It's never easy switching sides in one of sports history's greatest rivalries, but former Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi now has done so twice between his various roles with San Francisco and the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Zaidi's seven seasons as the Giants' top executive were sandwiched between a role as Dodgers general manager from 2014 to 2018 and now serving as a special advisor in Los Angeles -- and he recently addressed the popular, albeit silly, fan theory that he simply was spying on San Francisco during his time in the Bay in a Q&A with the San Francisco Chronicle's Susan Slusser.
"[Given] your Dodgers-Giants-Dodgers trajectory, I’m sure you’ve heard this fan theory that you were a Dodgers plant all along," Slusser asked Zaidi this weekend as his current team played his former. "What’s your response when you hear things like that?"
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SIGN UP HERE "I have definitely heard that," Zaidi told Slusser. "I know this whole thing is like, 'Yeah, he really just came to sabotage the team and leave it in a mess.' And if that’s true, if you look at the standings, I guess I did a pretty bad job of sabotaging."
The Giants, who feature plenty of players on their roster brought to San Francisco by Zaidi, currently trail the Dodgers by just two games in the NL West standings despite losing two out of three in their series over the weekend. Now led by legendary Giants catcher Buster Posey as POBO, however, the team is right in the thick of the MLB playoff race at 41-31 after three consecutive seasons of .500-or-lower baseball.
But before that, Zaidi's regime with then-manager Gabe Kapler at the helm produced the winningest team in franchise history with the 107-win squad in 2021, which fell to -- ironically enough -- the Dodgers that postseason in the NLDS.
So, it certainly is safe to say Zaidi wasn't doing a great job of ruining the Giants during his tenure. And as the Dodgers put together a super team in Southern California, it wasn't difficult for fans to compare San Francisco's struggles in recent years to its biggest rival.
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Now, as the race between the Giants and Dodgers is the tightest it has been in years, Zaidi is focused on giving his new job his all, too -- and it's quite a different role than he's used to.
"I joked a lot when I first got to the organization that it’s kind of like when you’re a kid and you get taken to a really expensive department store and your parents are like, 'Don’t touch anything. Don’t break anything,' " Zaidi told Slusser. "That’s kind of how I felt, because it’s been a really successful team and organization since I left. They certainly don’t need me, don’t need my thoughts or advice, they’ve clearly demonstrated that with the recent run of success. ...
"I’m not really involved in the day-to-day. I’m just kind of around to advise, to serve as a sounding board. One of the things that I’ve really enjoyed being back is, when you’re in a leadership management role, sometimes it’s just putting out fires constantly, you don’t always have time to sit with a scout or an analyst or someone in player development and really be able to dive deep on topics. My schedule now is allowing that a little bit more, and so I’ve gotten to do that more than I would the last few years and that’s been a lot of fun."
With the way the Giants are rolling this season and how happy Zaidi appears in his new role, it looks like all parties are satisfied -- no matter how wild the theories were.