Things move quickly, even in the offseason, and it turns out that Scott Harris will be staying with the San Francisco Giants. On Monday morning it was reported that Harris, the team’s general manager for the last two years, had talked with the New York Mets about a position in their front office, as they are overhauling their baseball operations department.
But just a few hours later, Andrew Baggarly of The Athletic reported that Harris had informed Mets owner Steve Cohen that he was not interested. Given that Harris is still in the early days of having a high ranking position with a team that just won 107 games and is near his hometown, this shouldn’t be surprising.
Also hearing Mets owner Steve Cohen spoke w/Giants GM Scott Harris, who declined to be a candidate for a top front office job. That’s less a reflection on the Mets’ situation and more based on the fact Harris is a Bay Area native and is excited about the path the Giants are on.
— Andrew Baggarly (@extrabaggs) October 25, 2021
But it’s good news for the Giants. Harris doesn’t get much public credit, as president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi is generally viewed as the face of the operation, but the Giants GM has played an enormous role in the team transforming from very bad to setting wins records nearly overnight.
While the Giants won’t need to begin a GM search this offseason, they’ll likely need to search to fill some holes on the staff, with Baggarly reporting what we all could have guessed: that the Giants are getting flooded with calls about people on their staff.
I’m hearing the Giants are getting inundated with permission requests to interview their coaches/staff for openings, which was anticipated. They don’t expect to retain everyone, but they also are confident they’ve created an environment where people feel incentivized to stay.
— Andrew Baggarly (@extrabaggs) October 25, 2021
This is no surprise whatsoever. When you go from a sub-.500 team to a 107-win squad in one season, the rest of the league takes notice. And the fastest way to catch up to the leaders in baseball is enlist the help of the people who got them there in the first place.
It seems as though the Giants have done well creating the environment that Baggarly references, though they’ll almost surely lose some people in the process. The team has an abnormally large coaching staff, which not only means that there are a lot of people who can be poached, but likely a lot of people who could be offered a bigger opportunity elsewhere.