SAN FRANCISCO — When longtime Giants employees sat down in a suite on the 62nd floor of the Delano hotel last Monday morning, they immediately noticed a difference. There were no scouts in the room.
For the first time in years, the Giants did not bring any of their scouts to the annual MLB Winter Meetings, instead relying on a smaller group in the suite that had slightly different kinds of conversations.
Now, that’s not to say the Giants are going all in one direction. It was notable that one of the first things that president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi did as a Giant was beef up the scouting department, hiring Zack Minasian as director of pro scouting and Michael Holmes as director of amateur scouting.