One of the architects of the championship era has passed.
Sad news today as one of the key figures of the Championship Era has died. Bill Neukom, 83, was the managing general partner for the San Francisco Giants from 2008 to 2011. On this site, he was simply called “Bow Tie” because he was a man who loved a bow tie. He was the catalyst for bringing the Baseball Operations department into the 21st century.
Alex Simon has a great writeup of Neukom’s background in SF Gate if you want a bit more detail, but the bottom line is that he wanted to give the team an identity (“The Giants’ Way”). Previously, it had been Willie Mays, Humm Baby!, and Barry Bonds, but with no guiding ethos behind the scenes. The reason he was pushed out by the ownership group was because he reinvested profits back into the team without approval.
He was as close to the 1980s version of Eddie DeBartolo as the Giants will ever get, and it’s for this reason alone that he should be remembered for generations to come. He stood out from the players and the typical scouts and execs because of his style and because of his air (more on that later) and he even set himself apart from most of ownership because he embraced baseball rather than see it as a potential slush fund for real estate investment. Neukom was the type of elite we rarely see now, whose success in corporate law didn’t end there. He was involved in civil rights cases, teaching young lawyers, and ran the American Bar Association for a year. The Giants were like a reward after years of hard work elsewhere.
In that way, he is the last of a line of true baseball fans who helped give us the Giants as we know them today. Peter Magowan and Sue Burns and Bill Neukom were all wealthy people who invested in the Giants because they loved baseball first. And if you think I’m being rosy about their motivations, I am simply saying that their interest was more than making sure they were seen on camera. Burns, in particular, knew everyone who worked at the park on a first name basis and had a close relationship with Barry Bonds. Magowan was the architect of the franchise’s survival and successful rebrand, but Neukom capably took the baton in this metaphorical relay race and got the team past the finish line in record time. There’s perhaps a bit of irony that Magowan’s exit, as with Neukom’s, was in part because of too much success (albeit through Barry Bonds’ PED use). Success breeds contempt!
It wasn’t a matter of good timing on his part that the team won a championship shortly after he became the team’s control person, a spot now occupied by Greg Johnson (who succeeded Larry Baer). As Simon references in his SF Gate piece:
[…] Neukom reportedly drew the ire of his fellow owners for freely spending money the team earned from its World Series success […] According to the San Jose Mercury News, those expenditures included off-field items, like buying new technology for the front office
It’s entirely possible I’m stepping on a writeup Roger Munter plans to do over at his indispensable There R Giants site, so please forgive me, Roger, but back in 2023, he tweeted this long thread:
attended a local SABR event last weekend which included that fascinating session on AI in MLB. One brief anecdote that’s worth sharing for my fellow #SFGiants fans.
Discussing adoption of AI in MLB, panelist Brian Hall, a prof at NYU, mentioned AI program he’d developed…
and w help of Vince Gennaro promoted to MLB teams. Program focused on maximizing lineups/batting order for teams based on hitters vs opposing SP and expected RP usage for game, considering contexts like performances against certain types of pitches etc.
As he was describing AI program, thought to myself “sounds lot like what Giants were doing in 2021.” So no surprise to hear him go on to say “first MLB team to use this program was the Giants.” AHA! thought I. Then he went on to say “and in the first year that they used it…”
won 107 games?” I mentally finished sentence for panelist. But no, real conclusion to sentence was “they won a World Series for 1st time in [franchise] history. And when they won 2 more in 4 yrs, it made it pretty easy to gain acceptance of program across MLB.”
From which story we learn once again that widely perceived notion that Giants previous FO administration as luddites as “gut thinkers” now given way to cutting edge minds is a paltry mythology. They were way ahead of game a decade plus ago and continue to push thought boundaries
So, we have Bow Tie to thank for the Giants’ investment in artificial intelligence over 15 years ago, and it stands to reason that the current ownership group has been coasting off the success from his brief stewardship ever since.
The Giants’ Borg-like ownership group creates an environment where credit is shared and failure is individuated and in the post-Neukom configuration we’ve seen less and less gumption from that tier of the organization along with public humiliations that have tarnished the team’s image. That’s compelled whoever the control person is to put more pressure on Baseball Ops to save their bacon, to the point that now a franchise icon has been brought in to give the team a new identity.
As we’re seeing with Posey, though, strong leadership can unlock an organization’s potential. At the end of the day, it does come down to the execs, scouts, coaches, and players to use the resources they’ve been given to put together the best team possible and play to the best of their abilities, but no consistently great organization would argue that such success doesn’t start at the top.
Bill Neukom is the last in the line of the great stewards the franchise had as it moved into Oracle Park. The Giants of today could not exist without his Giants’ Way.