Fixed interest
Even without a GM, Giants could decide to spend big on one of baseball’s best bats
CARLSBAD, San Diego County — Quick quiz: Who was the Giants’ general manager when they signed a 28year-old free agent named Barry Bonds?
Quick answer: It really didn’t matter.
The incoming ownership group, on the verge of purchasing the team from Bob Lurie in December 1992, was going to sign Bonds regardless of who’d be the GM. In fact, the Bonds deal virtually was in place before the team’s sale was made official.
The point is, 26 years later, Larry Baer and friends don’t need a GM or head of baseball operations to convince them it makes sense to pursue Bryce Harper, one of the most attractive free agents in baseball history.
Harper, along with Manny Machado, will be the talk of the general managers’ meetings this week at the Omni La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad. The meetings, a precursor to next month’s winter meetings in Las Vegas, begin in earnest Tuesday and run through Thursday morning.
It’s unusual that the Giants are without a GM at the GM meetings, but that wouldn’t keep them from having serious interest in Harper, the 2015 National League MVP
who hit 184 home runs with a .388 on-base percentage in seven seasons with the Nationals.
The Giants are being represented at the meetings by assistant GM Jeremy Shelley, and Baer is simply a phone call or text away from Harper’s agent, Scott Boras, who wouldn’t surprise anyone in the industry if he got a 10-year contract in the $350 million range. At 26, Harper is two years younger than Bonds when Bonds left Pittsburgh for San Francisco.
The Nationals and Phillies are said to be among teams with serious interest, and the Dodgers could make a run and say farewell to Machado, who was traded from Baltimore in July. Boras isn’t known for signing top clients in a hurry, so the process could take months, and it’s possible he could wait for a Machado signing and then snag a better deal for Harper.
Baer, who’s not at the meetings, is focusing on hiring someone to run baseball operations. It was confirmed the target is Dodgers GM Farhan Zaidi, who has benefited from enormous payrolls in Los Angeles but, while teaming with Andrew Friedman (president of baseball ops) the past four years, has not doled out a nine-figure contract.
The biggest is Clayton Kershaw’s $93 million, which he signed last week. Two years ago, Zaidi and Friedman declined to match the Diamondbacks’ $206.5 million offer to Zack Greinke. Harper’s contract would blow by that, and it’s uncertain how Zaidi or anyone else who gets the job would influence ownership on Harper.
When the Giants pursue an elite free agent, ownership tends to get heavily involved. It was owner Peter Magowan — not Bob Quinn, the GM who was hired days before the Bonds signing — who got the Bonds deal done.
Magowan also was a frontman in the Barry Zito contract, and Baer was present when the Giants met with Shohei Ohtani and Giancarlo Stanton last winter. Ohtani signed with the Angels, and Stanton was traded from the Marlins to the Yankees.
Now here comes Harper, and the Giants are expected to be all in. They have the need. They have the resources. And they have the history.
Plus, the Giants were determined the past year to make moves with the $197 million competitive-balance-tax threshold in mind, a strategy that’s widely believed in the industry to be linked to a Harper pursuit. By staying under the luxury tax this year, their penalties would be minimized if they exceed next year’s threshold of $206 million.
The only way the Giants were going to divert from the strategy was if they landed Stanton, whose contract would have pushed the Giants past the threshold. That was a special case and, according to ESPN’s Buster Olney, driven by billionaire owner Charles Johnson, who was the “primary source of enthusiasm” in the push for Stanton. Among Giants investors, Johnson has the biggest stake in the team.
Without Stanton or Ohtani, the Giants had another disappointing season and were especially inept at the plate, finishing 29th in the majors in runs, home runs, slugging percentage and OPS. Their outfield is in shambles, and only Steven Duggar, who’s known more for his speed and defense than his bat, can be viewed as a viable starter.
Harper would solve a lot of problems. Whether he wants to sign with the Giants is another matter. Money will be a major factor, and the Giants certainly can afford him, especially with the contracts of Hunter Pence and Andrew McCutchen off the books.
It’s a decent bet, no matter who’s hired as the new boss, that the dream would be for Harper to be in a Giants uniform on Opening Day.