DALLAS — When the San Francisco Giants’ executive board met to diagnose what went wrong this past season, for the most part, they did not find fault in the players they chose to sign. The mistake or misfortune, avoidable or not, was when they signed them.
They waited out the market under former president Farhan Zaidi. They were already catching pop-ups in the Arizona sun when they signed designated hitter Jorge Soler. Before the equipment trucks left Scottsdale Stadium at the end of spring training, they had signed Matt Chapman and Blake Snell, too. In retrospect, especially under a new manager settling in with a new club, it was asking too much to expect the team to fall into place. Bob Melvin would’ve had equal success getting a Jell-O mold to set on a sidewalk in June.
So even before the Giants’ ownership group fired Zaidi and replaced him with Buster Posey, they were resolved to conduct their offseason business at a different pace. They would not wait out the market. They would not take a reactive posture. They would identify their most pressing needs and the free agents who represented the best fits, meet them where they stood, and speak in direct language.
They took that approach with shortstop Willy Adames. They met him where he stood. And it might have saved them millions.
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The Giants formally announced their seven-year, $182 million contract with Adames on Tuesday. The 29-year-old shortstop will be formally introduced Thursday in San Francisco. And Posey, now free to comment on the first major transaction of his tenure as the Giants’ chief baseball architect, offered a window into the club’s rare successful pursuit of one of the game’s premier players on the free-agent market.
The negotiations were not unlike how Posey put down signs for his pitchers: Direct and with conviction.
“Just being authentic,” Posey said from his suite at the Hilton Anatole. “And letting him know that, ‘Hey, man, if you’re serious about your belief in San Francisco, your belief in what we want to do, then we don’t need to wait. We’ll meet you at a place that you feel is representative of your value.’ And he honored that.
“I feel like it was mutual. We went to a place that felt like represented what he had accomplished in his career and what he had earned to be rewarded on the open market. It was just trying to establish trust and honesty. It’s, ‘If we’re going to say that we value you, and you’re going to say that you value us, then let’s both show that.’”
Adames is a good culture fit as well as a good positional fit. (Dylan Buell / Getty Images)
The Giants and Adames agreed to terms one day before news broke that the New York Mets had signed outfielder Juan Soto to a 15-year, $765 contract that obliterated the record for the richest guaranteed deal in professional sports history. The fallout of the landmark Soto deal started to become apparent on Tuesday when the New York Yankees, with hundreds of millions earmarked for Soto burning a hole in their pinstriped pockets, reportedly agreed to an eight-year, $218 million contract with Max Fried — terms that blew away industry estimates and will make Fried the highest-paid left-handed pitcher in major-league history.
It’s reductive to assume that every also-ran in the Soto sweepstakes would’ve pivoted to Adames. But it stood to reason that there would’ve been more action on Adames once he waited for one enormous domino to fall. So the Giants, for all their recent trouble attracting free agents at the top of their class, didn’t only score a win by convincing Adames to enroll. They even convinced him that it’d be worth it to apply for early admission.
“He showed an interest early on that he believed in the vision of what we’re trying to do here,” Posey said. “We’re just thrilled that we got the best shortstop on the market, great defender, great offense, clutch hitter, but most importantly, I’d say, by all accounts … is we got a great person. It’s one of those things that’s hard to measure. It’s pretty sterling, sparkling endorsements that they give this guy. So we’re thrilled that Willy will be a San Francisco Giant.”
It is the richest contract in franchise history. Just 72 hours after agreeing to terms, it’s already looking like a bargain.
Posey, after investing $333 million in Adames and third baseman Matt Chapman, proclaimed that the Giants have “the best left side in the game with those two.”
Those are the kinds of words that can return with tucked napkins and remoulade sauce. Not much time has passed since Zaidi was forced to eat last season’s trade-deadline pronouncement that the Giants had “the best rotation in baseball.” Neither Posey nor Zaidi have a habit of making brash or reckless statements. At least in Zaidi’s case, there was no real danger in attempting to speak superlatives into existence. If the Giants didn’t have the best second-half rotation in baseball, then he’d be out of a job anyway. (They weren’t and he was.)
For Posey, who is just beginning his tenure, the “best left side in the game” is more than an expression of confidence. It reflects an on-the-sleeve belief that the Giants have committed to two players who represent the culture and credibility that they are driven to establish.
During negotiations, Posey asked Melvin for his opinion on Adames. The manager’s first and strongest impression: “Well Buster, it just looks like he loves to play baseball. There’s a joy to playing the game”
“That type of stuff matters,” said Posey, noting that Adames played in 161 games last season while leading the Milwaukee Brewers to the NL Central title. “Obviously, he’s a very talented player, but I think (it’s also) his willingness to buy into the grit mentality that we want to be. We want to be a team full of guys like Matt Chapman: a guy that’s going to be on the field and he’s going to give it everything he’s got. Willy is another guy. When you have leaders like that, when you have veterans like that, it’s much easier for the younger players that walk into the clubhouse, whether it’s first- year, second, third year, or maybe they’re a minor leaguer. They look at these guys like, ‘This is the way to go about your business. And I just believe that long term, those players have an impact that we’ll never be able to really know how important it is.’ I see Willy as one of those guys.”
“This is who we wanted to get,” Posey continued. “It’s been really fun to hear the excitement from players, from the coaching staff, and the feedback we’ve gotten from people that know him. I think our fans are gonna really latch on to the way the guy plays the game.
“I mean, we need that. We need a little energy. We need a little bit of edge. And I think he’ll bring that.”
Posey expressed confidence that Adames’ offensive skills would work in San Francisco’s unique hitting environment. Posey is just as confident that the significant wobble in Adames’ defensive metrics do not indicate a shortstop in decline. Adames committed 15 of his 20 errors on Milwaukee’s new hybrid turf and six of them came in a nine-game span in August.
“What we saw were some throwing errors last year, and one way or another, that can be cleaned up,” Posey said. “There was never anything glaring that we saw where, like, ‘Aahh.’ We believe full argument, he’s a great defender.”
Adames will receive a full no-trade clause and a $22 million signing bonus. He’ll get $10 million salaries in each of the first two years and $28 million in each of the final five years, according to Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle. When calculating the Giants’ payroll for competitive balance tax purposes, Adames’ annual number will be $26 million.
After folding in the Adames contract, on a cash basis, their current projected payroll of roughly $175 million would give them a bit more than $30 million to budget before they’d approach their level of spending from this past season. Even if the plan remains to reduce their year-over-year spending, they still figure to have enough left to augment their rotation and perhaps add another veteran bat. Posey could go the Brian Sabean route and look for value on the extreme edge of the age curve, with name players like right-hander Justin Verlander and first baseman Paul Goldschmidt among the potential targets.
But it’s exceedingly plain that signing Corbin Burnes would require a reassessment in their spending. The former Cy Young Award winner has been the Giants’ top pitching target but the Fried contract added rocket fuel to an already crackling and competitive market. It’s now likely that Burnes will receive more than $250 million, and while it’s hazardous to attempt to read the tea leaves of a first-year baseball executive, Posey’s comments on Tuesday left the impression that the Giants will be forced to lower their sights.
“We talked about it a lot yesterday,” Posey said. “We do feel good about our young pitching and it might be just, ‘Hey, we’re giving it to these guys.’ That’s a real possibility. We will continue to see if there’s a fit that makes sense for us.”
Posey said his group also spent considerable time revisiting the draft picks that the Giants would forfeit if they sign another qualified free agent. They already lose their second- and fifth-round picks for signing Adames. They’d lose their third- and sixth-round picks for signing Burnes. (They received no luck in Tuesday’s draft lottery, either, while falling to 13th from the ninth position based solely on their 80-82 record.)
The ideal pitching addition would require Posey to employ his best recruiting skills. He spoke at length about Roki Sasaki for the first time, saying that it would be “a dream for us to get this guy.”
“Just tremendous upside,” Posey said of the electric right-hander, who will be limited to signing a minor-league contract because he has yet to turn 25. “Not too many arms in the world like his, you know? He’s a tremendous talent. He’s 23 years old. It’s fun to dream on. It’s fun to think about him in Oracle Park and pitching deep into a game late in the year, the place rocking. It’d be over the moon to add a guy like him.”
Sasaki will wait to sign until Jan. 15 when teams receive refreshed amounts in their international bonus pool. The Giants have the least to spend ($5.15 million) because they forfeited money from the pool when they signed Snell and Chapman. But Sasaki’s lead agent at Wasserman, Joel Wolfe, said on Tuesday that the differences between teams’ bonus offers will be negligible in the broader context and are not expected to impact Sasaki’s choice. Teams can also make trades to acquire more bonus pool money.
Wolfe pushed back on rumors that the Los Angeles Dodgers are all but guaranteed to land Sasaki, citing the “tough go of it” the young right-hander has had with a critical Japanese press over his desire to be posted while speculating that a small- or mid-market team “might be more beneficial for him as a soft landing.” Wolfe said Sasaki has inquired about everything from weather to pitching development while watching the experience of other Japanese players in the major leagues. If those are among his criteria, then it’s hard to imagine his picking the Giants over a team like the San Diego Padres, who win on climate and can offer a master-and-apprentice relationship with pitcher Yu Darvish.
But with the successful pursuit of Adames, the Giants and Posey have something now that the organization didn’t have when they attempted to sign Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Kodai Senga and Seiya Suzuki:
Momentum. The confidence that they have a viable vision to sell. And the proof of concept that they have a powerful and persuasive presence doing the selling.
“The best thing I could sell was my authenticity and how I feel about San Francisco and the Bay Area,” Posey said of his negotiations with Adames, who incidentally, is a fellow CAA client. “Hopefully it means something to these guys. How much it means, I don’t know. Myself and my wife grew up in Georgia and this is our home now. So I hope that that means something to them, to know how I feel about the area and how I feel about the community, and what baseball means to San Francisco, I think is different than other cities that have major league baseball teams.
“Ultimately, I think that’s the best you can do: just be real in how you feel about the possibility in front of them.”
(Top photo of Adames: Katie Stratman / USA Today)
