SAN FRANCISCO — It took six weeks for the Giants to find their new head of baseball operations when they began a search in 2018, but it wasn’t meant to be.

Farhan Zaidi was always at the top of owners’ list, but because he was the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who were in the middle of a pennant run, the Giants had to wait for permission to meet with him. A telephone interview led to an in-person meeting with Larry Baer and then to interviews with members of the board of directors.

The Giants discovered fairly quickly that Zaidi’s ambitions aligned with those of ownership. He did not recommend a teardown for a team that had lost 187 games over the past two seasons, but instead presented a way to win games and develop at the same time.

That’s been the goal in San Francisco since the blueprints for Oracle Park were first drawn up. This is not an organization that believes in complete reconstruction, or even uses that word.

Zaidi was confident he could thread the needle, but on Monday his bosses decided they had seen enough of his attempt. With a year left on his contract, Zaidi was fired, and in a shock announcement, Buster Posey was immediately installed as his replacement.

Posey will address the media for the first time on Tuesday, and if the Giants were trying to hit a home run from a PR standpoint, they couldn’t have done better. The future Hall of Famer has succeeded in just about everything he has tried in life, both on and off the court, but this is a new challenge and it will take time to know if he is perfect for the job.

What is immediately clear is that the Giants are heading in exactly the opposite direction after six years under Zaidi. There are many small events and decisions you can point to as reasons for the change, but ultimately it all goes back to those first conversations at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles.

Zaidi finished with a winning record in San Francisco thanks to a magical 107-win season in 2021, but he missed the playoffs in five of his six seasons. You can pass on the first two — one of which was a farewell tour for Bruce Bochy and one involving a new staff trying to make adjustments during a pandemic — but the Giants are 240-246 since 2021 and just finished a season 80-82, despite committing about $400 million through free agency and trades last season.

The recent mediocrity might have been more tolerable if the Giants had developed their players better, but they are generally considered to have a farm system in the bottom third, and while they have achieved plenty of contributors over the past two seasons, Zaidi has never been in been able to recreate it. the homegrown core he inherited, a core that played such a crucial role in that 107-win season.

His best young player – Heliot Ramos – was drafted by the previous regime and only broke through after it seemed the front office had exhausted all other options. Tyler Fitzgerald was a Zaidi draft pick, but like Ramos, he was blocked for months by a struggling veteran, a situation that frustrated many within the organization.

Fairly early in Zaidi’s tenure, it looked like top prospects Kyle Harrison and Marco Luciano would lead the Giants into the future, but the latter was rushed to the big leagues and had the rug pulled out from under him at shortstop, designated hitter and second base. during a lost season.

The Giants have struggled with player development, as well as simply acquiring enough good young players. Only one of Zaidi’s first four first-round picks has reached the major leagues, and there are real questions about the other three. He inherited a top pick in Joey Bart, but the decision to sign Tom Murphy last offseason forced the Giants to trade Bart, who was one of the best offensive catchers in baseball this season as a Pittsburgh Pirate.

Zaidi had some notable draft wins, led by Patrick Bailey, and it’s possible that in a few years everyone will look back and realize that the cupboard isn’t as bare as it seems. That was the case for Bobby Evans, who was also criticized for his lack of a farm system but left behind some underrated prospects like Camilo Doval and Randy Rodriguez.

Bryce Eldridge is one of the top prospects in the game, and even Zaidi’s detractors in the organization see the first baseman as a future star. In a few months, Posey will watch the Giants officially sign Josuar De Jesus Gonzalez, the top international teenager in this year’s class and a player Giants scouts compare to Francisco Lindor.

A better future might not be as far away as it seemed for most of this season, but Zaidi ran out of time to find out.

Six years ago he said the Giants would win by the margins, and they certainly did at times. The 2021 season was about the core, but also about players like LaMonte Wade Jr. and Darin Ruf, who essentially came over for free and made great contributions for the Giants. Too often, the Giants lost depth, frustrating many within the organization who were led to believe that Zaidi’s greatest strength was building a 40-man roster.

Zaidi almost never lost a trade, but most of them were small trades, and he held on to some prospects that didn’t pan out. He failed to bring in a Mookie Betts or Juan Soto type who could change the entire vision of a franchise.

Many of Zaidi’s most controversial moves made a lot of sense on paper, but they were cold, and over time that became more and more apparent. The most notable example came a few years ago, when the Giants agreed to terms with Carlos Correa without giving Brandon Crawford any warning that he might be changing positions. This year, the handling of Luciano and Thairo Estrada raised red flags.

The decision to take Estrada and have him finish the season in Triple-A — just in case the Giants somehow get back into the race but also lose several infielders to injuries? – frustrated many in a clubhouse already confused by the overall plan. The team’s stars weren’t happy with the “one foot in, one foot out” approach to the trade deadline, and there was anger over the decision to dump Alex Cobb, one of the most popular players in the clubhouse.

When the Giants couldn’t turn the tide, things got exciting at Oracle Park for the second straight season. Exactly a year after firing Gabe Kapler, his hand-picked choice to be Bochy’s successor, Zaidi seemed to sense he was about to be let go.

Zaidi is rarely on the field or in the dugout for games, but on Friday he watched batting practice while leaning on the cage. Three days earlier, he had made himself available to cover reporters in Phoenix, seemingly as a way to express some of his thoughts at a time when his job security was the only topic most Giants fans and many within the organization were talking about.

At one point, Zaidi was asked if he felt there was still confidence in his vision.

“I think I’ve evolved in my perspective on things, and part of that has to do with the culture around the Giants organization and the fan base and the things that our fans want, things that this organization has done when they were most successful which may not have been the way I was successful earlier in my career,” he said. “I think over time there has been a meeting of the minds. I think I’ve made adjustments.

“I think we’re at the point now where I think we’re very much aligned with the vision of the team that we want. We want a younger team, we want a more athletic team, we want more consistency in the rotation. and the arrangement.”

It is true that Zaidi evolved, but for many it was too late. Kapler’s firing set the Giants on a new course, and Zaidi chose the opposite as Kapler’s successor. It bothered him over the years that fans didn’t embrace the Giants’ use of platoons and openers — even last week, when answering questions, he pointed out that the Arizona Diamondbacks also platoons — but he adapted and traded for Robbie Ray and signing Matt Chapman, Jung Hoo Lee, Blake Snell and others.

However, there were a lot of misses in free agency. Zaidi may be better than any executive at dumping a bad contract, but many of those deals had his signature on them.

It’s hard to know exactly how many of them would have been offered if Zaidi had built entirely his way, but ultimately this is what he signed up for, and this is a plan he felt he could execute.

While leaning against a wall at Chase Field last week, Zaidi noted that there has to be “everything in balance,” and that really was the perfect word. It is difficult to balance winning and development. While Zaidi tried to do it his way, the organization seemingly lost its identity.

Even as the end approached, Zaidi hoped this would change.

“I think as an organization we need to discover our identity, and not feel that a strategy is only successful because it is the right choice for us,” he said last week. “I think this has been a bit of a learning process for me. I think we’ve had a lot of discussions about that and we’re in pretty good agreement at this point.”

On Monday it became clear that ownership feels different.

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