SANTA CLARA – Buster Posey has reached out to 49ers’ general manager John Lynch, and Lynch is eager to take the call.
Lynch, handpicked by coach Kyle Shanahan as the 49ers G.M. in 2017 as a Fox analyst and with no experience in an NFL front office, is seen as a rough parallel with Posey, who was named the Giants’ director of baseball operations Monday in place of Farhan Zaidi.
“We have some mutual friends, and word got to me he’d love to sit down and talk,” Lynch said Friday morning during his weekly appearance on KNBR-680.
Lynch said he had gotten to know Zaidi, and believes the Giants should be in good shape going forward thanks to his stewardship.
Lynch believes Posey’s first order of business will be to formulate a game plan going forward.
“You think you know what your vision is for a place, but go through the exercise, with his top people on what’s really important. Who do you want to surround yourself with?” Lynch said. “He and (manager) Bob Melvin, go through it and say, `What is our vision? We think we know, but everybody in this building should know exactly what we feel is going to build a championship team and a championship culture.”
Lynch said he’s always admired Posey “from afar” and that his devotion to the organization will not be questioned. Lynch left his job at Fox in part because of his competitive nature and desire for standings and an end result, and thinks Posey probably had similar thoughts.
“(He’s) a guy who’s very comfortable in his own skin. He knows what it means to be a Giant,” Lynch said. “He’s beloved here because the guy came to play and played to win . . . he knows the commitment it’s going to take for he and his family. He was still willing to dive in.
“That, to me, means he still cares about this organization, No. 1, and that he’s kind of got a void in his life where he wants to win again and he wants to be a part of wins and losses and that’s a good thing for Giants fans.”
While Lynch had no prior experience with the 49ers as Posey did with the Giants, he felt he had gained an admiration and respect for the organization from a distance while a college player at Stanford.
“I had played for Bill Walsh, I had played for Denny Green. I knew Ronnie Lott. I knew Keena Turner, so I knew kind of the core, what it meant to be a 49er,” Lynch said. “I had never lived it, but I knew this was a place I always wanted to play. Buster knows in and out what it means to be a Giant, then you’ve got to put your own stamp on it, you can’t just rest on your laurels, you’ve got to make it happen again.
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“It’s important to know what kin dof people you surround yourself with, what are the players, and what are the qualities and then go to painstaking lengths to define that.”
Lynch said he was struck by a comment from radio play-by-play announcer Greg Papa on the practice field regarding Posey’s demeanor.
“Sometimes it helps to paint a picture when you don’t know someone and he said there’s a lot of similarities between Buster and Brock Purdy,” Lynch said. “And I think I got it right then, because it doesn’t seem like Buster’s a guy who doesn’t say a lot, kind of like E.F. Hutton when we were growing up. When he speaks, people listen.”