Buster Posey, managing partner of the San Francisco Giants since September, has hired former teammates Nick Casali and Luis López to the front office. Both will work in baseball operations, reporting to president of baseball operations Zack Minasian. The hires fill out the roster-construction apparatus Posey is building around analytics, international scouting, and pro personnel—all areas the Giants lagged in payroll alignment during the Farhan Zaidi era.
Casali, 31, caught parts of seven seasons in the majors, including 41 games with the Giants in 2022. López, 38, spent 11 seasons in the minors and a brief window in the majors with the Phillies and Rays, then returned to Triple-A Sacramento in 2015 and 2017. Both speak Spanish fluently; López is Dominican, Casali grew up bilingual. Both know Posey's priorities from the dugout side—game-calling philosophy, pitcher maintenance, how a veteran catcher reads a staff in real time.
The hires matter because Posey is installing a front office in his image, not inherited architecture. He did not promote from within. He did not hire from the Ivy League pipeline. He hired players who sat in the same dugout, understand the Pacific time zone grind, and can translate front-office mandates to a coaching staff that still includes six holdovers from the Bruce Bochy era's final iteration. The Giants lost 88 games in 2024, finished fourth in the NL West, and carried the league's eighth-highest payroll at $206 million. That payroll bought 71 wins in 2023, 81 in 2022. The efficiency problem is not talent cost; it is talent identification and deployment.
Casali's move is the more lateral of the two. He retired after the 2023 season, worked briefly in player development, and now shifts to a hybrid role that blends advance scouting and major-league operations. He will travel with the team periodically, giving Posey a direct pipeline into dugout sentiment without needing manager Bob Melvin to play intermediary. López, who has been coaching in the Dominican Summer League and working as a roving catching coordinator, will oversee catching development across the system—a role that did not formally exist under Zaidi. The Giants have three catchers on the 40-man roster; none hit above .210 last season. The organizational depth is worse. López inherits a structural problem, not a talent reclamation project.
The timing is deliberate. Posey took over in late September, waited until after the GM meetings in early November, then made his first external hires in mid-December once the Winter Meetings concluded and front-office salary slots opened. He is filling positions Zaidi left vacant or underweighted—bilingual coaching pipeline, ex-player scouting voices, catching infrastructure. The Giants have not developed a plus-defensive catcher since Posey himself. They have not signed a marquee Latin American amateur since Marco Luciano in 2018 for $2.6 million. López and Casali address both gaps with one roster move.
The skeptical read: Posey is hiring friends, not résumés. The structural read: he is hiring fluency. Both men know how he thinks, how he wants information delivered, and which metrics he ignores. That matters more in year one than an Ivy League pedigree. The Giants' front office already has analysts; it lacks translators. Casali and López are translators.
Watch for more ex-players joining in operations roles before Spring Training. Posey has quietly reached out to four other former Giants about part-time scouting or development positions, per two people familiar. Watch the international amateur class in January; López's Dominican network is deep, and the Giants have $5.2 million in bonus pool space they have historically underspent. Watch whether Melvin's coaching staff gets turned over after 2025; if Posey is building his own infrastructure, the logical endpoint is his own dugout.
The Giants open Spring Training in 48 days. Casali and López start in January. The catching depth chart has not improved. The payroll is still $206 million. The hire is not the fix. The hire is the signal that Posey knows what was broken and is solving it with people who already speak his language.
The takeaway
Posey installs ex-teammates who know his priorities into baseball ops, filling bilingual coaching pipeline and catching development gaps Zaidi left vacant.
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