In his October 2024 introductory press conference as the new president of baseball operations of the San Francisco Giants, Buster Posey declared, "We're in the memory-making business." No matter any outsized belief in RBI, it was the strongest repudiation of the old Farhan Zaidi regime, an optimized, min-maxed platoon machine with a veritable lack of new dudes, which spent each year scuttling about trying to sneak into the Wild Card, caught lightning in a bottle in 2021, and—after showing prediction models who's boss—never broke .500 since. It doesn't matter if Matt Chapman never puts up another 7 rWAR season, or if Willy Adames is the ideal guy to drop a $182 million contract on—so long as the Giants' roster winds up with people to root for, year over year, Posey's team-building philosophy will readily outperform Zaidi's as a maker of memories.
Combine commitment to the memory-making business with an optimized, min-maxed machine, and you wind up with the Los Angeles Dodgers, who are, if you missed it, ruining baseball. Admittedly, signing a guy so fans and future fans alike will have someone to root for is a bit different from signing every guy on the market; the latter is, to simplify a bit, the Dodgers' approach to this past offseason. So far, Los Angeles has signed or extended, in a semi-rapid succession of long-term contracts: Blake Snell, Tommy Edman, Hye-seong Kim (a 25-year-old free agent with 37 career home runs in the KBO, who is not to be confused with cool Padres guy Ha-seong Kim), and then, in the span of one week, Roki Sasaki, Tanner Scott, and Kirby Yates.