- Editor’s Note: Alex Pavlovic’s new book “The Franchise: San Francisco Giants: A Curated History of the Orange and Black,” hits bookshelves Tuesday, July 8. The following is an excerpt regarding the team’s pursuit of Bryce Harper during the 2018-19 offseason. You can purchase the book HERE.
For all of the attention that was paid to the Jon Lester chase (in 2014), the Giants never really felt he was coming to San Francisco. Larry Baer, Brian Sabean, Bobby Evans and Bruce Bochy flew to Atlanta to meet with Lester and Buster Posey, who lived a few miles away, but it was pretty apparent that he would choose the Cubs. As they walked out of the meeting, Bochy, as good a judge of body language as anyone in the sport, turned to the others and said Lester wasn’t coming to San Francisco.
Lester was high-profile, but over the years, the Giants had fallen just short on plenty of others, from Pudge Rodriguez to Zack Greinke. The first pursuit of Shohei Ohtani was a long shot, but the Giants did their best to stand out. Trainer Dave Groeschner laid out a plan for the Japanese superstar to pitch every six days and play the outfield. Bochy added a personal touch by learning some Japanese from bullpen catcher Taira Uematsu. But the Giants could tell that Ohtani didn’t love their plan to use him in the outfield, and he chose to play in Anaheim, where he could be a designated hitter.
The other target that offseason, Giancarlo Stanton, was also best suited to DH, but back then, he was an outfielder and the reigning NL MVP. The sides agreed to a deal that would send Stanton to San Francisco in exchange for Denard Span and minor leaguers Jacob Gonzalez and Andrew Suarez, with the Marlins potentially sending about $40 million over the next decade to help offset some of the $295 million left on his deal. But a week after meeting with the Giants at a hotel in Los Angeles, Stanton used his no-trade clause to rebuff them and the Cardinals and land in New York.
Falling short on Ohtani and Stanton helped usher in a new front office, and a few months in, Farhan Zaidi made a run at one of the game’s best players. In just about every way, Bryce Harper was the perfect fit.
He was just 26, making him the rare superstar who could chase another title with the existing core but also be around long enough to lead a future generation. While Harper had some of the worst numbers of his career at Oracle Park, he loved the atmosphere. Sure, he always found it chilly, but he had faced the Giants in the 2014 postseason and never forgot what it was like to play in front of that crowd.
The Giants were a late entrant in the sweepstakes, with Baer, Zaidi and Bochy flying to Las Vegas to meet Harper, his wife and agent Scott Boras at a casino near his home in early February. Years earlier, Harper had played on a travel team called the San Diego Stars that got field passes for a Padres game. He got to meet Bochy, and he remembered how all of his fingers disappeared in the former catcher’s huge hands. When they met again in 2019, Harper told Bochy he would love to play for him, but he needed to know how long they might be together. He knew Bochy was going into the final year of his contract and had not announced his future plans. Harper’s one shot at free agency was too big a decision for any uncertainty.
“We had a great meeting. They’re a great organization and they have been for a long time,” Harper said. “The biggest thing for me was asking Bochy if he was going to be here, and he said no, he had just one year left. I think that was the thing that really scared me the most.”
The question was still bouncing around Harper’s head as he neared a decision a few weeks later. A night before it was announced, he called Brandon Crawford and asked about the team and the organization. He also asked if the shortstop had any insight into what the plan was after Bochy retired.
Nobody did at the time, and the next day, Harper reached a $330 million deal with the Phillies. The Giants had offered him $310 million over 12 years, and while they signaled to Boras that they could stretch higher if needed, there was a lot of ground to be made up because of the difference in state taxes. There was also another problem. “The key thing,” Boras said, “is they were late to the event.” Boras and Harper thought the meetings with the Giants went well, but they were always chasing offers from the Phillies and never caught up.
In a twist, the succession plan to Bochy ended up being to hire Gabe Kapler, who was Harper’s manager in his first year in Philadelphia. “You never know what’s going to happen, right?” Harper said. “I love Philadelphia. I love where I’m at and I’m very happy with the decision. It came down to Philadelphia or San Francisco, and I just felt that for me and my family, it felt right that we were going to go to Philadelphia.”
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