S.F. Giants Chair Greg Johnson discussed his team\u2019s offseason priorities, building stronger ties to the Japanese baseball market, the club\u2019s budget outlook and how fan support remains a bright spot after an up-and-down season, according to a Q&A with Susan Slusser of the S.F. CHRONICLE. Questions and answers have been edited for clarity and brevity. <\/p>\n
Q: How do you ensure that the Giants make inroads into the market for Japanese players?<\/p>\n
Johnson: \u201c[GM] Zack Minasian has spent a lot of time there in his career. He met with those players when they were there. Obviously L.A. has done a great job building those ties to Japan, and the more players you have in the locker room speaking Japanese, probably the easier it\u2019s going to be to draw more talent. We\u2019re just going to keep pressing it, we\u2019re not going to concede that territory to anybody. It is important to have those players come in, so I think that has to be a priority for us to make sure we\u2019re doing everything we can to attract that talent to the Giants. But it\u2019s difficult when L.A. has built that presence and there are 10 million people watching Dodger games in Japan.<\/a>\u201d <\/p>\n Q: Where do you see things going with the budget?<\/p>\n Johnson: \u201cIt\u2019s been reported we\u2019re at somewhere around $185 million … We do know we\u2019ve got to address some of the issues to strengthen the team, and that\u2019s our plan. I know you (media) guys don\u2019t believe it, but we don\u2019t have a (specific budget) number we kind of look at. We look at all the needs and how best to address them and depending on the player, the opportunity, we will raise that number. It really is dependent on whether it\u2019s short term, long term.\u201d <\/p>\n Q: The CBA is ending after this next season. How much of a concern is that and is it a consideration with the budget? <\/p>\n Johnson: \u201cThat\u2019s kind of a separate issue that we\u2019re not really thinking about in terms of free agency. I\u2019m hopeful that we will not have a work stoppage. That\u2019s about all I can say on that topic because it just doesn\u2019t serve anyone to speculate on where things are going.\u201d <\/p>\n Q: No one in the organization was happy with the end results, finishing 81-81, but one thing that jumped out to everyone around the team was the fan support. Even during some pretty grim stretches, the ballpark was mostly full and the atmosphere was positive.\u202f<\/p>\n Johnson: \u201cThe fans have been incredible. We were up about 10 percent in attendance. Part of it is that the city is\u202fback. The city\u2019s vibrant, the city\u2019s going. You had a period where maybe people didn\u2019t go to a game for a while. Now they\u2019re back in the city and feeling like, \u2018Hey, let\u2019s go back out to the Giants.\u2019 I also think the lineup has some personalities and if fans can identify with the players, it goes a long way, they\u2019re much more engaged. \u2026 The [President of Baseball Operations Buster Posey] factor is a positive for the fans, having him at the help and supporting what he\u2019s doing\u201d (S.F. CHRONICLE, 11\/4<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"S.F. Giants Chair Greg Johnson discussed his team\u2019s offseason priorities, building stronger ties to the Japanese baseball market,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[3307,49,48,139,462,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-263923","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-leadership","12":"tag-mlb","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}