Posey explains why Giants chose not to chase Soto in free agency

Posey explains why Giants chose not to chase Soto in free agency originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area

DALLAS — The offseason has had a bit of a theme in recent years for the Giants, and for much of 2024 it looked like this one would fall right in line. The organization has been chasing superstars since Buster Posey still was a player and repeatedly has come up short, often finishing second.

It was Shohei Ohtani, Giancarlo Stanton, Bryce Harper and Aaron Judge, and then Ohtani again, this time at the same time as Yoshinobu Yamamoto. When Juan Soto visited Oracle Park this year and made it look small, it seemed he would be next to hear rumors that the Giants might win the bidding, but they never materialized.

The Giants always will do their due diligence, of course, but there wasn’t much energy spent on courting Soto. They never were seriously connected to him, with the five finalists being the New York Mets, New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Toronto Blue Jays and Los Angeles Dodgers.

Willy Adames was the priority for the Giants and Posey locked him up a couple of days before Soto agreed to terms with the Mets. On Wednesday’s Giants Talk Podcast, he explained why the Giants didn’t pursue Soto the way they did Ohtani, Judge and others.

“I think it’s a gut feel as much as anything,” Posey said. “That’s a word that I think probably a lot of — as numbers-driven as we are today — probably would be spurned a lot of times, but I think you’ve got to trust that. I think sometimes with instincts, there’s more to instincts than maybe sometimes you even know individually. There are certain cues that you pick up along the way that maybe might not even be verbalized. You try to gather all that information for yourself, you try to gather it from the group, and then take it and make the best decision you can.”

Ohtani had long been on the radar at Oracle Park before he hit free agency and team officials talked openly about Judge in the months leading up to his own open market. It was relatively quiet on the Soto front this past season, though, even when he visited in June and had a two-homer game.

The industry always believed Soto would wind up back in New York, either with the Mets or Yankees. It ended up being the Mets, who gave him a jaw-dropping deal that will pay $765 million over 15 years and could end up being worth more than $800 million when all is said and done. There was no outbidding Steve Cohen, the sport’s richest owner, and Posey said he was aware of that as the process started, even if he never gave much thought to what the final number might look like.

“Sure, that was a thought,” Posey said. “We weren’t in it there at the end, so it’s hard to say, but it was a thought.”

The Giants knew Adames was far more realistic and they locked him up before Soto made his own decision, keeping some of the Soto contenders from potentially driving up the price or winning the Adames bidding altogether. Adames got a franchise-record deal, breaking Posey’s mark of $167 million.

Posey now has been involved in the three biggest contracts in franchise history: His own and the ones he helped negotiate with Adames and Matt Chapman. But even if you add all three together, you still come up more than $250 million short of Soto’s number, which shattered Ohtani’s record from a year ago.

Posey’s initial reaction after he saw the news wasn’t about money, though.

“My first thought is that my oldest kids will be 28 when he’s done playing,” he told reporters on Monday. “That really puts it in perspective.”

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