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Buster Posey wants it to be 2010 again and so do you. But I have bad news …

Buster Posey addressed the media Tuesday, but stuck mostly to talking baseball. Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images.

There was a fear-slash-conspiracy-theory that when Buster Posey was hired as the Giants’ President of Baseball Operations, he was going to be an owner in an executive’s clothing. The idea was that he was hired to be the friendly face delivering news like “the Giants aren’t looking to spend a lot of money.” Posey was on board with an agenda of austerity, as a lot of minority owners typically might be, but he was going to make everyone feel OK about it. He was going to do this with intelligence and charisma, and Giants fans were going to be powerless against his championship charm. And if it doesn’t work out, what, are they going to yell at Buster Posey?

It was a quaint fear, in retrospect. Posey is not here to make the medicine go down easier. He is not here for fan service. He rarely speaks to reporters, and he is not here to be a cheerleader. He is here to focus on baseball and only baseball and, also, he wants to focus on baseball. He was very clear about this on Tuesday. Baseball, baseball, baseball. Anyone got questions about baseball?

Here’s the state of the baseball: Bryce Eldridge is in the middle of an incredible rookie season. Jung Hoo Lee is hitting .331. Luis Arraez has become an immediate favorite in the clubhouse and the Bay Area. Logan Webb is pitching as well as ever. Casey Schmitt has become an everyday player, if not a future All-Star.

Also, the Giants are 14 games under .500 and their fans are furious at them.

You can spot the tiny incongruity between the previous two paragraphs. There should be so much for Giants fans to celebrate this season. Yet they’re as incandescently angry as they’ve ever been, both at the quality of the team and the quality of the organizational response to a controversy that isn’t going away. It’s not uncommon to hear boos for the hometown nine at Oracle Park now, a far cry from the years when Hunter Pence could get a standing ovation for switching from left field to right.

This was the state of Giants baseball before Posey decided to speak to reporters. He looked at this situation and must have said, “alright. Let’s not panic. All we need to do is ignore everything and talk about the trade deadline.”

Nobody was expecting Posey to announce that all of the pitchers involved in the events of the team’s Pride Night earlier this month have been designated for assignment. They were just expecting something. Something that started off respectfully and and never veered from that path. Something that honestly reckoned with the very real, very complicated emotions people are feeling, not just “I understand some fans are upset and frustrated” (an actual quote!). Something that started off like …

“When I was a player, it was important for me …”

“One thing I learned talking with people from all over the Bay Area over the last couple decades is that …”

“My experiences with Pride Night over the years have …”

There were so many ways to do it without tossing more fuel on the fire. There were so many ways to do it without upsetting the people who were waiting to be upset. There were ways to acknowledge the hurt feelings that so many Giants fans have expressed over the past two weeks, while also acknowledging that a lot of the hurt came from the inadequate organizational response. There were ways to do this without dragging the players back into it. Heck, there were ways to do it without mentioning them at all.

Instead: baseball. Head down, eyes on the prize. It wasn’t just disappointing or harmful. It was baffling. It was the response that nobody asked for and nobody could possibly have expected to work. What happened?

I have a theory. Posey wasn’t hired to be the mask for an operation that’s more interested in real estate than baseball now. He was hired to bring 2010, 2012 and 2014 back. Whatever regional cachet he could offer would help everything from a PR perspective, of course, but he was hired for the reasons the Giants explicitly gave: He was a human fount of institutional learning, ready to spread the Gospel of Bochy and mold the organization back into shape. He knew what winning looked like. It was a part of the message behind moving the championship trophies back into a place of prominence. He knew the mindset.

Back when Posey was playing, the Giants visited the White House three times. There weren’t any controversies (well, maybe one) from those trips. He knows for a fact that not everybody agreed with the politics of the administration at the time, but everyone just put their heads down and kept it about the baseball.

It was possible to do that back then! Posey thought that same playbook would work, especially since Tuesday was a full 11 days since the controversy started.

The 2010s are gone, man. They’re not coming back. In the 2020s, a lot of the people who buy Giants tickets and merchandise are scared. They’re scared as hell. Angry, perhaps, but scared. And when they went to watch a team that was supposed to be an escape from all that — on a day that was supposed to celebrate them — they were reminded of it. They’re now using their collective voice to ask for something more than they’ve been given, and Posey delivered quick thoughts about the upcoming draft.

A few hours after Buster Posey addressed the media Tuesday, protestors made their way to the Giants-Athletics game in San Francisco. (Sergio Estrada / Imagn Images)

It was yet another sign that the Giants are hopelessly behind the times, an organization that tried to go back to the future but ended up fossilized instead. The manager is even out here quoting movies from 2010 like they’re still relevant, which is a little on the nose.

Posey was hired to bring the Giants back to a championship era, and by gum, there are roughly 3,000 games left this season, so he still has time to get them there. But whenever the Giants do get there, it’s going to be in the context of the times they’re in. If it’s too far in the future, maybe they’ll win with the help of revolutionary nanotechnology, or by paying their players in potable water. Regardless, it’ll be in a way that makes sense for the Giants organization of that era.

And if the Giants going to win in the 2020s, they’ll have to join us here. Everyone’s pissed off all the time at everything, and a lot of them are right to be. Posey is looking around at a franchise on fire and wondering what happened? Yeah, well, everyone is sort of wondering that. And in the meantime, something more than the bare minimum from anyone at the top would help us all arrive at the answer sooner.

Jun 24, 2026

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