Buster Posey rode into the San Francisco Giants’ top baseball decision-maker role as a white knight.

Experience in running a baseball team? Who needs it?

Posey, after all, is a winner. Three World Series rings prove it. His impeccable reputation on and off the diamond backs up the claim.

He saw something was amiss with his team, so he returned to fix it.

The Giants have posted one playoff season since 2016. The team’s front office was racking up high-profile failure after failure in the organization’s quest to land big-time free agents. The gap between the Giants and the arch-rival Dodgers is the largest in 40 years.

So you can call it a short-sided compulsion, an ego trip, or a vocation, but Posey couldn’t sit back and watch anymore. As part of the Giants’ ownership group, Posey could have created a new role for himself anywhere in the baseball operations department, exerting soft power in a bid to right the San Francisco ship.

Instead, he fired Director of Baseball Operations Farhan Zaidi after seven aimless years and took on the top job.

He’s all in.

Yes, Posey Way isn’t just a future side street by Oracle Park — it’s how the Giants will be run for as long as No. 28 wants the gig.

Posey’s first offseason in charge of a big-league team has been … interesting. It’s been a whirlwind, to be sure, for Posey, the Giants, and Major League Baseball as a whole.

But while the boss is learning his new trade on the fly, we’re discovering what that Posey Way is.

Ironically, soft power is the name of the game.

Listen to Posey speak over the last few months, and one word comes up again and again:

Culture.

While the Dodgers go out and sign anyone they want (including a handful of the top free agents the Giants wanted to sign), building up the most potent lineup this side of the steroid era, the Giants, it seems, are keen to win through the power of friendship.

In the era of quantification, where everything about the game is tracked and, ergo, managed, Posey is beginning his career in personnel looking to recreate the sport’s secret sauce.

And it stands to reason: the Giants didn’t win three titles on his watch because they were the best team in baseball in each of those campaigns. The Giants have won 95-plus regular-season games once in the last 20 years. It just so happened to be Posey’s final season, 2021.

But the best Giants teams — and perhaps baseball’s best teams, even in this era — find a way to maximize their talent in the biggest moments.

The Giants still spent a bit in Posey’s first offseason — shortstop Willy Adames signed the largest contract in franchise history in December (overtaking Posey), solidifying, at least for a few years, the team’s most prominent position of need.

But in the press conference announcing (celebrating?) the Adames signing, Posey consistently harked to the 29-year-old Dominican’s reputation as a “unique connector of people.”

“Great defender, great offense, clutch hitter, but most importantly … we got a great person,” Posey told reporters. “It’s one of those things that’s hard to measure. I know I’ve read some stuff from former managers and other front offices that have had him over the years, and it’s pretty sterling, sparkling endorsements that they give this guy. We’re thrilled that Willy’s a San Francisco guy.”

And when the Giants — having lost out on their top two free agent starting pitching targets, Corbin Burnes (Diamondbacks) and Roki Sasaki (Dodgers) — turned to 42-year-old Justin Verlander to fill out the team’s rotation, the conversation didn’t center around the veteran fading his fastball and increasing his slider use against righties to bounce back from a 5.49 ERA season in 2024.

No, it was about — you guessed it — culture.

“You want to be part of a team you can have fun with,” Verlander said. “From everything I’ve heard, the culture that’s been built in this organization is something special. That’s one of the most important ingredients … You can fill the room with all the talent in the world, but … it isn’t going to win [for] you in the playoffs.”

If only the Giants had the luxury of testing that hypothesis.

“There’s a lot of benefit for everybody else on that staff,” Posey said of adding Verlander. “I mean, this is a future Hall of Famer. How does he go about his business? How does he walk into the park each day? How does he carry himself during a good outing or a bad outing? What’s his work ethic? All of those things — I think it’s hard to measure that value, but I believe they’re really important.”

And perhaps they will prove invaluable.

The problem is that while Verlander and Adames can bring the Giants so many positive, unquantifiable things, wins and losses are, in fact, counted.

Posey might believe that the Giants are in the “memory-making business,” as he said at his introductory press conference, adding: “Sure, winning is great, and ultimately that’s our goal, but the overall big picture of being a part of something bigger than yourself is really appealing.” But that kind of holistic approach only flies until the standings become live. After that, the Giants are in the business of winning games. As it stands now, the nation’s leading sportsbooks are expecting the Giants to have another mediocre, roughly .500, non-playoff season. FanDuel has the Giants winning 79 or 80 games in 2025.

Zaidi’s numbers-over-everything approach might be out in favor of Posey’s people-can’t-be-quantified approach might be in, but the output is projected to be the same.

And while that says nothing about the Giants’ future — Posey’s No. 1 responsibility is to build up this team’s bottom-of-the-barrel farm system, a job that will take years — patience will be a hard sell to a fan base that has seen this flush-with-cash organization abdicate their near-sacred responsibility of competing with their arch-rivals in Los Angeles.

That’s the other fun part about prioritizing chemistry — the unquantifiable is cheaper than buying up home runs and strikeouts (those pesky things everyone understands). Sure enough, as of mid-January, the Dodgers — who are estimated to bring in 20 percent more revenue than the Giants annually — have double the payroll of San Francisco ($369 million to $181 million).

In fact, Giants’ payroll is down nearly $20 million from 2023.

Yes, the Giants, one of the most valuable operations in sports (the fifth-most valuable baseball team in the world, per Forbes) and the sole big-league team in America’s most affluent metro area, are cutting payroll under part-owner Posey’s watch. They’re not even close to being a luxury tax-paying team, outspent by every team in the division but the perpetually last-place Rockies.

Posey knows all this. He might be inexperienced, but he’s no dummy.

In turn, he knows that the excitement that came with his appointment will fade without a turnaround on the field.

At some point, wins and losses will be counted, and all those forces that folks who have never lived in a big-league clubhouse couldn’t possibly understand will have to manifest, and the Posey Way will have to lead the Giants back to relevance.

And time, the most quantifiable asset of all, is off the essence. Because, just like Posey, Giants fans won’t be patient.

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