Dieter Kurtenbach: Giants ownership is afraid of a full rebuild. Buster Posey just showed why they're wrong.
Published in Baseball
Buster Posey may have built a garbage baseball team for the 2026 season, but he can sure pawn some parts.
Let Monday’s trade deadline go down as one of the best days of Posey’s tenure in charge of the San Francisco Giants’ front office — his best since, well, last year’s trade deadline sell-off.
The circumstances? Less than ideal.
His Giants are a disappointment stacked on top of a letdown, layered deep with frustration and confusion. His team, despite playoff hopes at the beginning of the campaign, was 18 games under .500 less than two weeks ago.
No one wants to be an unquestioned seller at the market. But if you’re in that position, you might as well do the job right.
And Posey did just that.
His trading of Luis Arraez, Robbie Ray, Tyler Mahle, Heliot Ramos and Erik Miller for legitimately good returns — in some cases better-than-expected packages — was almost inspiring.
He was so impressive, in fact, it left me wanting more. What else can this man spin?
Can he trade the Pacific fog for a pair of intriguing High-A arms? Could he trick the Los Angeles Dodgers into taking on Willy Adames?
Seriously, if Posey can sell the fixtures from a burning building for a great return, imagine what he could do with a clean blueprint.
What could this man do with the chance to strip this big-league team down to the studs and build from scratch?
You know, a rebuild.
Giants ownership has treated the word “rebuild” like a profanity for a decade. The top-level decision makers act like admitting defeat will turn Oracle Park into a garlic-fry-scented ghost town.
Posey knows this well: He became a part of the ownership group in 2022, two years before becoming the president of baseball operations.
But if this season has proven anything, it’s that even with a bad product on the field — and watching this Giants team is like getting a root canal without anesthesia (it costs more than $20 a hit at the concession stand) — the fans will keep coming.
So why not make the most of the situation and lean into the downward slope?
Posey went big in his first year as the Giants’ top baseball voice, adding big names for big money. That didn’t work. So then, this past offseason, he spent tens of millions more on Band-Aids, chasing plausible deniability. Outside of Arraez, none of those signings worked, either.
By May, the engine was smoking on the shoulder of the road. By July, he was on the curb selling the hubcaps.
But boy, can he sell.
Look at what the 2012 National League MVP pulled off on Monday:
He took Arraez — a two-month rental for the acquiring Phillies — and turned him into legitimate pitching depth with team-controlled contracts.
He found not only a buyer for the remainder of Ray’s contract, but he brought back two of the San Diego Padres’ top prospects.
He was able to trade Mahle and receive something more than a bag of balls in return.
He even cashed in on Ramos, landing two really intriguing prospects — including Jeff Kent’s son — for an outfielder who seemed like the odd man out on a bad team.
And his most impressive move was extracting serious value from Miller — a good but generally forgettable reliever — from the Boston Red Sox. Miller netted the Giants former uber-prospect Marcelo Mayer, an infielder who hasn’t panned out in Boston but still has oodles of potential and might be well served by a change of scenery. It was a great buy-low move.
Pair these kinds of deals with the Giants’ universally admired draft success over the last two years, and the pattern is unmistakable.
If Posey is going to build a contender, success will come from the bottom up. You know, the way the Giants built those title teams a dozen-plus years ago.
The Giants should have a top-five farm system in all of baseball now, and there’s even more than Posey can sell.
Jung Hoo Lee and Logan Webb were considered untouchable at this deadline.
That feels like the marketing department chiming in; the tail wagging the dog.
Let him sell them. Monday showed the best thing for the Giants would be a full-blown demolition.
Some team executives are interior decorators: They can make an already well-built space look really nice.
That’s not the Giants’ situation and that’s certainly not Posey.
But he might just be the general contractor you’d hire for something big, true and lasting — even if he has to undo some of his early mistakes to get the job done.
Let him stock the farm system until the rosters in Sacramento and Richmond and Eugene and San Jose are bursting at the seams. Eventually that talent will flow up to the big leagues.
And once it does, the Giants could well be a team to be reckoned with.
Posey isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but neither are the big-league Giants.
Buy the dip. Embrace the bottom. Let Posey keep sowing seeds.
And please, ownership, I beg of you, give this man the time and patience to actually build something worth keeping.
Because he might just do it.
____
©2026 MediaNews Group, Inc. Visit at mercurynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.







Comments