Weekend BP, 10/12-10/14/18

Brewers owners Mark Attanasio denied Larry Baer permission to speak to his general manager, David Stearns, for the team’s open baseball ops position. While that’s not a stunning blow to the search process, it’s inconvenient.

There’s a good chance the Giants will be denied a lot of current front office people because nobody wants to help the Giants get better, and that makes total sense. Professional competition dictates that you destroy your opponent until history forgets about them.

Now that we know Kim Ng will be interviewed, let’s go back to the last Alex Pavlovic’s 11-candidate list he published on October 2nd and that we discussed in this post. Those candidates were:

Jed Hoyer (CHC GM)
Farhan Zaidi (LAD GM)
David Stearns (Brewers GM)
Mike Elias (Astros AGM)
Jason McLeod (Cubs VP Player Dev)
Mike Rizzo (WSN Pres Basell Ops, GM)
Jean Afterman (NYY AGM)
Ben Cherington (Blue Jays VP Baseball Ops)
Kim Ng, (VP Baseball Ops, MLB)
Chaim Bloom (TB VP of Baseball Ops)
David Forst (A’s GM)

Cherington removed himself from consideration and Mark Attanasio nixed a Stearns interview, but I’ve crossed off the others for various reasons:

• Farhan Zaidi was hired at the end of 2014 — the Justice Department’s potential RICO case against the Dodgers for their crimes in Latin America hinges at least in part on “internal communications [...] regarding illegal activity [that] were from 2015 and 2016, after the Dodgers cleaned house — so he could be in legal hot water that might make hiring him more trouble than it’s worth. And then there’s the whole Dodger connection. Kim Ng has had some time to hose all that Dodger blue off her, but Zaidi is the Dodgers at the moment.
• Mike Rizzo doesn’t really fit the idea of “next gen” and if the Giants are going to go with a dude, then the pursuit of someone David Stearns’ age feels more appropriate. Rizzo might help land Harper and he might even hire that “next gen” guy, but he still has a year left on his deal and just seems like he’s very much of a baseball wave that’s about to pass.
• In Pavlovic’s own article, he mentions that his sources think she’s unlikely to be interviewed for the position.
• I can’t imagine the Giants would ever hire someone from the Oakland A’s.

The Mets are already into their search (this article says they’ve already interviewed six candidates) and are getting close to having their finalists. The Rays’ Chaim Bloom already interviewed for the position and they’re expected to add the Brewers’ AGM Matt Arnold to the list, too.

If you read Ken Rosenthal’s mentions, then you’ll see that some Brewers fans are ticked off that the Giants would seek out their people during a postseason run. Now, we don’t know when the Giants requested this interview — it could’ve been right at the start of the playoffs and the request could’ve been “May we speak to him once your postseason ends?”

We don’t really know, but it also really doesn’t matter. I have to admit, I am often surprised by what upsets people, but I can’t say they’re “wrong” for feeling the way they do, but also that I can only hope Larry Baer ticks them off some more by requesting an interview with Matt Arnold.

Oh, also, housekeeping: use this thread to talk about today’s playoff game. One will go up tomorrow that can be used for the three games this weekend. I’m sure that will work out...