Buster Posey Sucks, But Don’t Take My Word For It

There was a very awkward moment in the July 16 episode of The Executive Show, on KNBR in San Francisco. The hosts, Brian Murphy and Markus Boucher, were talking with Giants executive Buster Posey, making his first appearance on the show since May 21. According to SFGate, that May interview was “testy,” and Posey subsequently bailed on the episode scheduled for June 25, possibly due to hurt feelings but also possibly because he was too busy making a huge mess of the team’s stupid Pride Night meltdown. So his return to the show Thursday was a bit of a delicate matter. It did not go well.

Posey is a huge drag on the radio. The Giants stink, and as the architect of this mess, Posey is probably not in a great mood these days. What’s particularly deflating is his way of inflecting his voice so that it sounds like he’s just speaking plain truths, just being square with you, and then you listen closely to what he’s saying and there’s just nothing of substance to it. It’s like listening to a lecture on home warranties, but somehow delivered in platitudes, by Eeyore.

During the show’s middle segment, Posey was asked to evaluate his team’s first-half performance and to share his impressions of what has gone right and what has gone wrong so far this season. The Giants are presently 41–55, fourth in their division and third from the bottom in the National League. They are a plodding, weary, strikingly juiceless team: The Giants are last in walks and stolen bases, but don’t do nearly enough slugging to make up for it, and as a consequence have scored fewer runs than all but one NL team. Also, they have the league’s third-worst fielding percentage. Hell, while we’re here, Giants rookie skipper Tony Vitello has the National League’s worst overturn percentage among managers. It’s a bad baseball team.

Posey droned on for several minutes about walks. His team draws too few of them, and also issues too many of them, and that seems to be all that ails them. He listed some guys who are doing OK, but then he described the team’s performance as “confounding”—you do not love to hear of confusion from the person at the very top of your team’s baseball hierarchy—and noted that the Giants “just haven’t played the caliber of baseball that we need to in order to win games.” One of the show’s hosts followed up by asking whether any of this might reflect on Vitello, a goofy, panting golden retriever of a fella who is very obviously out of his depth as a manager. Posey absently moseyed around it by pondering whether Giants players are psyching themselves out, and then assured listeners that Vitello is also aware of that possibility. Toward the end of Posey’s segment, he offered his “frank” evaluation that Vitello and his staff “are doing a really good job,” and used the word “clickbait” to hedge against any confused head-scratching that might be inspired by this statement. God, he sucks.

Minutes later, after Posey had clocked out and the show’s hosts were recapping the segment, a hot microphone caught a producer doing an audio check, and then saying, loud and clear, “Posey sucks, man.” That section of the episode has been clipped from the show’s audio recording, and the YouTube video containing the awkward moment has been deleted altogether and replaced with one that cuts off after the end of Posey’s interview.

Someone is almost certainly going to be fired over this. Not the guy who sucks. The other guy, the one who was both frank and honest.