Book excerpt: How Buster Posey foresaw Giants' record-breaking 2021 MLB season originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area

• Editor’s Note: Alex Pavlovic’s new book “The Franchise: San Francisco Giants: A Curated History of the Orange and Black,” landed on 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.

In the spring of 2020, the Giants opened the doors of their new $50 million spring training headquarters. The stunning 40,000 square foot building has a multi-floor weight room, a clubhouse with 10 TVs and mood lighting, and an event space that doubles as an indoor infield on rainy mornings.

There is a float tank for recovery and the booth that Mike Murphy used to eat at every night at Don & Charlie’s. On the third floor, two decks overlook the playing fields and offer stunning views of Camelback Mountain. A lounge is set up with ping-pong tables and leather couches for team meetings.

It was in that room that Buster Posey reset expectations for the 2021 Giants.

It had been five years since the organization’s last postseason appearance and the Giants finished with a losing record during the shortened 2020 season, which Posey opted out of. With their catcher back to lead a rebuilt starting staff, the Giants were internally optimistic about being in the thick of the Wild Card race.

There was no talk of winning the NL West, which had been taken eight consecutive times by the Dodgers. The new staff took a measured approach as camp kicked off, but Posey, as was so often said when he made a perfect throw down to second base, wasn’t having it. 

As the entire team met in the lounge on the first day of camp, Posey had a sense that expectations needed to change. He stood up and talked about the importance of going game by game, series by series, and he talked passionately about how the lineup should focus on becoming the toughest set of nine outs possible. Then he turned to the big picture.

Posey knew that each season gets broken up into sections and overlooked teams often waited to see how they were faring later in the summer before taking a serious run at a division crown. But he felt the group in front of him had the talent to be pretty good, and he thought it was important to get in front of that from day one.

“The bar is not to sneak into a Wild Card spot, the bar for us with the Giants is to go out and win the division. There’s freedom in that, I think. It’s like, ‘All right, here’s the standard,’ and it’s a high bar but I think it also leads to confidence,” Posey said later. “Guys are like, well, shoot, the manager and these players believe we can do this, instead of just thinking we’re going to try to sneak in. I think it kind of rallied the guys early. The first day of camp, it was like, ‘All right, we’ve got to set the bar high.’ ”

The short speech struck the right chord, although there were still plenty who viewed the climb as impossibly steep.

“I’d say probably half the people in the room would admit to taking that with a grain of salt, like, ‘Yeah, but the Dodgers …’ ” said backup catcher Curt Casali.

But Posey had reminded them that it was a challenge worth tackling.

“That was important for us. At that point, nobody had given us a chance for a few years — nobody ever picked us to be first in that division,” Brandon Belt said. “But to hear it out loud from a leader of the team, it gives everybody else a bunch of confidence and gets their head in the right space. He got me in the right frame of mind. We had a few veterans speak up. I think that meeting in spring training was the turning point for us that year.”

It was a message that was particularly powerful coming from a player, but Posey might not have fully grasped how important it was to shift the tone. He had not been in the clubhouse a summer earlier when players started having long conversations about how seemingly everything about the Giants was changing.

The new front office and staff embraced openers, platoons and cutting-edge training and recovery methods. The lingo changed, with manager Gabe Kapler talking of putting his arms in buckets. There were “bulk innings pitchers” but also “sprinters.” The Giants irritated fans by announcing their starting pitchers at the last possible moment and opposing managers rolled their eyes at how late the lineup card would be sent over.

At times it seemed the staff was trying to challenge every tradition and method the game of baseball had, and not always for the better. Early in the 2020 season, a few veterans called a team meeting after a game to make sure that, for the players, at least, the priority was always on winning games.

The next spring, that was made clear from the start. An unlikely goal had been set, and seven months later, when Posey caught a 97 mph fastball to end the regular season, he raised both arms and looked to the sky. It took everything they had, but the Giants had won the NL West, and done so in historic fashion.

They set a franchise record with 107 wins, edging the Dodgers by one game in the first divisional race in which both teams won at least 105 games. It was the closest race in MLB history, with the Giants becoming the first to win 107 games but clinch their division on the final day, and the Dodgers setting a record for wins by a second-place team. After 162 games, the Giants made good on a message that Posey teased publicly shortly after he spoke to teammates. 

“As much as I think the sports world loves to try to predict everything, there’s still some parts of it that can’t be predicted,” Posey told reporters at the start of camp. 

His team ended up becoming the greatest outlier in franchise history. In MLB history, that type of win total is generally preceded by years of postseason performances or tanking to stockpile top picks. But the Giants went 29-31 in 2020 and then came back the next year and spent 125 days with the best record in baseball. They got contributions from every corner of the roster, winning endlessly at the margins, something that president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi preached when ownership hired him in 2018.

If ever there was a time for the Giants to take a full step back and tear it down to the studs, that winter of 2018 had seemed to be it. The Giants had lost 98 games a season earlier and then doubled down with expensive trades, but they seemed allergic to the word “rebuild.”

Larry Baer interviewed 10 candidates to lead the baseball operations department, but Zaidi always was a frontrunner. He built a glowing reputation in Oakland and then Los Angeles, and his vision aligned with what the Giants’ board had always embraced. He had no interest in tearing things down.

“Our ownership group has always been constructed in a way that we want to try to win every year and also develop. That’s probably the hardest thing in sports to do,” Baer said. “Some teams have done that — the [New England] Patriots, the [San Antonio] Spurs, the [New York] Yankees to some extent — and our ownership group is aspirational about trying to do that. Farhan matched those aspirations. That’s really what it came down to.“

Perhaps the Giants should have taken a step back. That might have put them in a better position over the long haul, but with key veterans like Posey and the Brandons still in the lineup, that was never really an option. Over the previous four seasons, the Giants won just 45 percent of their games, with GM Bobby Evans getting dismissed. Over the following three seasons, they went 240-246, a run of mediocrity that cost Zaidi and Kapler their jobs.

But in the middle of it all is a remarkable 162-game season. For six months, just about everything went right.

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The Yankees made an improbable comeback on Thursday night against the Mariners.

After Mariners starter Bryan Woo took a no-hitter into the eighth inning, the Yankees erased a five-run deficit in the final two innings before walking off Seattle, 6-5, in the 10th.

The turning point came in the ninth with the Yankees down 5-3 and going up against All-Star closer Andrés Muñoz. Trent Grisham and Cody Bellinger singled to pass the baton to Ben Rice with two outs. With Grisham on second base, it was clear from the broadcast that the Yankees outfielder had a tip on Muñoz's pitches, specifically the slider.

Grisham could be seen making a circular wave motion before Muñoz threw a slider, and didn't wave when a fastball was coming. And a Yankees source told The Athletic's Chris Kirschner and Brendan Kuty that they had indeed picked up on Muñoz's slider.

Rice fell behind 0-2 but took four straight balls -- two from sliders -- to load the bases. With Bellinger on second base, the former NL MVP did the same motion to give Austin Wells a heads-up on Muñoz. What eventually followed was Wells hitting a 3-2 fastball for a two-run single to tie the game.

An example of the Yankees catching Andres Munóz tipping. Watch Cody Bellinger at second base at the bottom of the frame. A Yankees source said the club had a tip on Munóz, and Cal Raleigh said it was obvious.

Story w/ @ChrisKirschner

READ: https://t.co/RNs2A90bhfpic.twitter.com/xgYQFH8WZO

— Brendan Kuty 🧟‍♂️ (@BrendanKutyNJ) July 11, 2025

With the score tied in the bottom of the 10th, the Yankees loaded the bases with one out and Aaron Judge delivered a walk-off sac fly -- with the assist of Anthony Volpe's slide -- to complete the comeback and sweep the three-game series from the Mariners.

“He was tipping it every time at second base,” Raleigh said via The Athletic after the game. “Obviously, they weren’t making it very discreet, I guess is the word. It’s part of the game. It’s our job. We should have known about that going into the series. That made it really hard there at the end.”

As Raleigh said, there's nothing illegal about the practice, but he put the onus on himself and the team for not figuring out Muñoz's tip sooner.

The 2025 MLB home run leader said he figured out Muñoz was tipping his pitches when he saw Grisham and Bellinger motioning to the batter, and tried to let his closer know, but admitted he didn't want to distract him. He said that the team will need to figure out how to combat that moving forward.

Entering Thursday's game, although Muñoz had five blown saves, his ERA was a minuscule 1.06, which included 8.1 consecutive scoreless innings over nine appearances. That's why he was named to his second career All-Star game this year.

The Yankees and Mariners won't meet again in the regular season, so if New York sees Muñoz again, it'll be in the postseason. Perhaps then, the Mariners would have figured out a way to hide Muñoz's slider...or the Yankees would be more discreet than they were on Thursday.

The stage was set for Aaron Judge to be the hero in the 10th inning of Thursday's matchup between the Yankees and Mariners.

After being no-hit for seven innings, the Yankees came back from five runs down to force extra innings and they were 90 feet away from taking the game and sweeping Seattle.

With the bases loaded and one out, Judge drove a hanging slider into shallow center field. Julio Rodriguez caught it and launched the ball to catcher Cal Raleigh at home. Anthony Volpe, who was on third, scampered home, but the throw beat him home. However, the Yankee shortstop dove headfirst and did a swim move to avoid the tag and get his hand onto home plate to seal the 6-5 win.

"That was sick. Totally went around him, got his hand in there," Austin Wells, whose two-run single tied the game in the ninth, said after the game. "That was a great slide."

"Rodriguez made a great throw but what a great slide by Volpe," manager Aaron Boone said of the play. "I had the best seat in the house for it. I saw his hand go right in there. I saw the throw was on target, I’m like, ‘oh no,’ but I saw his hand in there and Volpe jumped up safe. It was a good call by [homeplate umpire Nic Lentz]." 

With how shallow Judge's fly ball was, Boone was asked if Volpe's speed and ability to make slides like that are in the thought process to send him. Boone pointed to the situation as the deciding factor for the send of Volpe.

"With that being the second out there, you gotta force them to make the perfect throw," Boone explained. "Rodriguez, as good as he is, still has to make a perfect throw, which he actually did. But it’s absolutely have to go there."

Volpe's slide not only extended the Yankees' winning streak to four, but it gave Judge his first career walk-off sac fly. It also capped the Yankees' biggest comeback win since May 2023, when they trailed by six runs. It was especially impressive considering they were down by five runs after being no-hit by Mariners starter Bryan Woo for seven innings.

More impressive is that the Yankees are only the second team in the Expansion Era (since 1961) to win a game after going hitless and trailing by at least five runs through seven innings, according to Elias. The other team, the 1977 Pirates.

“I knew who was at third. My whole thought going into [that at-bat] was get the ball somewhere in the air and let 11 take care of the rest," Judge said. "Impressive. What a great slide. Nobody else I want at third in a situation like that besides Volpe."

Volpe finished 0-for-4 in Thursday's game, including flying out with an opportunity to walk-off the Mariners in the ninth inning. He's now only slashing .215/.290/.387 on the season. But the Yankees are happy to see their shortstop still find ways to impact and win them games.

A walk-off sac fly for Aaron Judge! pic.twitter.com/Ke2EVFkTaL

— Yankees Videos (@snyyankees) July 11, 2025