Friday BP: Giants ownership reiterates trust in Zaidi and Kapler

Happy Friday, San Francisco Giants fans.

Thursday was supposed to be a big day on the field for the Giants. They were slated to play the Colorado Rockies as they kicked off a 10-game road trip that very well might determine the fate of their season.

Instead, the stories surrounding the team involved everything but nine innings of Giants baseball.

The day began with the Boston Red Sox firing chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom. It ended with the Giants game getting rained out — but losses by all three of their Wild Card opponents who were in action moved the Giants back into playoff position.

In between, many parallels were drawn between Bloom (whom the Giants interviewed back in 2018) and the team’s president of baseball operations, Farhan Zaidi. Both executives are widely respected among baseball, with tenures that have had a fair amount of disappointment in very similar ways. The biggest difference between the two is that Bloom was hired a year after Zaidi, which led many to question whether the Giants might part ways with their top decision-maker, since the Red Sox had displayed an even shorter rope.

Heck, Bryan even wrote an article about it. That, combined with some recent rumblings that the organization wasn’t stoked about manager Gabe Kapler’s job this year, suddenly made things quite interesting. But it wasn’t clear if the grey stuff in the air was smoke or just fog.

Turns out the latter. With an acute sense of the moment, Giants owner Greg Johnson quickly snuffed out any notion that the team might be moving in a different direction. Johnson told the San Francisco Chronicle that the team’s 2024 opt-out clause for Zaidi “expired months ago,” and reiterated that the organization stands “fully behind him,” and that Zaidi and Kapler will “both be here next year.”

Regardless of how well or poorly you think Zaidi has done, retaining him for at least another year is rather obviously the right move. The organization tasked him with the very difficult goal of competing while rebuilding, and it’s only been this year that we’ve started to see the fruit of the latter goal. Firing him right before the first full season of Kyle Harrison, Marco Luciano, Patrick Bailey, Casey Schmitt, Luis Matos, Keaton Winn, and many others would be the equivalent of pinch-hitting for a batter in a 2-2 count.

If next year doesn’t go well, you can expect Zaidi and Kapler to find themselves on fairly warm seats. But until then, the decision-makers behind the best regular season in franchise history will get a year to prove that they’re working on something special.

What time do the Giants play today?

The Giants kick off their series with the Rockies a day late, with a 5:40 p.m. PT game at Coors Field.