Kurtenbach: Buster Posey successfully navigated SF Giants through his first real crisis in the most ironic way ...Middle East

SAN FRANCISCO — The Giants needed a shakeup.

First-year president of baseball operations Buster Posey tried patience and positive reinforcement, but as the Giants’ offensive struggles reached their third week unabated, it was undeniable that San Francisco’s clubhouse had become just a bit too comfortable with not scoring runs.

So after Tuesday’s loss to the Padres, which was a 16th straight game where the Giants scored four runs or fewer, Posey decided that enough was enough. Some tough cuts were made, and some new faces were brought in to start on Wednesday.

And after back-to-back wins where the Giants scored a staggering nine total runs — including a previously believed-to-be-impossible six in Wednesday’s game — you can’t say the moves didn’t work.

But it’s funny. Posey might have successfully navigated his first real crisis as the Giants’ man in charge, but he did it in a way that, dare I say, was downright Farhan Zaidi-like?

The mix-up for the sake of a mix-up was a Zaidi special during his six-plus seasons in Posey’s chair. It’s how we ended up with Forever Giants like Justin Smoak, Skye Bolt, Yermin Mercedes, A.J. Pollock, and Trenton Brooks.

And in all likelihood, Daniel Johnson and Dominic Smith will be part of that club of guys who will only be remembered as excellent Immaculate Grid plays — baseball vagabonds who were scooped up in a hurry to set up camp in San Francisco for a few games or a few weeks.

There’s nothing wrong with that. You have to do what you have to do.

Even if it’s deeply ironic.

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Posey is new to his gig in every way. He has never been a day-to-day personnel man, and now he’s in charge of the entire roster. Grace was fair and necessary as he navigated these uncharted and unquestionably choppy waters. He still needs time to get his sea legs under him.

But as Posey figured out his roster — all six levels of it — he could try to impart his principles and beliefs onto the big-league roster, at least.

Posey pushed trust, belief, and steadiness. He wanted a great clubhouse first, with the belief that a great baseball team would naturally arrive from that environment. Lofty goals, to be sure, but it’s what Posey knew.

And after years of players not knowing when at-bats would come — or even how long they’d be in the big leagues — amid Zaidi’s constant tinkering and the team’s platoon-first mindset, the change was seriously welcomed in that clubhouse. And you can’t argue with the early returns on the new tactic. The Giants won tight game after tight game. Maybe the Buster magic was still working.

Until it wasn’t.

There will, hopefully, be another time and place for all of those things Posey espoused. But the issue for the Giants was that they moved away from platoons and constant competition for at-bats without making wholesale changes to last year’s roster. Some of these guys still need to be platooned.

I can see Smith and Casey Schmitt as a nice lefty-righty combo at first base.

Jerar Encarnación and Mike Yastrzemski might make a nice platoon, too. (With apologies to the Giants’ marketing department for all the promotional material that features Yaz.)

And you already know Zaidi would have found a left-handed hitting second baseman by now to spell Tyler Fitzgerald, who mashes lefties but is middling against righties. Perhaps Posey will look into that now that the pretense of the campaign has been lost.

Either way, Posey was pushed to abandon — or at least suspend — his ideals in the sake of winning games. Such a move was inevitable, but it undoubtedly came sooner than anyone with the Giants wanted. And it will probably work for a bit, and then Posey will have to try something else to tide the team over for a while.

Just like Zaidi did.

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This isn’t to defend Zaidi’s work at the helm of the roster. He had to go — the Giants were spinning their wheels as an organization, and while the issues were unquestionably coming from places higher than Zaidi, he wasn’t helping progress things. Posey, for all his naivety in his new role, is at least empowered by ownership. After all, he is ownership.

However, this shift does highlight how tough the Giants’ grand poobah gig is.

Even without a bunch of big, crooked numbers going on the board, the new-look Giants had enough hitting to beat their rap the last two games, claiming contests that were as much must-win as any two games can be in early June. Only time will tell — it’s baseball after all, the most macro of sports — but the Giants have seemingly righted a ship that was steering off course.

And it couldn’t have come at a better time. As much as I pushed the team’s weekend opponent, the Braves, as dangerous and talented, that was before Atlanta allowed seven runs in the top of the ninth on Thursday to lose 11-10 to the Diamondbacks. The Braves might be cooked.

The Giants, once again, might be cooking.

But we can take a moment to laugh about it.

How’d Posey work his way out of the first big jam of his nascent personnel career?

He did what Zaidi would have done. And after years of complaining about this way of doing business, I don’t think anyone minds now.

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