Isn’t it a “principal partner” that just means you have some share in the team? The Giants website lists about 20 “principal partners” but only 3 “general partners”, namely Magowan, Burns, and Neukom. I thought that the general partners were partners with a large enough stake and an active role in the club’s operations.

The whole point is that Magowan had control of the franchise. So blaming Neukom for all the ills of the management team would like like blaming you for the struggles of a stock that you owned some shares of but did not have management control over it.

They have made the nicey-nicey corporately appropriate statements about the change, I would not have expected any less, particularly when a lawyer is taking over. He’s not going to piss over Magowan’s legacy right after being announced as the new owner, he’s going to say the nice things to give Peter a nice bon voyage.

He won’t really show what his true colors are until the off-season when he really takes over and we see by the actions of Sabean what the new marching orders (if any) are. We don’t know what Neukom has been saying internally for years now. Maybe he’s been the one dissenting owner who spoke up vehemently enough against the current plans and that’s why they chose him. Maybe he is very smooth and talked his way into the job (he is a lawyer after all) and it will be rearranging the deckchairs.

I will note here what I wrote on my blog, I think he is just a transitional managing partner anyway. It seems to me that they are preparing Larry Baer to run things eventually, he has handled the non-baseball side with Peter all these years, now they are giving him Peter’s baseball duties while Neukom will be handling Baer’s non-baseball side duties. Neukom is just as old as Magowan, 66, so he’s probably not going to be in this role more than 5-7 years (though you never know).

Lastly, I also think that there has already been one key break from the Magowan years, at least in talk. Neukom said that winning is now the litmus test for how the team is managed when he was asked if the team would keep their budget the same going forward, and that budget would be secondary. So the team could start spending more on player development by signing more international players and spending more on the farm system, upgrading facilities, providing more tools and instructions.

Remember, he’s been adding shares over the years while others have backed off. He probably has at least $50-100M still even after investing in the Giants and giving $40M to universities, as his stock was worth $100M back in the early 1990’s when he left Microsoft, before the boom of the 90’s. He is also leading a group of owners in buying some of Magowan’s shares, and presumably they believe in what he says and would answer capital calls the way that he did, eagerly, unlike the others who grumbled about it. He could be leading a new era of spending if he walks the talk.

It will be an interesting off-season.