The San Francisco Giants’ 2024-25 offseason began with so much fresh air and fulfillment.
After several winters of discontent and free-agent frustration at missing out on top targets, they landed the best player available at the position that they had identified as their top priority. They sealed up a franchise-record seven-year, $182 million agreement with shortstop Willy Adames before the Winter Meetings got underway in early December. As soon as their baseball contingent returned home, they had Adames signed, delivered and introduced to San Francisco in a celebratory press conference.
Then a quiet week went by. Then a second and a third. Now baseball’s offseason calendar is lurching into 2025. Pitchers and catchers will be reporting before you know it. And the Giants have made no further improvements to a roster that, even in the most optimistic view, had far more to patch than one hole in the middle of the diamond.
Adames filled a big hole for the Giants, but there are more areas to address. (Lachlan Cunningham / Getty Images)
It hasn’t been for a lack of effort, according to sources familiar with the team’s inner workings. Rival executives have described the Giants’ new baseball operations group under Buster Posey and Zack Minasian as hyperactive in attempting to generate trade dialogue. The Giants made legitimate offers to Houston for outfielder Kyle Tucker and to the Chicago White Sox for starter Garrett Crochet, to the point that they were said to feel a bit uncomfortable with the players they were willing to sacrifice. But top hitting prospect Bryce Eldridge would’ve been a prerequisite to completing either deal, and that was a line the Giants were not willing to cross.
That’s the problem with inheriting a minor league system that has a sneaky amount of talent but only one true headliner prospect: any team dangling a solid-average everyday player or better is going to start by asking for Eldridge — and not likely to move off that position.
It also probably hasn’t helped speed the trade plow that the Giants are operating with a rookie president of baseball operations, Posey, and a first-time GM, Minasian, who are building their reputations with rival executives. Until they prove otherwise — both Posey’s acumen and Minasian’s extensive front-office background indicates that they will do so in time — they will enter trade discussions as a potential mark to be hoodwinked. It’s nothing personal. That’s just how the poker game is played. And it’s led to a few opening offers — no, the Giants aren’t trading Logan Webb — that have amounted to non-starters and time wasters.
After the successful pursuit of Adames, the offseason has presented a series of challenging dead ends for Posey, who inherited a minor league system short on potential impact players to trade along with a soft mandate to reduce payroll from last season’s dissatisfying dalliance over the luxury tax threshold. But Posey is said to be unwilling to treat next season as a reset in an otherwise rigorous National League West. Those familiar with Posey’s thinking describe him as competitive and ambitious, still determined to improve the roster sufficiently to the degree that the Giants will expect to contend in 2025.
What’s unclear at this stage, given the free-agent options off the board and the trades already made, is how Posey can make that happen.
Posey acknowledged when he took the top job in October that he will sip water through a fire hose while learning all the ins and outs of running a baseball operations department. No matter how sound his leadership and vision might be, no matter how earnestly he wants to put a competitive and entertaining team on the field from the get-go, he will have his blind spots and bouts of naiveté. Perhaps the hardest lesson Posey is learning thus far: closing a deal is a lot more complicated than it looks.
After Adames, the cleanest and most direct way to improve the roster would’ve been signing right-hander and former Cy Young Award winner Corbin Burnes, who indicated to a few friends within the game that he had interest in coming to San Francisco before the former Saint Mary’s College ace signed a six-year, $210 million contract with the division-rival Arizona Diamondbacks. Critically, Burnes received an opt-out after the second year of that contract — a concession that might have helped Posey’s predecessor, Farhan Zaidi, close deals with Scott Boras clients like Blake Snell and Carlos Rodón but isn’t the ideal practice for a new president seeking roster continuity.
Stripping away any artificial budget limits, could the Giants have afforded Burnes? Well, sure. But it became clear as early as the GM meetings in November that the Giants would have to bid against themselves if they wanted to sign Burnes to a contract with no escape clause. And with almost $160 million in projected commitments to a payroll that isn’t expected to exceed last year’s total (roughly $206 million on an adjusted cash basis), that would’ve left them with scant resources within the budget to address other areas of the roster.
Any lingering hopes the Giants had for an agreement with Burnes likely vanished the moment news broke at the winter meetings that the New York Yankees had agreed to a whopper of an eight-year, $218 million contract with left-hander Max Fried.
The Giants might have had a built-in advantage when they courted Adames, given that he is a CAA client. Not only was Posey represented by CAA, but the agency’s former head of baseball, Jeff Berry, is now on the Giants’ payroll as a special advisor. The Giants had no such advantage with Burnes, who left CAA for Boras Corp. in 2023. Although Posey’s personal persuasion in September helped to close a $151 million extension with another Boras client, Matt Chapman, it became clear to Posey rather quickly that the rules of personal engagement aren’t quite the same for a player on the open market.
After the Burnes news broke last week, I texted Posey and asked him: What are his roster priorities now, given the names that have come off the board?
“We believe in our young arms and feel like they are in a position to take some big steps forward,” Posey replied. “(We) will continue to look on the offensive side for players that give us a chance to score runs in multiple ways.”
OK, then. How about those remaining options on the offensive side?
Well, the other two top free-agent hitters still on the market, Pete Alonso and Alex Bregman, are also Boras clients. If the Giants signed either player, both qualified free agents, they would sacrifice their third- and fifth-round draft picks next July in addition to the second- and fourth-rounders that they already sacrificed to sign Adames. The Giants were willing to entertain punting picks en masse for the right pair of free agents. But Alonso is not expected to warrant that consideration — the Giants need power but they are also seeking to create a more athletic and dynamic run-scoring environment — and adding Bregman would result in a lot of moving parts around the infield even if he agreed to play second base.
The desire for a more dynamic lineup made Tucker, a hyper-athletic 27-year-old three-time All-Star, an alluring trade target even though he’s entering his final season before free agency. But the Giants didn’t have the prospects beyond Eldridge that the Houston Astros most coveted.
Call it wistful thinking: the prized prospect that allowed the Chicago Cubs to close the four-player deal for Tucker, third baseman Cam Smith, was taken with the 14th pick (first round) out of Florida State last July. The Giants took Smith’s college teammate, outfielder James Tibbs III, one pick ahead of him.
Perhaps it was a longshot to trade for Tucker, but the Giants are in no position to walk past a stone without turning it over. That’s why they went the extra mile in their video presentation to Japanese free agent Roki Sasaki and flew down to Los Angeles for an in-person meeting at the Wasserman Sports offices. The widespread industry expectation is that Sasaki, who must sign a minor league contract with a bonus out of a major league team’s international signing pool because he is under the age of 25, will be one more coup for the all-powerful and star-charged Los Angeles Dodgers.
GO DEEPER
What’s next for Roki Sasaki? Agent provides update on coveted free agent
At least in the Sasaki recruitment, Posey could interface in person with the player. And perhaps that meant something, since Sasaki and agent Joel Wolfe made it clear to clubs that current players could not attend the sessions. No Shohei Ohtani as part of the Dodgers’ contingent. No Yu Darvish as part of the San Diego Padres’ group.
Posey is still the closest thing the Giants have to a star player even though he caught his last game three years ago. He was also an academic All-American at Florida State, which might also come in handy, because Wolfe said that Sasaki gave a “homework assignment” to each team granted an audience. According to Wolfe, Sasaki was driven to know how clubs would equip him with the coaching and analytics tools he will need to reach his greatest potential as a major league pitcher.
Posey’s college major was finance. But getting the most out of a pitcher? That’s his wheelhouse subject. The Giants’ current catcher, reigning NL Gold Glove winner Patrick Bailey, is becoming pretty good at it, too.
Assuming the Giants do not win the recruiting effort to sign Sasaki, there would be one upshot: they would retain their international signing pool funds. Their $5.15 million, which is refreshed on Jan. 15, is tied with the Dodgers for the lowest among major league teams. But they are believed to have agreements in place with three of the top 30 or so international players, including Dominican shortstop Josuar De Jesus Gonzalez, who is a consensus top-5 talent in this year’s class. The Giants are believed to have at least one high-profile commitment in place for the 2026 signing period as well.
When it comes to recruiting star Japanese players, the Giants do not dare to harbor even cautious optimism. They’ve come up short in their pursuits of Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Kodai Senga and Seiya Suzuki — to the point where some in the organization began to question whether they should continue to invest resources and bandwidth in the space. (They will.) Last winter’s Yamamoto pursuit was especially difficult for some in the Giants front office, who were left wondering if they ever had a realistic shot at signing the player.
Instead, Yamamoto became one more star drawn into the Dodgers’ firmament.
Now Snell will join him in the Dodgers rotation. And Burnes will bolster the rotation of another division rival.
The Adames agreement might have been a grand start to the Giants’ offseason, but for an organization with designs on winning behind pitching and defense, the deck of aces in the NL West appears more stacked against them than ever.
Whether it’s the willingness to flex financial muscles or the contents of their player development pipeline or the state of the major league roster, the Giants remain nowhere near the same galaxy as their primary rival. So for now, here is what their top decision makers have: an earnest desire to improve and contend, the desire to keep putting in the work to create trade avenues, and the discipline to keep moving forward while leaving no stone unturned. On any continent.
(Top photo of Posey and Adames at the introductory press conference: Robert Edwards / Imagn Images)
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