A Conversation with Larry Baer and Buster Posey of the San Francisco Giants

Buster Posey:

The parallel between a great Giants team and the city of San Francisco thriving, I think it's real. I was able to experience it as a player. I think the pride that the city had when the team played well, I would have so many different fans come up to me in tears after we had won in ‘10, and just talk about what it had meant to them because of them being generational San Francisco Giants. What we're doing is more impactful than just wins and losses.

Larry Baer:

We're the San Francisco Giants, but hey, guess what? We need more housing in San Francisco. We need more open space. People like this part of town. Let's see if we can do something with it and can our impact move out beyond the team itself.

David Stiepleman:

Being in the stadium and high fiving with someone I don't know, including their politics. We’re both wearing the same jersey and talking with your kids about it. It's the best. It's the best.

Everyone say hi to Larry Barer, the president and CEO of the San Francisco Giants, who's also on the Board of the club. Larry, you put the investor group together that bought the team and kept the Giants from going to Florida in 1992. You've worked here ever since, have led the franchise for three plus decades of success, including directing the construction of the best ballpark in the world, which is Oracle Park, where we are today. It opened in 2000, 25 years ago. Not to mention, the team winning three World Series titles, 2010, 2012 and 2014. Not such a bad track record. So, thanks for being here, Larry. Good to see you.

Larry Baer:

Thank you David and welcome. We're thrilled that you're a new partner in the Giants.

David Stiepleman:

Thanks. And there's also someone else here. Three-time World Series Champion and seven-time All-Star Buster Posey. Buster now serves as the President of Baseball Operations for the Giants, moving into that role about nine months ago in September 2024. You spent your entire 12-year professional career here at the Giants. You rank among the club’s all-time leaders in most stats that you’d think of. This is not a baseball podcast, so we're not going to go into a lot of stats. But, in 58 career postseason games, 57 postseason hits, 25 RBIs, most by a Giant franchise history, one of only three catchers in Major League history to win the World Series and be voted League MVP in the same season. If you know the other two, come up afterwards and Larry's giving you a free pretzel. Buster, after you retired from playing in November 2021, you joined the Giants ownership group in September 2022. You also joined the Board of Directors, all that before taking on the new role. Anyway, thanks, it's great to have you here and great to be here with you. Thanks for letting us come and invade your home.

Buster, I'll start with you if we can. So, new gig, nine months in. One of the themes in our conversations in this podcast is the thing that gets you from recognition into the seat. You know, being a lawyer or an accountant or good at investing or being a baseball player, but those aren't necessarily the skills that you then need to use in your next role. Are you finding that or is the analogy of being a catcher and being the field general – is that super helpful? How have you thought about that so far?

Buster Posey:

I think there's a lot of similarities, but there's a lot of differences. I'll start with the differences. The way I've approached this is very much that I'm learning daily. I came into this role with a lot of great people around me and that kind of leads me to what the similarities are. The similarities are moving from being a baseball player to now in a management position. It's still a team, right? It's a team. There's a ton of people that make the day-to-day go and when you're on the field, you're not alone. It's some of the intrigue. It’s what makes baseball such a unique sport because it's a highly individualized competition between a pitcher and a batter. But when you get that base hit, you're relying on the guy on second to get a great jump to score on your base hit. And then similarly, I feel like in this role as well, is that maybe there's a phone call made to start a conversation for a trade, but you're relying on your front office teammate to either give you insight or advice from past experience or it's a call to somebody else within that other organization to kind of keep the momentum going. There's some things that are similar for sure.

David Stiepleman:

There was a piece in The Standard last week. It was a conversation with Greg Johnson, one of the principal owners, talking about your rapport in the Rafael Devers trade. You becoming a deal person and thinking about that. Was that natural or were you working out your relationship with Greg as you were going through it?

Buster Posey:

The nice thing about my relationship with Greg at this point is that it's been established. We really got to know each other during COVID. We were arguing about wanting to be back on the field and play, and I probably had some snarky comments to him and he'd come back at me. And I think just that rawness that we initially had during COVID, opened up an avenue for us to have what I consider a pretty trusting relationship. I trust him. I feel like he trusts me so that when he says something, I know there's nothing that I have to sift through. And conversely, I hope the same thing for him. So, when the Devers trade was starting to happen, we laid it out for Greg. Larry said, these are some possible scenarios here. We think this is a route that would be viable, not saying that this is where it's going to end up, but we kind of laid out parameters and then Greg had conversations with Boston's ownership as well, which was really helpful for us to understand where their head was at with Rafi and the future of the organization. It was an interesting process. It was fun. Somebody asked me if it was the same adrenaline that I got as a player, probably not. But it was still a big deal. You could feel it in the ballpark here last week. Just the excitement from the fan base. Something Larry and I talk about a lot is, yes, it's about wins and losses, but ultimately, baseball and sports, but baseball in particular because it is 162 games, it's storytelling, right? The ability for fans to show up with their family and friends to have the memory of the first game Rafi Devers ever hit a homer in Oracle Park is hopefully something they can look back on years from now and tell grandchildren about.

David Stiepleman:

Yeah. You've called it a memory-making business and that really sticks. Let's rewind the tape then and talk about memories. August 7th, 1992. Why was that an important day for you?

Larry Baer:

I remember August 7th, 1992, pretty vividly because that day I was in New York City working for CBS and the headlines rolled across. There's no internet at the time, but the shock waves hit because there was a press conference announcing that the San Francisco Giants were moving to Tampa after four elections where it was not passed. It had not triggered public money to build a ballpark, four ballpark elections – two in San Francisco, two in the South Bay. The owner at the time, Bob Lurie, who at one point saved the Giants initially back in 1976 with his group when the team was going to move to Toronto, had sold the team to a group in Florida.

David Stiepleman:

No relation to our new mayor.

Larry Baer:

No relation to Daniel, nor Marty Lurie. Bob Lurie, who was a great San Franciscan, thought he had come to the end point in terms of getting a ballpark to replace Candlestick. That was really the game. He had done a great job in many respects. The team was in the World Series in 1989. I grew up like so many – loving the Giants. I wasn't there in 1958, but in the 1960s with Mays, McCovey, Marichal, Cepeda, it was a great, proud franchise which then morphed into Will Clark and Mike Krukow and the team in the 80’s. Then, to see the team almost disappear or about to be on the precipice of moving the following year to Florida where there was a stadium ready to go – that was scary.

David Stiepleman:

How old were you at that point?

Larry Baer:

At that point I was in my early thirties.

David Stiepleman:

Okay, so what can you do about that?

Larry Baer:

This can't happen. There are obviously people in charge of the city who don't want it to happen, like the mayor and the mayor at the time, Frank Jordan, was great. But he's not going to be able to create a stadium. Poof, here's a stadium, or poof, here's an ownership group. This was a signed purchase agreement. The only way for the signed purchase agreement to be invalidated was the owners in baseball at the time would have to not consent to the move. The owner's meeting was the first week of November, so I started calling around. I had worked for the Giants a couple of years between college and graduate school before New York and I knew some of the folks that were Pacific leaders, and I grew up in San Francisco. We had a few weeks to try to galvanize a group. Thankfully, there were other pots of activity. Walter Shorenstein was involved. Richard Goldman was involved. I reached out to somebody I knew pretty well, Peter Magowan, who was Chairman and CEO of Safeway and had been on the Giants board previously. I asked him, Peter, would you get involved? He said, I got to think about it. So ultimately, all those efforts sort of galvanized to a point where we could put together a group that would, in the face of the Tampa up or down vote in November, transfer the franchise to Florida, that this group – in the background – make it known to the other owners and make it known to MLB and the commissioner that we were there. Then, maybe they would say no to the move to Tampa and give it one more shot in San Francisco after four elections that the voters denied a new ballpark with public money. And that was our gambit, and it was an amazing group, right? We had John Fisher before Don and John acquired the A’s, Charles Schwab, Walter Shorenstein, Dick Goldman, Peter Magowan, a man named Harmon Burns, who was at Franklin Templeton, and Charles Johnson was in a small way, Arthur. We had kind of a “who's who” of in some ways of American business, including Bill Hewlett from Hewlett-Packard.

David Stiepleman:

Yeah. Okay. So that worked. Are you feeling any parallels to today? A little bit, in terms of San Francisco, a key moment, the city's turning around. Are there any parallels?

Larry Baer:

This is a little different, but I think Mayor Lurie has called on the urgency here in San Francisco in a very compelling way that we all need to pull together and get San Francisco back to where we know it can be and where many of us grew up with the city being such a magical place. And I think we're well on the way. So, a little different; this was a crisis where we were going to lose an institution. But, arguably in the last few years what we've been through has been at a crisis level for the city and for its stature in the world.

David Stiepleman:

You got here, Larry, in 1993 as a younger guy starting in a job that, you obviously figured it out, but that must have been daunting.

Buster Posey:

For me, being a kid growing up in South Georgia and then moving to San Francisco was a pretty big change for me and my wife as well, but I'd say where Larry and I bonded, he grew up here his whole life and he has a passion for the city and the Bay Area and the people that are involved in it. I think that's where we relate the most is that we want San Francisco and to be proud of the Giants. We want our fan base to come to the ballpark and leave, win or lose, having a great experience. Obviously, it's better if you win. I give Larry credit for this because he's really the first one that I heard talk about it, but the parallel between a great Giants team and the city of San Francisco thriving, I think it's real. I was able to experience it as a player. I think the pride that the city had when the team played well, I had so many different fans come up to me in tears after we had won in 2010, and just talk about what it had meant to them because of them being generational San Francisco Giants. I know he feels this way, I feel this way, is that what we're doing is more impactful than just wins and losses. I'm certainly a very competitive person and I want to win every single day. That's kind of what excites me, and it has excited me about being in this role is just understanding what the impact can be beyond the game.

Larry Baer:

Getting to know Buster over the years as a player, I have a very vivid moment when I got a call from Buster after the 2021 season – a very successful season, we won 107 games, and Buster had a great year. I'm actually at our daughter's parents weekend back East at Brown University and I see Buster Posey and I actually thought Buster was calling because there was an option year on his contract for 2022 and I thought Buster was calling to say “hey, let's suspend the one year into a couple years and my agent's going to call” and all that, just a heads up. That's what I thought when I saw the thing. I was shocked, for all the right reasons – I probably shouldn't have been so shocked – that Buster was going to decide to retire. That was like a cataclysmic thing initially for us because Buster was the face of a franchise. We had never enjoyed the success that we had under Buster's leadership starting with essentially his rookie season in 2010. As I was processing that and after the press conference, I remember I said to Buster and Buster’s representative. I said, you're a forever Giant, you're such a big part of the franchise. What do you see down the line? Broadcaster? Back on the field? Manager? Coach? General manager? And he said, we'll think about it. Just take your time, process. I get a call maybe a month or so later: would it be possible to be part of the ownership group? Would it be possible to invest in the team? And to me and to Greg and our Board and the ownership, it was like manna from heaven that not only could you have such an amazing force for the franchise who is just an impeccable love affair and image with our fans and in this community, but wanting to contribute in this way. And that was the beginning of us. We would talk some when he was a player, but he was a player and I'm up at the front office and I'm a suit. And that beginning of us being able to collaborate.

David Stiepleman:

Why was that important to you, Buster? It’s not the typical path for a retired player.

Buster Posey:

I think it really just stemmed from, like I mentioned before, my connection that I felt to the area and to the fan base and felt like it was a gesture that went beyond your typical advisor role, or special advisor to the GM or whatever title you want to put on it. I think it kind of solidified my mind. Even though, Larry and the ownership group were gracious and said you're always a Giant. And I believed that. But I think for me, I was able to join the Board as well as be part of that, right? So I looked at it as a learning experience to be able to sit in and listen to conversations that otherwise I wouldn't have access to. So for those couple of reasons, it felt like a good fit.

Larry Baer:

For us, knowing Buster through the years as a player, there was always an intellectual curiosity there. And so when he offered that, immediately it's Buster has to be on the Board. And immediately the value add that would come with somebody so tuned in to the game and beyond the game, as he's spoken, to what we're trying to do here in the community with the fans was just such a no brainer and such a natural. And it was kind of like, wait, why didn’t we think of this, you know? Come on, be part of ownership. And the other thing, baseball, and it was gnawing at us – there are no former baseball players that are giving what Buster can give to us in the sport, no cases of that. It's just great to see a former player play for one club his whole career and connected to the community.

David Stiepleman:

Totally. Buster, what surprised you? Anything surprised you about the job?

Buster Posey:

How much I have to be on my phone.

David Stiepleman:

Interesting.

Buster Posey:

I think that has been one piece of the puzzle for me because my family's always going to come before my job, and I think I was a little bit hesitant to jump on this just because I wasn't sure what toll it would take on them. I'm saying this as I knock on this wooden armchair that I do feel like I've done a pretty good job of balancing that so far. I've had so many people say it’s a 24/7 job, which it is in the sense that, Larry might call me at midnight one night. But it doesn't mean that it's nonstop. It kind of fits with my personality. I love to be engaged, and I love to have something to work on and have different challenges. What's been fun for me is that as a player, the challenge was pretty one dimensional, whereas this has a lot of different dimensions and as Larry's mentioned, it’s more big picture. You want to be in the moment, but also have an eye on what the future's going to look like in two, three, four or five years. Some of these contracts are longer than that. It's been fun to learn on the fly.

David Stiepleman:

How do you stay focused on what you think is important? In thinking about this conversation, thinking about you, everybody's a fricking expert. Everyone. I'm an expert because I've watched a bunch of baseball games, you know? So, how do you tune that out? Do you have things that you do?

Buster Posey:

Yeah, I think first I would say is, I want to try to get to know that expert and understand if they really are an expert or not. I think that helps. Then second for me is just having kind of a straight and narrow path in what my belief system is and what's important, but also being malleable enough to recognize daily that I don't have all the answers, so I need to be able to filter. Again, I think it's very similar as when I was a player. I'd have a lot of people telling me I need to do this and that with my swinger. I needed to catch this way. And you have to be able to take that information in and maybe try it, apply it here and there, and figure out if it works. And if it does, great. And if it doesn't, you have to be able to move on from it and I think it's similar in this role as well.

David Stiepleman:

Got it. What about you, Larry? I mean, you must be getting advice all the time from all of us.

Larry Baer:

Yeah. It kind of reminds me, somebody once said – go to a restaurant, you can have an opinion that it's great food, not great food or they should do this or that. But it doesn't prepare you to be the executive chef. You're not the executive. You can't walk into the kitchen and change it and fix it. I remember working with Peter Magowan it was really interesting. He was running Safeway at the time. He used to say, let's make 25 decisions a week and get it 87% right. As opposed to six decisions so we can get them all right. Let's keep moving and keep things going.

David Stiepleman:

Can we talk about evaluating talent? It's another one of the themes that has kind of evolved in these kinds of conversations over time, sort of how people have learned to try to not misevaluate talent.
And maybe Buster, start with you. I don't think there's any question about your baseball talent, but your first year at FSU, you were not a catcher. It’s kind of crazy, I mean, you're one of the catchers of the ages, right? Did they miss something? Did you miss something? How did that happen?

Buster Posey:

To be a catcher, you have to be a glutton for punishment. I guess I had that in me. No, I played shortstop up until my sophomore year in college and actually one of my best friends, he is the first base coach for us now, Mark Hallberg, had transferred into FSU and I had enough self-evaluation, my self-evaluation was high enough that I could look out there and I was like, well, this guy's better than I am. And even from looking around, I could tell probably if I wanted to play the next level, that I was going to have to move off of short. I just didn't have the range in the field that the elite defenders in professional baseball had. So I took to it and I loved it. I mean, it had its growing pains for sure. I can remember sitting in my apartment in college for the first three months and I would watch TV at night in a catcher squat, just trying to get my hips and knees into the position where I felt comfortable behind the plate.

David Stiepleman:

I’m just telling you that at almost 54 years old, that sounds really bad.

Buster Posey:

That's why I've had a hip surgery already. Yeah, and I'm not close to 54.

David Stiepleman:

Thanks for reminding us.

Buster Posey:

The question about talent evaluation, I think for players, this is a little bit off topic, but one of the key attributes that I do look at and try to figure out, and I did this as a player myself, is asking guys questions to try to understand, if they understand who they are, because if you don't understand who you are, it's really hard to go in one direction. The direction of wanting to go forward or up, if you don't have the baseline understanding who you are as a player.

David Stiepleman:

How do you suss that out?

Buster Posey:

By what my eyes tell me and what my ears tell me. If my eyes and ears aren't matching up from what I'm seeing and what they're telling me, then it’s not a good thing.

David Stiepleman:

I think that's true in the business world too, for sure. Larry, when you guys took over the team in ‘93, the first person you hired was the manager, and it was a guy who everybody knows now, Dusty Baker, he wasn't obviously a manager at that time, but it was obvious to you guys. What was that talent evaluation thing?

Larry Baer:

That was one of those things that, again, you have to try to trust your instincts. So when we took over the team, Peter Magowan and I are calling around furiously trying those people that we did know in the game to try to get some thoughts about what we do about the manager job and the general manager job. We've put an urgency on the manager's job just because, you know, general managers are very important too, but we thought that the best talent would get snapped up because of the time of the year. We had talked to a few folks, and we're literally meeting with them in Peter's living room, and Dusty Baker was a Giants hitting coach. He had managed a total of a dozen or so games in the Arizona fall league. That was it for his managing experience. We sat down with him and it's a little bit like what Buster was saying on talent evaluation. The passion, the human connection. We had been told and we kind of got a feel that at least important to what you do from first pitch to last out, is what you do from last out to first pitch. So all that you're doing in the clubhouse, on the flights, on the road, the way to keep the team together and to create a trusting relationship between the manager and coaches and the team is incredibly important. And we picked that up from Dusty, his capabilities there. So we went ahead and hired Dusty, a first-time manager. Then went out to get a general manager. I mean, we talked to a few folks and said you got to be in on Dusty and if you're not in on Dusty this isn’t going to work. We hired Bob Quinn, who had been the general manager of the Cincinnati Reds who won the championship in 1990. Our year was 1993. Bob Quinn said to us, I'll come if I can bring in number two. And that number two is the head of scouting for the Yankees. His name is Brian Sabean and we didn't know Brian Sabean from the Man on the Moon, right? When you do the research under Brian Sabean's leadership is in the scouting department at the Yankees, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, Bernie Williams. So that happened. And Bob was like, I'm going to do this for a few more years. And Bob was in his seventies I think. We had a succession plan and it worked, Dusty. I don't know that we could have done better with anyone. Then in the 10, our first 10 years of our ownership, then Dusty as manager. We didn't win any championships, but he set the right tone. He connected with the players beautifully. He connected with the community. He connected with the front office, Dusty and Brian. It's a very important relationship, right? Between the general manager and the manager. For Peter and I, it was just a matter of that working smoothly, which it did for a good decade.

David Stiepleman:

I mean that, but that first season was a pretty good season, if I don't recall.

Larry Baer:

103 wins. We thought, this is easy, you know, the first year. It is like, what's the big deal running a baseball team? And one of those years where everything went well, and we even had an increase – a million increase in attendance. From a 1.6, 1.5 previous year at Candlestick, the 2.5 at Candlestick, but we knew we were not going to be able to survive in San Francisco if we did not get a new ballpark done.

David Stiepleman:

Buster, he said Dusty set the tone. What is the tone when you're a player? What matters that you get the season off on the right track?

Buster Posey:

Yeah. Some people say the word culture is thrown around a lot and I think it is, but to me, culture. Culture matters only if it's backed up by action. So the words only can carry you so far. I think it's set early in the Spring with an identity, how we want to play the game, what are the small parts of the game that really matter to us? What do we feel like as a group that is going to put us in the best position to win? And then the hope is that as you spend more time together, you start to build a level of trust for one another, that we're all in it for the right reasons, which is not an easy thing, right? When you're dealing with 22- to 40-year-olds that are making millions of dollars, to try to get everybody pulling in the same direction. I was fortunate to have been on some of those teams, and I remember leaving college and thinking about how much I missed that, how much I missed the team element of really just ultimately working towards one goal. And you get into minor league baseball and it's climb the ladder. You know, is this guy, even though he is my teammate, he might be taking my job type of thing. And so when I got to San Francisco in 2010, it was refreshing that that culture had already been established, that we're working towards winning the vision, getting the playoffs going on a deep run. You know, it's amazing too, that the productivity when you work from that mindset rather than from a selfish mindset.
In my opinion, just how much more productive you are individually. And it's something that I've talked with our coaches and with our players, some directly, that ultimately my belief is, and it is through experience too, that if you go out and play the game from a selfless position, you're going to be rewarded for that. You're going to be rewarded for team baseball. And to me this is a long-winded way of saying the tone is something that can be set early, but it has to be carried out daily and it has to be front of mind conversations with everybody that you come in contact with because it can't be purely a mission statement that you read off one time and expect it to stick with people.

David Stiepleman:

Right. When you talk about the style of player, the style of baseball, what do you mean by that? What is Giants baseball to you?

Buster Posey:

Well, we hope it is a tough brand of baseball that whether it's a low scoring game or high scoring game, we're going to be in the game. Something I've talked to our group about a lot, our players a lot this year, is that when the opposing team comes into town, I want them to feel our pressure. I want them to understand that it's not going to be easy to play the San Francisco Giants. Again, you may win the game, but you're going to limp away. And I think over the long haul, if you buy into that mentality, one, you're going to be in a lot of games and you should win a lot of games, but you're also going to gain a little bit of an edge when eventually that word does get out to the rest of the league that the Giants are not a team that will roll over.

David Stiepleman:

How important is it that the business side and the sporting side are in sync?

Larry Baer:

Very. We're one organization and you know, people on the business side don't have the skill sets to do what Buster and his team does, but we're all, I believe, mission driven. Right? And so one of the things that it's just a great rewarding thing is to see the folks inside our front office, and you know, even those that aren't touching directly, the baseball team, they care so much and with the passion. Wearing San Francisco across our chest means something and you feel like it's part of a quasi-public utility. Now, we're a private company as you well know, and with profits and losses and valuations and all of those things. We're not the San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Symphony, et cetera, but I believe we're more than just the business. Just the business – I say in a way, that it's a motivator for all of us. We just had a staff meeting and one of Buster's lieutenants, Zack Minasian, came in and gave a download to our business group about, you know, what's happening in the last couple of weeks. And it was empowering because they're Giants fans. They care, they're in the community. They go to the coffee shop, they go to the dry cleaners and people want to talk about the Giants, and that's an exciting thing for them. They have to be obviously good at their craft, but I think there's a kind of an elevated sense of mission with an organization like a sports franchise.

David Stiepleman:

How important is that to the players, Buster? Knowing that like everybody around San Francisco is like, you know, when the team's up, it's obviously you feel the buzz that's great in the ballpark, but my sense is that the ownership group, started in ‘93, had a great civic sense of civic pride and mission. That's continued. That really matters and that certainly matters to the rest of us living, living in and around San Francisco. Does it matter to the players? Do you guys think about that?

Buster Posey:

It does because you can feel it. You can feel it when you're on the field. I won't call out specific teams, but there are teams where they don't have the same energy, there's not the same passion or the fan base isn't as knowledgeable of what's going on in the game. It does matter. I mean, everybody I think is individually motivated for different reasons. But again, I go back to, ultimately we all, most all of us started playing some sort of team sport to have a crack at winning a championship of some sort. So when your fan base is behind you to try to make it to the top, I think it just gives you even more motivation.

David Stiepleman:

You were known in the clubhouse, Buster, as someone that when you spoke, it mattered. How do you do that? And how has that changed now in your new role? Do you go into the clubhouse and talk to the players or that's not your role anymore?

Buster Posey:

I have a couple times, but not much. I think it's important to kind of pick and choose my spots, similar to when I was playing I guess. I do have to speak a lot more than I did as a player. And I feel like I'm getting better at it. But again, I think in my position now, it's really important to listen. Maybe not so much now, but as the group was getting comfortable with me, I felt it really important to let them talk. I wanted to hear their opinions too without maybe what my opinion might be.

David Stiepleman:

Like on your executive team or on your team. I got it.

Buster Posey:

Yeah. On the executive team or different departments. So that I could get an unfiltered opinion and not something that would be clouded maybe by something that I said. So I think now, I don't have to do that quite as much now just because I do feel like I have a good feel of the group. And as Larry mentioned, I think one of the unique or exciting things about being in this role is that everybody in the front office or on the business side, they just love baseball. And I mean, it's fun to be around a group of people that are as passionate about the same thing. And, I haven't been in any other business, but I would imagine that has to be pretty unique. Except for Sixth Street, of course.

David Stiepleman:

Of course.

Larry Baer:

One of the real highs is, and we encourage everybody in the organization to do this, you know, tonight we have a game against the Marlins, take a walk in the upper deck and see. Buster mentioned a generational sport. See mothers and sons and fathers and daughters and grandparents enjoying an experience and taking it in. And that is where a lot of the satisfaction comes from for those of us that can't be on the field playing or aren't necessarily, you know, impacting directly one-to-one the team itself. But we're seeing this community come together and frankly, today's world, 2025, it’s more important than ever. Coming out of the pandemic and with all that's going on in the world that, you know, we see in some ways a ballpark, a ball game, being around town with your friends, talking about the Giants and going into a bar or a restaurant watching a game. It's more necessary than ever that escape, that refuge, that two or three hours a day.

David Stiepleman:

Being in the stadium and high fiving with someone who you don’t know each other’s politics. Exactly. We're both wearing the same jersey. Great. The best. And talking with your kids about it, your memory. It's the best. It's the best. Let’s talk about baseball and the state of baseball. We're having a resurgence, their attendance is up, revenue's up, international viewership is up. What going on? Is just the new rules? Pitch clock?

Larry Baer:

I think from talking to the fans, the number of the improvements has been the cumulative effect, right? Of the pitch clock and taking out the shifts, which makes, you know, at least some more athleticism. All the rule changes, I don’t want to go through all of them, but the rule changes have been a positive. I also think that kind of what we were talking about before, is that there is a real yearning for community connection and a communal experience. I mean, are people going to movie theaters anymore? I wish they were. And there's some neighborhood theaters out and we have an executive of the Giants who's very involved in the Neighborhood Theater Foundation, Alfonso Felder, but that's diminishing. But here you have a chance. Music, sports, you have a chance for a community connection. And I think that that's what baseball is. It's in the summer, a lot of the games are during the day. You have time on your hands. People take vacations. I can't tell you the number of people that talk about how their summer, as we're getting into summer now, their summer is going to be traveling around to different ballparks, following the Giants, or just sampling, you know, Fenway Park or Wrigley Field or Camden Yards. You know, I think baseball today fits what people are looking for to kind of tune out some of the things in the world and tune into a great experience.

David Stiepleman:

So intertwined with our history too. I mean, 150 years of American history is about baseball. I think people want to touch that. You were going to say something, Buster?

Buster Posey:

The rule changes have been hugely impactful. I think it's just a better product to watch in person, a better product to watch on television. I think that we have two legitimate superstars. One in the National League, one American League in Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge. I was in Japan a couple of months ago and that's a baseball crazed country. I haven't been to Korea, but I heard similar there as well. So the hope is, I know for me as a person that loves baseball, is that it continues to be a global sport and I think that will only help the product get better.

David Stiepleman:

Yeah. Maybe Larry, talk about the business of sports. I mean, it’s not just the game, it's real estate, it's a media company, it's entertainment. How are the Giants positioning? Maybe talk about Mission Rock a little bit.

Larry Baer:

Yeah. So I think that, you know, to the extent we're a part of the community, an important part of the community, professional sports franchise, can our impact move out beyond the team itself? And you have to do that carefully. And you can't be distracted because baseball will always be our core business and we're the San Francisco Giants. But one of the first opportunities we saw is, you know, the growth of San Francisco, the growth in this neighborhood. We had a surface parking lot, a 30-acre surface park parking lot, and hey, guess what? We need more housing in San Francisco. We need more open space. People like this part of town because it's a gateway to Silicon Valley, it's got great weather, it's connected to the Embarcadero in downtown. Let's see if we can do something with it. So, we have a 30-acre real estate project and were just completing phase one. We're a part owner of our television network. That whole ecosystem is changing dramatically but we want to have a role in how the content is distributed. We were just talking over the weekend, Buster and I, about how great the drone shots were on our telecasts of the Red Sox games and last night as well. And that is part of what we do as we put out content. And we want to be, you know, part of that. We do obviously a lot of it internally, social media, around the Giants, but are there other areas that we can get involved in where we can use our skill sets and we're looking at acquiring businesses and touching that as well. There's a business within the Giants called Giants Enterprises, and we put on non-baseball events here in the ballpark and elsewhere. So all of that I think is part of using our skill sets around sponsors and around ticketing and around community connection here and maybe in some other markets down the line.

David Stiepleman:

I mean, just the picture you're painting of what was here before this ballpark, then what was here before you started on Mission Rock? I mean, what a transformation of this part of town. You know that now down to where the Warriors play, it's incredible what you can do to the city.

Larry Baer:

And it's a new neighborhood for the city. We're a city in many ways. You think about San Francisco having grown up here, we're a city of neighborhoods. And so we want people to have pride in the in Mission Bay and Dogpatch and Potrero Hill and all the neighborhoods that touch Mission Bay and Mission Rock.

David Stiepleman:

How do you guys think about all this institutional capital coming into sports? I mean, how do you think about navigating that?

Larry Baer:

It's a really good thing. I mean, I think there's, you know, there are some boundaries that have been created in some of the leagues, not all the leagues, around control and board seats and all of that. And we have some private equity firms and institutional capital that own multiple teams in the same league. So you have to have those boundaries. But I think what it does is it creates, obviously, liquidity opportunities for investors. What that really means is we can get more investors in because there's just a more fluid system. In the old days, somebody owned, you know, 1% of the Giants, 3% of the Giants, 5%. And it was just like, you just hold it. But we have 35 Giants investors. And if curated the right way, we can have 35 evangelists for the Giants in the community. And they own various businesses or they're working in various communities, and they can be out there, you know, talking about the Giants. So I think what it does is it broadens things. I look at some of the other teams that have changed owners and have come to kind of a model like this. It reminded me of our group in ‘93 because it was kind of like a group of civic leaders or people that have connections to improve the community and do it as a civic gesture. So we want more of that. And I think with, you know, equity cap, private equity, institutional capital, that just promotes a more liquid system.

David Stiepleman:

Favorite piece of writing or movie about baseball? Movie?

Buster Posey:

I'd probably have to go movie, The Sandlot. I think it's just the perfect picture of what childhood baseball should look like with a bunch of friends. Out playing and getting into a little bit of trouble here and there and I just always felt like that movie had a great way of showing what the game was about. You know, it ultimately is a kid's game, and I think that's why the fans are drawn towards major league players that play with reckless abandonment and passion when they're out there, even as adults.

Larry Baer:

I'd say Field of Dreams. I mean, to me, it reminds me of going to games with my dad. I would go to Candlestick and watch Willie Mays, but that field, when I walked in the ballpark, it was beautiful. It was the green grass. It was dreamlike for me as a teenager, as a young kid growing up. And you know, I love reading. There's so many great ones. I mean, the one thing about baseball also is there's literature, there's cinema around baseball that I'm not sure exists in the other sports. I loved reading some of Roger Angell's pieces in The New Yorker and David Halberstam’s book on New York.

David Stiepleman:

The Boys of Summer.

Larry Baer:

Yeah. The Boys of Summer. Spectacular. About just the majesty of the game in those days and it's different. As Buster was saying, I mean, there's different majesty now. I mean, I'm not sure there's ever been players like Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge ever play the sport in the history of the sport.

David Stiepleman:

Cool. That's a great way to leave it. Thank you guys. Let's go Giants. Thanks for everything. Really happy to be here with you guys. We appreciate it, so thank you.