David Forst gave 27 years to the Oakland Athletics and, when John Fisher's franchise finally pried itself out of the Bay for Sacramento and eventually Las Vegas, Forst declined to go. On August 7 he and the A's parted ways; three days later the San Francisco Standard's Kerry Crowley argued the Giants should hire him despite already running one of the most crowded front offices in baseball. Crowley's right, but for a reason bigger than the org chart: a Bay Area franchise was gutted and dragged east, and its last lifer is standing here, unemployed, a BART ride from Oracle. The Giants absorbing him would be less a personnel move than an act of the region keeping one of its own.

Buster Posey's front office is so crowded the Giants reportedly knocked down a wall on broadcast row at Oracle Park so every graybeard could be heard. The San Francisco Standard's Kerry Crowley ran the roll call last week and it reads like a reunion: Zack Minasian, the GM. Bobby Evans, the former GM. Bruce Bochy. Dusty Baker. Jeff Berry, Posey's old agent. Javier Lopez and Curt Casali, old teammates. Paul Bien on the analytics. A lot of people who know how to win, Crowley wrote, and these days all they have to talk about is losing.

The Giants are 49-69, fourth in the NL West, going nowhere. So Crowley's pitch — add one more voice, David Forst, the freshly-unemployed A's GM — lands as a paradox with a shrug attached. What's one more chair in a room already this full?

I want to make the case louder than that, and I want to be honest about where it's soft. Because the reason to bring Forst across the bay isn't really the reason Crowley gives. It's not that the Giants need another smart guy. It's that a Bay Area team got hollowed out and hauled off, and the man who spent his whole adult life inside it is standing on the platform, and we have the room.

The exile

Forst joined the A's as a scout in 2000. He became assistant GM in 2004, GM in October 2015, and by the time he and the club "mutually agreed to part ways" on August 7 he'd given the organization 27 years. Twenty-seven. That's not a job, that's a life. Billy Beane, the man who hired him and then handed him the keys, once said he'd never had a better leader, mentor, and friend. This is Moneyball lineage. This is the last thread connecting the franchise on the field to the franchise in the movie.

And here's the part that should mean something to anyone who ever sat in the Coliseum's cheap seats: the reporting is that owner John Fisher never planned for Forst to move to Las Vegas, and Forst and his family didn't want to go. The franchise is squatting in a minor-league park in Sacramento, waiting on a Vegas stadium that may or may not materialize on schedule, and its general manager looked at the whole degrading migration and said, no, my life is here. There are outlets that call August 7 a firing. There are outlets — ESPN, others with the primary sourcing — that call it a mutual parting tied to the move. I lean toward the second, because it's better reported and because it's sadder and truer: this wasn't a man who lost his job so much as a man who wouldn't follow a franchise out of its home.

I've spent a lot of words in this space grieving what the television money did to the games I grew up on — leagues carved up and franchises hauled off, loyalty treated as the one asset with no line-item value. The A's are that wound in a baseball uniform. Fisher didn't lose Oakland. He left it, deliberately, and took a hundred years of baseball with him. Forst is what's left in the wreckage: an Oakland guy, a Bay Area guy, who wouldn't get on the bus.

The record, honestly

Now the part the Standard piece glides past. If you're going to sell Forst as the turnaround wizard the Giants' otherwise-experienced room somehow lacks, you have to reckon with what he actually built and what he didn't.

The good is real. The A's went from 75 wins in 2017 to 97 in each of 2018 and 2019, made three straight postseasons, won the 2020 AL West. He did it with a budget Fisher kept strangling — three winning years on money the Giants spend on a bullpen. His late-career rebuild, the one Fisher's payroll cuts forced on him, produced genuine young talent: Nick Kurtz, the 2025 AL Rookie of the Year, plus Jacob Wilson, Tyler Soderstrom, Lawrence Butler, Brent Rooker. Then he locked them up — Soderstrom eight years, Wilson seven, Butler seven, Rooker five — the exact "win with young talent and keep it" trick a rebuilding club dreams about.

But the core of those 97-win teams — Matt Chapman, Matt Olson — was drafted before Forst was GM. Marcus Semien was acquired. His best homegrown first-rounder in the GM chair was Sean Murphy, whom he later traded. And the draft, the very thing Crowley credits him with knowing? Oakland ranks near the bottom of baseball in first-round production since 2016. Kyler Murray took the NFL. Austin Beck, A.J. Puk, Logan Davidson — thin returns. The last two years of pitching development were a mess, and a chunk of his trades came back light.

So the clean story — Forst knows the draft, Forst knows development, hand him the Giants' loaded farm and watch it bloom — is only half true. He is a proven value-extractor and a good judge of a big-league roster on no money. He is not, on the evidence, a draft savant. If you bring him in as the guru who fixes a player-development pipeline the Giants themselves have fumbled for a decade, you may be buying a reputation the record only partly supports.

Why it still works

And yet. Everything Posey has assembled is a winner's memory — Bochy's rings, Baker's gravitas, Posey's own three titles. What that room has never actually done, outside of Evans and Minasian, is build a big-league roster while shepherding a farm system through the lean years. That's not a knock; it's a résumé gap. It is precisely the gap Forst has spent his entire career standing in. He has lived the thing the Giants are only now entering: the years when all your smart people have to talk about is losing. He knows what that feels like from the inside, on a budget, for a decade. Nobody in Posey's booth knows that. Forst knows nothing else.

The pitching failure and the draft misses are real, but consider the constraint he worked under. It is a lot easier to develop arms when your ownership lets you keep a coordinator, a facility, a plan — instead of selling the whole thing for parts every eighteen months and threatening to move the franchise the entire time. Put a value-extractor who never had resources into an organization that has them, and the floor of what he can do rises. The Giants have exceeded the luxury tax exactly once since 2017; they're hardly the Dodgers. But next to Fisher's A's, Posey's Giants are Versailles.

There's a smaller, human argument too, and it's the one I actually believe. In 2018, Forst reportedly turned down Giants interviews to keep his family in the Bay Area. He has, twice now, chosen this place over advancement. The A's rewarded that loyalty by leaving town without him. The Giants could reward it by making a chair.

Knock down another wall. The room's already loud. But one of those voices spent 27 years learning, on the cheapest baseball ownership in America, exactly how to lose with dignity and claw back anyway — and he learned it here, ten miles across the water, in a ballpark Fisher let rot. Bring him home. Not because the Giants are short on advisers. Because the Bay shouldn't let this one get on the bus to Vegas.