Private Equity Bought a Piece of My Giants.

I want to be honest about my conflict of interest here. I am a lifelong San Francisco Giants fan. I have been to somewhere north of fifty home games at Oracle Park. I watched the 2010 World Series in a bar in college and lost my voice. I watched the 2012 comeback against the Cardinals from my couch and did not sleep that night. I watched the 2014 title from home and texted my dad immediately after the final out the way you do when something big happens and you need to share it with the person who made you care about it in the first place.

The 2021 season I went to eight home games. I was taking the Caltrain in from the peninsula, walking up to Oracle Park from the station the way you do when it is a nice evening and the bay is visible and the whole thing feels like it costs nothing even when it costs something. One of those eight games was against the Arizona Diamondbacks in June. The D-backs came out and jumped to a 7-0 lead before the Giants had barely batted. The crowd got quiet the way it does when a game seems over before it starts. Then the Giants came all the way back. Mike Yastrzemski hit a go-ahead grand slam. Brandon Belt was everywhere. Giants scored nine runs and won 9 to 8 in one of the more chaotic and genuinely joyful games I have sat through. The crowd on Caltrain home that night was the kind of loud that does not need a reason to keep going. That was the 2021 Giants. That was the team that went 107 and 55 and made the whole Bay Area feel like something was happening again.

That team is what I think about when I hear that three private equity firms now own pieces of the franchise. Not because PE caused what came after. It did not. But because the distance between that Caltrain ride home in June 2021 and where the Giants are right now is enormous, and most of that distance can be explained in about four names.

Giancarlo Stanton. The Giants and Marlins had literally agreed to a trade in 2017 after Stanton's 59-homer MVP season. The players were named. The deal was done. Then Stanton used his no-trade clause to block it. He did not want to play at Oracle Park, which is a pitcher's park that suppresses home runs in a way that a guy swinging for the fences every at-bat does not love. The Giants pivoted to Andrew McCutchen and Evan Longoria instead.

Bryce Harper. The Giants went hard after him in 2019. Harper met with the team. He was genuinely close to signing. What pushed him to Philadelphia instead of San Francisco, he said later, was that Bruce Bochy was leaving. He called Bochy a legend and said the allure of playing for him was part of what made the Giants interesting. Bochy walked out the door and Harper walked toward Philly and a 13-year $330 million deal.

Aaron Judge. This one still stings for Giants fans and I am one of them. Judge grew up in Linden, California. He idolized Rich Aurilia as a kid. He flew to Oracle Park in November 2022. He met with Logan Webb and Brandon Crawford. A reporter for the New York Post tweeted that Judge appeared headed to the Giants. For a few minutes it felt real. Then he signed a nine-year $360 million deal to stay with the Yankees and Logan Webb, when asked how he felt about it, said two words: butt-hurt. The Giants had made an offer in the same range. They still lost.

And then Carlos Correa. The Giants agreed to a 13-year $350 million deal. Agreed. Contract done. Fell apart in the physical over concerns about an ankle injury. Correa went back to Minnesota for less money and less years and the Giants were left with nothing again.

Four swings at franchise-altering talent across seven years. Four misses. Each one for a different reason, which is almost worse than if there were a single obvious explanation. The ballpark kills power numbers. The manager left. The star preferred New York. The medical staff found something. Whatever the reason each time, the result was the same. The Giants kept not having the player they were trying to get, and the team that won 107 games in 2021 quietly got older and the window closed and nobody really had a plan for what came next.

That is the context for the private equity news. The organization that just sold stakes to Sixth Street and Arctos and Thrive Capital is the same organization that watched Stanton block the trade, Harper choose Philly, Judge stay in New York, and Correa fail the physical. The PE firms did not buy a dynasty. They bought a franchise that has been trying to get back to one for five years and keeps coming up short in the most maddening ways possible.

And at some point you have to ask what the pattern is telling you. Four different free agents. Four different reasons it did not work. But the same team on the other end of all four. At some point the common denominator is not bad luck. It is something structural about the organization that makes it hard to close on elite talent. The ballpark suppresses power numbers and big hitters know it. The city is expensive and players have families who factor that in. The market is not New York or Los Angeles in terms of the platform it offers. Whatever the combination of reasons, the Giants have spent the better part of a decade learning that you cannot simply want a superstar badly enough to get one.

Which is exactly why the private equity money matters in a way that goes beyond Oracle Park renovations and Mission Rock real estate. If the Giants are going to compete at the level they competed at in 2021 and in the dynasty years before that, something has to change about how this franchise is built. You cannot keep swinging at the same free agents and missing and expecting different results. The Willy Adames signing was a step. The Rafael Devers trade was aggressive. But four straight losing seasons says clearly that incremental moves are not enough. This team needs a different approach, whether that is a genuine commitment to player development that produces homegrown talent, a willingness to pay above market to compensate for what Oracle Park takes away from a hitter's numbers, or a front office creative enough to find value where other teams are not looking.

Buster Posey taking over baseball operations is the most hopeful sign that ownership understands this. He won here. He knows what it takes. He has credibility with players in a way that a pure analytics executive never will. But credibility alone does not sign the next great Giant. It opens the door. You still have to walk through it and the Giants have been standing at that door for five years watching other people walk through it instead.

Here is the situation. Over the past couple of years the Giants have sold minority stakes to three private equity firms. Sixth Street Partners picked up a reported 10 percent stake in March 2025 in what Larry Baer called the team's first significant investment in three decades. Arctos Sports Partners already had a piece, the same firm that owns stakes in the Dodgers, Cubs, Padres, Astros, Red Sox, and the Warriors. Then in April 2026 Thrive Eternal, the holding company founded by Joshua Kushner, agreed to purchase another minority stake as essentially its first investment as a firm.

Three different private equity firms now own pieces of the San Francisco Giants. The team is valued at somewhere between $3.8 and $4.2 billion depending on who you ask. It has not made the playoffs in eight of the last nine years. It finished the 2025 season having gone under .500 for the fourth straight year. And the people who just bought into it are not doing it because they love Madison Bumgarner.

What the money is actually for

Larry Baer was explicit when the Sixth Street deal was announced. The money is not going toward players. His exact words were this is not about a stockpile for the next Aaron Judge. It is about improvements to Oracle Park, the spring training facility in Scottsdale, and Mission Rock, the massive real estate development project the Giants are building across McCovey Cove from the ballpark.

Mission Rock is a multi-billion dollar development project that will include housing, offices, retail, and public space on land the Giants control near the waterfront. It is one of the biggest development projects in San Francisco in decades. The Giants are not building it because they are a baseball team. They are building it because they are a real estate company that plays baseball eight months a year and manages a billion-dollar development asset the other four.

I keep coming back to something I wrote in the Hidden Economics piece on this site about how modern sports franchises are real estate vehicles with a game attached. The Giants are the clearest example of that I know personally. Oracle Park sits in one of the most valuable real estate corridors in the country. The land around it has appreciated enormously since the park opened in 2000. Mission Rock is the ownership group capitalizing on that position in a way that has nothing to do with whether Logan Webb wins the Cy Young.

Private equity understands this. That is exactly why they are buying in. Sixth Street has stakes in Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, the San Antonio Spurs, and Bay FC. Arctos has pieces of over a dozen professional sports franchises across multiple leagues. These are not fans. They are financial engineers who have done the math on sports franchise appreciation and decided the risk-adjusted returns are attractive. At a $4 billion valuation for a team that has not won a playoff series in over a decade, that math is entirely about the asset and not at all about the box score.

What happened to the team I grew up watching

The 2010s Giants were something special. Three World Series titles in five years, 2010, 2012, and 2014, built on pitching depth, grinding defense, and a front office that knew how to identify value before the market caught up. Buster Posey. Madison Bumgarner. Tim Lincecum in his prime. The entire city was locked in for those October runs in a way that I genuinely miss.

Then 2021 happened, which felt like a reward for everyone who had stayed patient. One hundred and seven wins. Best record in baseball. Kris Bryant and Brandon Crawford and Buster Posey having one last great season before he retired. The Giants won the division, lost a heartbreaking five-game NLDS to the Dodgers, and everyone felt like it was just the beginning of something.

It was not the beginning. It was the goodbye. Posey retired that winter. Crawford and Belt followed not long after. The front office under Farhan Zaidi tried to build something new through free agent spending and it did not work. Mitch Haniger. Joey Bart. A series of signings that looked reasonable on paper and cratered in execution. By 2023 the Giants were last in the league in runs over the final three months, set a franchise record for strikeouts, and Zaidi was looking over his shoulder.

Four straight losing seasons. Eight missed playoffs in nine years since that 2021 run. The 2025 team spent significant money on Willy Adames and traded for Rafael Devers mid-season and still got eliminated in September, blowing an 8-3 lead in the clinching loss in one of the more demoralizing ways you can go out. It is not a disaster in the sense that the team is irreparably broken. It is a sustained mediocrity that feels worse than an obvious rebuild would because there is no clear bottom and no obvious upswing.

Where PE money fits into this and where it does not

Here is the thing about private equity buying minority stakes in sports teams. They are minority stakes. Non-controlling. The PE firms that bought into the Giants do not get a seat at the table when the front office is deciding whether to trade for a pitcher or extend a shortstop. Sixth Street does not have a vote on whether Buster Posey, who replaced Zaidi as president of baseball operations, should spend money on a starting rotation or develop from within.

The people who own the Giants in a meaningful operational sense are still the Johnsons and the other principal partners who have been there for decades. Greg Johnson, the son of Franklin Resources founder Charles Johnson, is the designated control person for a team that has over thirty ownership partners. The private equity stakes are financial investments, not operational control. The firms bought into the asset. They did not buy the team.

That distinction matters for fans who worry that PE is going to strip-mine the franchise for returns. It is genuinely more complicated than that. What PE does to sports franchises is not necessarily what PE does to operating companies. They cannot gut the workforce or cut costs dramatically without destroying the asset they just paid billions for. A baseball team that stops trying to win loses fans and media value and ultimately the thing that makes the investment worthwhile.

The more realistic concern is subtler. When you have investors whose returns depend on the franchise value rather than the win-loss record, the incentive structure around the ownership group shifts slightly. A team that is mediocre but well-positioned for real estate development and stadium upgrades and long-term appreciation is fine for a PE investor. It is less fine for the fan who drove to the park on a Tuesday night in April and watched the Giants lose 7-2 to the Marlins.

What I actually think

I have sat in those seats enough times to have a real relationship with this team that goes well beyond investment analysis. I have been there for wins that felt like the whole city exhaled at once. I have been there for losses that made the drive home feel longer than it was. I was there when the Giants beat the Nationals in extra innings in what felt like the most September baseball possible and the parking lot afterward was the happiest crowd I have ever been part of.

None of that is affected by whether Sixth Street owns ten percent of the franchise. The games are the same games. The ballpark is still the most beautiful place to watch baseball in the country on a clear day when the bay is visible behind the left field seats. The fans are the same fans who have been coming to games at that waterfront park since it opened.

But there is something uncomfortable about watching a team that used to be run primarily by people whose identity was tied to whether the Giants won, now adding investors whose identity is tied to whether the asset appreciates. Those incentives usually rhyme. Winning teams are more valuable teams. But they do not always rhyme, and when they diverge the question of who the team is actually for becomes genuinely complicated.

The Giants need to win. Not for Sixth Street. Not for Arctos. For the people who have been showing up for fifty years and are starting to wonder whether the organization is treating the baseball as the product or as the content that supports a real estate business.

I think Buster Posey understands this. I think he was brought in precisely because ownership recognized they needed someone in that building whose relationship with winning is personal and not financial. Whether he can actually fix what has been broken for four years is a different question.

What I do know is this. I lived in San Francisco for two years. You see Giants hats and Giants jerseys everywhere you go in that city. On BART, at the coffee shop, walking through the Mission. People still want this team to succeed. The fanbase is not gone. The love is not gone. You just walk around that city and you feel it. You hope the front office feels it too.