milwaukee after Melvin stepped down and David Stearns, who brought a more data-driven approach, took over as the Brewers’ head of baseball operations. But Minasian impressed during his time with the Giants, who were similarly data-driven under Zaidi. In addition to managing his pro scouting staff, Minasian worked well with assistant GM Jeremy Shelley and vice president of analytics Paul Bien to identify unpolished gems in other organizations.
The hiring of Minasian is the cleanest possible move for Posey, who sketched out a role for himself in which he will lead broadly while elevating people within the organization. With Posey learning all the nuances of running baseball operations, hiring a GM from outside the organization would have involved a lot of onboarding all at once. Minasian will arrive with a minimum of orientation required to learn his own staff as well as the player inventory and the current roster needs.
But the GM search was far from an open-and-shut process. Posey spoke with not quite a dozen candidates over the past four weeks, and in the process, likely gained valuable perspectives on the current state of the game.
But he kept coming back to Minasian, who had the right personality in addition to the front-office skills and baseball sensibility.
Minasian and his brothers, including Perry, have been plotting baseball trades from the time they were kids working for their father in the Rangers clubhouse. They spent just as much time analyzing the game and understanding how players create value.
“They were always asking and prying questions in the early Bill James days,” Valentine told USA Today in a story about the Minasian family in 2021. “We had guys writing up essays on the value of the bunt, steal, home runs, and all of the SABR stuff. They were around guys like (Rangers coaches) Tom House and Tom Robson, who were like mad scientists at the time. They were around a lot of crazy stuff at an early age.”
They wrestled and played Wiffle ball not just with kids their own age but also with big leaguers like Bo Jackson and Jose Canseco. They were like any other clubhouse attendants, sent on an endless number of errands, including a few odd ones. The USA Today story mentions a time when the Minasian brothers were sent to retrieve a goat and tie it to Will Clark’s locker to remind the veteran first baseman that he was the oldest player in the room.
Valentine was managing the Rangers when he hired the elder Zack Minasian in 1988, convincing him to leave behind a packing business in Chicago, and has remained close to the family ever since. But the Minasian boys’ first connection with baseball was through their grandfather, Eddie, who was a longtime friend of former Los Angeles Dodgers manager and Hall of Famer Tommy Lasorda.
Lasorda was “Uncle Tommy” to the Minasian boys, including Zack, the youngest of the four, who was his godson. After the Giants hired the younger Zack in 2019, Lasorda, who relished his role as a chief instigator in the Dodgers-Giants rivalry, would introduce his godson as “Benedict Arnold.”
When Lasorda died in 2020, the younger Zack and his father were among the pallbearers.
(Photo: Brandon Sloter / Image Of Sport / Getty Images)
