The Los Angeles Dodgers are talking to their former general manager and ex-San Francisco Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi about returning to the organization, league sources told The Athletic on Tuesday.
No deal has been finalized, and the role Zaidi would play in the Dodgers’ front office is unclear. But the Dodgers would be a logical landing spot for the former Athletics, Dodgers and Giants executive, who lost his job with San Francisco in September.
Zaidi had run the Giants’ baseball operations department since the end of the 2018 season, leading the only team to unseat the Dodgers’ decade-plus run of dominance in the National League West in 2021. Yet the Giants failed to make the postseason or even finish above .500 in any other year of Zaidi’s tenure. He was replaced as president of baseball operations by longtime Giants catcher Buster Posey.
For as much as the Giants sought to add a star to center Zaidi’s vision around, they often found themselves on the outside looking in – including in the race for Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who each signed with the Dodgers as part of the franchise’s $1.4 billion offseason last winter. While the Giants did land star third baseman Matt Chapman and two-time Cy Young winner Blake Snell last offseason, the Giants still finished 80-82. Snell recently signed a five-year, $182 million deal with the Dodgers.
Farhan Zaidi (left) and Andrew Friedman (right) address the media after manager Don Mattingly’s departure from the Dodgers in 2015. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)
With the Dodgers, Zaidi would return to the place where he served as general manager for four seasons under president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman, reshaping an organization already at the beginning of a stretch of dominance and putting forth the early steps in what Friedman has long aspirationally called “the golden era of Dodger baseball.” In those four seasons, the Dodgers won the division each season, clinched their first pennant in 29 years and found breakthroughs in young, ascending talents like Corey Seager and Cody Bellinger (both inherited from the previous regime) and Walker Buehler. They also unearthed early modern player development success stories, with Zaidi among those chiefly credited with the acquisitions of Max Muncy and Chris Taylor, both of which have now been part of the core of two World Series champion clubs in Los Angeles.
That made him a highly-sought after executive among clubs, not just when he was hired in San Francisco but this winter.
(Top photo of Farhan Zaidi: Suzanna Mitchell/San Francisco Giants/Getty Images)
