Shohei Ohtani turned down Giants $700M offer. Buster Posey reflects on teams free-agent slu

June 26, 2024

The Athletic has live coverage of Shohei Ohtani’s first Dodgers press conference

Buster Posey is learning how to draw parallels.

He is still figuring out his transition from the San Francisco Giants’ franchise catcher to member of its ownership group. He will always think about competition in terms of what happens between the foul lines, not on balance sheets. But the more time Posey invests as a member of the Giants’ executive board under chairman Greg Johnson, the easier the analogies from his playing days form in his mind.

And as Posey reflected on the Giants’ unsuccessful pursuit of Shohei Ohtani, coming on the heels of their unsuccessful pursuit of Aaron Judge and Carlos Correa and Bryce Harper, and heck, go back to Posey’s face-to-face efforts to woo Jon Lester, the frustration begins to feel so familiar to what he’d experience during a tough stretch at the plate. A baseball player always expresses himself easiest in baseball terms.

“Unfortunately, we’re in a bit of a free-agent slump,” Posey said. “But I believe it can turn around.”

Buster Posey may be retired but he still has a player’s competitive spirit. (Kyle Terada / USA Today)

The Giants took their biggest swing on Ohtani. They did not hesitate to authorize offering him the exact terms — an almost totally deferred 10-year, $700 million contract — that he accepted from the Los Angeles Dodgers, as detailed by Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi in a conference call with reporters on Tuesday. They did not offer one penny less than what their archrivals did. It was also made clear to them: it wouldn’t have mattered if they offered a penny more. Or several million more.

Until Tuesday, Giants officials had been silent following the news on Saturday that Ohtani had agreed to terms with the Dodgers on a mind-bending, record-setting contract. The deal was pending a physical and it hadn’t been announced by the team. Once those formalities were out of the way, Zaidi arranged a conference call with reporters to comment on the contract and deliver a play-by-play on the Giants’ failed pursuit.

Damage control? Sure. A weary “we tried” narrative to present to their fans? Of course. But transparency doesn’t have to mean manipulation. And Zaidi said he wanted to be as transparent as possible: from ownership on down, the Giants met Ohtani’s every ask, upped their offer three times, and sought to make every positive impression.

“Every financial target or request that was made from their camp was met and was met pretty quickly,” Zaidi said. “But this is what free agency is: It comes down to a choice for the player. And when you’re talking about a generational player, he’s going to have great choices and probably check just about every box he’s looking for.”

So the question must be asked: Whether it’s Ohtani or Judge or Harper, why do none of these generational players want to go to San Francisco?

It’s a question that Posey, the Giants’ own generational star, is asking himself.

In a phone interview with The Athletic on Tuesday, Posey spoke candidly about his personal message to Ohtani during their meeting at Oracle Park on Dec. 2, his concerns that free-agent pursuits have been impacted by negative perceptions about the Bay Area, and his confidence that there are brighter days ahead for both the franchise and the region.

“I just wanted him to understand my level of love for the San Francisco Giants and city of San Francisco and for him to understand how much I’ve come to appreciate the history here and wanting him to be a part of that history going forward,” Posey said of the Giants’ intimate, two-hour meeting with Ohtani, which also included Zaidi, Johnson, and manager Bob Melvin. “It was such a unique opportunity. I just feel that him coming to the Giants could have been transformative, obviously for the baseball team but it also would’ve given the city a boost that we’ve all been looking for.

“That was the pitch: ‘Look, you’ve got an opportunity to come here and do something special that’s going to impact not only people during your tenure but potentially for years and years to come even after you’re done playing.’ And I meant it. I fully believed it.”

Posey said that it was a matter of hours into the free-agency period in November before he was on the phone with Ohtani’s agent, Nez Balelo, the Creative Arts Agency’s co-head of baseball representation. Posey, a former CAA client, was adamant in their conversation: Hey Nez, I want us to get him first. I want you to understand how important this is to us and how serious we are. We’ve got the backing from everybody in the organization.

“I just wanted the best chance we could possibly have and to push as hard as we possibly could to try to have Shohei be a San Francisco Giant,” Posey said.

Could the Giants have done anything more?

“I don’t think so,” Posey said. “I really don’t. I’ve thought about it since the news came out. I really don’t think so. It’s different but similar to playing the game: I always wanted to feel when you’re done, win or lose, that you put it out there. I really feel like we did.

“I also gave this analogy to somebody: Throughout my career, I would’ve rather had three broken-bat hits in a game than three lineouts at somebody. For people to say, ‘Well, you did everything you could. You hit the ball on the nose.’ It’s like, yeah, but ultimately you want results. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the result and so, you know, we’ll keep pushing.”

This wasn’t Posey’s first attempt at convincing Ohtani. Posey was a 30-year-old catcher coming off a season in which he hit .320 when Ohtani met with seven finalists before signing with the Los Angeles Angels in the winter of 2017. Ohtani spoke of Posey’s “great aura” in that meeting. But the Giants were also coming off a 98-loss season. And no amount of spiritual glow could make up for the fact that the designated hitter role hadn’t yet come to the National League. Ohtani, with his two-way ambition to hit and pitch, was bound for an American League franchise.

This time, the Giants sensed that they would have to overcome a different impediment: Ohtani’s comfort level in Southern California. It came up as a potential issue in their background work. And it came up again during their meeting.

“It did seem like geography mattered,” Zaidi said. “It wasn’t an absolute must or a deal breaker, obviously, given the pool of teams that were interested, but we did sense there was a preference to stay in Southern California and we knew that would be a challenge for us.

“We just talked about the organization, the history, our philosophy, our plan, our ballpark, hitting in our ballpark,” Zaidi continued. “We tried to address what we thought might be concerns, either things we sensed might be concerns or things that they had explicitly brought up to address.”

They talked about how their ballpark’s reputation for being hitter-unfriendly was only true to a minimal extent for someone with Ohtani’s launch angle and exit velocities. They even mentioned how the park was playing livelier after the 2020 pandemic season, when black cloth installed to block the right field archways helped to mitigate winds that knock down high drives or push them out to center — a factor that they’d previously downplayed in their public comments.

This was their strongest pitch to Ohtani: He could make a bigger impact in San Francisco than anywhere else. And not just to revitalize a pro baseball franchise.

“We have a legacy of great, great, players — some of the greatest players in the game, from (Willie) Mays to (Willie) McCovey to Buster and the generation that won the World Series to (Barry) Bonds, and we just felt he could be the next in that line,” Zaidi said. “He’s a real student of history and thought that might be appealing. We made the pretty strong case that we would have easily made the playoffs (this past season) with a player of his caliber. And we expected he could be that kind of a difference maker for us.

“We talked about the city and the region in general — the chance to come to the Bay Area as a superstar and capture the imagination and excitement of the fans in this area. In our view, it was as impactful an opportunity as he might have had anywhere. So that was the pitch.”

Here’s the thorniest part of that pitch: The Bay Area, at least as some perceive it, is damaged goods.

And that is the part of this process that Posey said bothers him the most.

“Something I think is noteworthy, something that unfortunately keeps popping up from players and even the players’ wives is there’s a bit of an uneasiness with the city itself, as far as the state of the city, with crime, with drugs,” Posey said. “Whether that’s all completely fair or not, perception is reality. It’s a frustrating cycle, I think, and not just with baseball. Baseball is secondary to life and the important things in life. But as far as a free-agent pursuit goes, I have seen that it does affect things.”

And yes, Posey said, it affected the Ohtani pursuit.

Posey made it clear that Ohtani never said or did anything to express concerns about San Francisco. But within his camp, “there was some reservation with the state of the city right now.” Two offseasons ago, similar reservations were a factor that steered former Hiroshima Carp star outfielder Seiya Suzuki away from the Giants to sign with the Chicago Cubs.

Without painting too broad a brush, the cultural expectations for cleanliness among Japanese players in particular, and perhaps a greater preference for urban living as opposed to renting a 3,500-square-foot house in a leafy suburb like Lafayette or Blackhawk, could make those negative perceptions of San Francisco a significant impediment in the recruitment of those players. It could be a factor the Giants are also working to overcome as they are in the final stages of an aggressive competition with most of the big-market franchises for Orix Buffaloes ace right-hander Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

To that end, Posey, whose family of six moved back to the Bay Area after a year in suburban Atlanta, wanted to send a message:

“We love this area,” Posey said. “Our kids have been raised in this area minus a year in Georgia. This is home for us and we have a deep bond with the Bay Area. I’m not going to pretend I know more than I do about what the turnaround is going to look like, but things sometimes can happen quicker than we think. COVID is a perfect example of that where it affected a lot of things. And I think it can happen in the opposite direction in a positive way as well.”

Perceptions aside, most free-agent pursuits continue to boil down to the almighty dollar, and if the Giants are in a posture where they must overpay to secure the services of top players, so be it. It was reported on Tuesday that they are in agreement with Korean star outfielder Jung Hoo Lee on a six-year, $113 million contract — not including a posting fee of almost $19 million that must be paid to the Kiwoom Heroes — that nearly doubled early contract estimates within the industry. Zaidi declined to comment on Lee, whose deal, which is pending a physical, was first reported by MLB Network’s Jon Heyman and confirmed by The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal.

Perhaps coming to terms with Lee is just the start of what will become a productive winter for the Giants.

“People may read this and say, ‘Sure, they did (their best on Ohtani),'” Posey said. “It’s been well documented that we’ve come up short for a number of years now. But I can’t say enough how happy I am to be a part of a group that is truly pushing as hard as they can and want the city of San Francisco to have a great baseball team. I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in now if it were any other way.

“You look at the run we had winning three titles, and gosh, it was so much homegrown talent, right? It was pieced together with some nice free-agent signings and trade acquisitions. There’s no reason that can’t happen again. But my frustration, the rest of ownership’s frustration, is we want the fans to be excited about coming to the ballpark and having those players where kids come home and say, ‘Mom and dad, I want their jersey.’ Obviously Ohtani would have that to the 100th degree. So it’s tough. I was bummed. I was really bummed. I thought we had a good shot at it. But again, we went at it full bore.

“The biggest thing is there is such a hunger for the group to put a team on the field that our fans are excited about. There’s a lot of different ways to do it but that’s the main goal. That’s where my perspective has shifted a bit from player to the role I’m in now: As a player, my only focus was, ‘How do we win every game?’ That’s still very, very important — the most important. But there’s no doubt we’re in an entertainment business and everyone recognizes the value of having players who are entertaining.

“Not to keep going back to our (World Series) run, but we hit the jackpot because we had players that could win and also players like a Pablo Sandoval who’s got this gigantic personality that fans fell in love with. He’s just one to name. I mean, (Tim) Lincecum. It’s such a unique mesh of personalities and talent. That’s what you’re striving for: to find that group of players that are extremely talented but also have that entertainment factor to go with it.”

Nobody would have been more entertaining than Ohtani in a Giants uniform. Instead, he’ll oppose them while suiting up for their archrivals.

“That’s OK,” Posey said. “Rivalries are good, right? I told Shohei when we met with him, ‘Shohei, even when I was playing, I would wake up in the morning and look at your highlights. I was just intrigued to see what you did on a baseball field.’

“That player can hopefully be celebrated, as long as he’s not doing it against the Giants.”

(Top photo of Shohei Ohtani at Oracle Park in 2021: Cary Edmondson / USA Today)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57lGpqbGllaXxzfJFsZmpqX2Z%2FcLPImqWtq12otbC0xKJkqKCklruqec6fnZ6qXZfCtMDEq2Spp6OaxnA%3D