Tuesday BP: How are you feeling about Melvin?

Good morning, baseball fans!

The San Francisco Giants have reached the end of their 2025 journey. As we found out yesterday, manager Bob Melvin has also reached the end of his journey as the Giants’ manager. Oh yeah, we have officially entered scapegoat season!

I was absolutely unsurprised to see the news. In fact, I was more surprised that they did Melvin the courtesy of letting him finish the entire season. That was more than former manager Gabe Kapler got, and he had more to show for his time at the helm.

I don’t necessarily agree with the decision. I don’t believe Melvin was solely responsible for the lack of success during his tenure. However, the team has set a precedent of heads rolling after each of the last couple of seasons, with Kapler and Farhan Zaidi each being shown the door after the last two. So I guess it was either Melvin or Buster Posey. And we all know Posey isn’t going anywhere.

Which brings me to some of the concerns I had about Posey taking on the role of president of baseball operations last year. I didn’t get to write about it at the time because life was busy life-ing. So I’ll get into them now because it goes hand in hand with the topic.

While I love Buster Posey, as any orange-blooded Giants fan does, I still have concerns about him being both an owner and the PoBO. It feels like a massive conflict of interest. And not a partnership that can be ended with any sort of grace or good publicity for anyone involved, because Posey is a franchise legend.

I’m not saying the team should part ways with him. Not at all. I’m actually optimistic about his leadership. But my concern comes from both the conflict of interest portion (in that an owner’s interests and a PoBO’s interests do not necessarily align), and the public relations issue (in that the team basically cannot ever part ways with living legend Buster Posey, no matter what happens, without taking a massive public relations hit that they cannot afford.)

At the time, I was caught up in the hype of it all because…well, he’s Buster Posey and now he’s running the team and how cool is that? Of course he’s gonna turn it all around, he’s Buster Posey!

But now, watching yet another scapegoat on the way out, I can’t help but wonder how this plays out in the future without getting ugly. Most of me is still on the side of “of course it’s going to be sunshine and lollipops soon, because Buster!” but that’s not usually how reality works. I guess time will tell.

As to Melvin, I don’t honestly have an opinion other than that the team probably has a better read on that situation than I do. Probably. I don’t think it’s his fault that the team underperformed on the whole, and I don’t necessarily think he deserved to be given such a short leash. But the Giants have set the precedent now, so I guess we all have to live by it.

How are you feeling about the Giants parting ways with Bob Melvin?