There's something poetically brutal about professional sports: the city that raised you doesn't get a loyalty discount.

Paul Toboni, the Washington Nationals' president of baseball operations, is a San Francisco kid through and through. We're talking Candlestick Park pilgrimages, Saint Brendan youth ball, West Sunset Little League, a stint at Saint Ignatius — the whole fog-soaked, Giants-cap-wearing childhood. He went on to play at Cal before climbing the front office ladder all the way to the top of a major league organization.

Just not this major league organization.

Toboni now runs the Nationals, which means every time Washington lines up against San Francisco, there's a local boy on the other side of the chess board scheming to take the Giants apart. It's the kind of storyline baseball was made for — hometown hero returns as the villain, except he's in a suit instead of cleats.

For a franchise like the Giants that has leaned heavily on its San Francisco identity and community roots, Toboni's rise is both flattering and a little embarrassing. The city's baseball infrastructure — its youth leagues, its high school programs, its culture of the game — produced a front office executive sharp enough to lead an MLB franchise. The Giants just didn't end up being the beneficiary.

This isn't a hit piece on the Giants' talent pipeline. Organizations can't hire every bright mind that grows up within city limits. But it's worth noting that San Francisco has a habit of exporting its best and brightest — in tech, in finance, and apparently in baseball operations too. At some point you have to ask: are we a city that develops talent, or a city that develops talent for other people?

Toboni's story is a great one. A kid from the Sunset who fell in love with baseball under the howling winds of Candlestick now calls the shots for a franchise in the nation's capital. We just wish he was calling them at Oracle Park.

Good luck, Paul — except when you're playing us.