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Before Thursday’s victory over the Miami Marlins, the San Francisco Giants found themselves losing seven straight games before ending their losing streak Thursday. With the second-worst record in the National League, and the 2019 MLB Draft beginning on Monday, the Giants would love to find the next Mike Trout. Current Giants President of Baseball Operations Farhan Zaidi almost landed Trout back in 2009 with the Oakland Athletics.

Zaidi joined Tolbert & Lund Thursday afternoon on 680 to discuss the latest with the Giants, as well as him telling a story about almost drafting Trout back in 2009. Scouting high school players is not an easy task, and Zaidi experienced that first hand, missing out on the best player in baseball.

“It’s really not easy, and I’ll make that story worse with the fact that I was with Billy (Beane) on that trip,” Zaidi said “It was probably the one trip we made out together that year, we doubled up on the worst game that Trout had as a senior.”

The A’s were not the only team that passed on Trout, who was drafted 25th overall in 2009. Beane and the A’s ended up drafting Grant Green, who just beat out Trout for the number one spot on the A’s draft board. If Trout had shown just a little bit more in front of Beane and Zaidi, he may have ended up in Oakland.

“He did not get the ball out of the infield, he took batting practice before the game with wood, didn’t drive the ball at all. Billy and I both left there saying: ‘Look, we’re not going to bang this guy, but obviously that wasn’t an impressive look.’ We look back all the time and say ‘Look if he had hit one ball hard or hit a ball out, it might have been different.’ We didn’t move him down the draft board based on our look, but there’s no doubt that when you have senior people go in and light them up, it’s going to positively impact the guy and his draft position.”

In hindsight, nobody knew just how good Trout would turn out to be for the Angels. After the A’s decided to pass on Trout, Zaidi joked that the decision did not go over well with the teams scouting department.

“After that, I think the scouting director wanted to just chain us to our desks and make sure we didn’t mess up his board.”

Right now on social media, especially Twitter, Zaidi, and the Giants have some fans expressing their frustrations with the team. Even though he does not have a public Twitter account, Zaidi has experienced the social media backlash first-hand during the 2009 draft.

“There’s another small, historical fact that comes from that. In 2009, when I was over there with the A’s, social media and Twitter were just taking off and they had me live-tweeting during the draft. At first, they asked me to live-tweet about every pick that was made. So when the Trout pick was made, I was tweeting every team’s pick on the A’s account, and there were some angry comments below what I posted saying ‘stick to the A’s, we don’t care about these other teams.’

Mission Control, aka A’s Draft Room 2009 – Scouts are here, computers are going, The Board is covered in names. Let the fun begin! #MLBdraft — Oakland A’s (@Athletics) June 9, 2009

Unfortunately for him, this tweet is still out there. Now knowing how great Trout turned out to be, this tweet (which Zaidi himself tweeted) did not age well…

“There’s actually a tweet in the archives, I was just kind of typing out tweets and it says ‘Our division rivals the Angels take Mike Trout, he was the next guy up on our board’ after taking Grant Green. So that’s actually out there in the public domain.”

Our division rival Angels take 2 HS OFs — Randal Grichuk & Mike Trout. Trout is in the MLB Network studio…he was in the mix for us at 13. — Oakland A’s (@Athletics) June 10, 2009

Missing out on Trout has to hurt for all 24 of the teams that passed on him in 2009. With the Giants drafting tenth overall in the first round of Monday’s draft, let’s hope the next Mike Trout does not slip through Zaidi and the Giants’ hands.

Listen to the full interview with Farhan Zaidi here:

