Buster Posey’s latest KNBR appearance was supposed to be a routine stop on the Giants’ weekly radio circuit. Instead, it ended with another awkward flashpoint between the team and its flagship station.
Posey, the Giants’ president of baseball operations, joined the “Murph and Markus” morning show on Thursday as part of the rotating “Giants Executive Show.” It was his first KNBR interview in eight weeks, since a tense conversation with Brian Murphy and Markus Boucher on May 21.
His absence had already stretched through the fallout from Pride Night. Posey was the first Giants executive to speak publicly about the issue at a June 23 news conference, but he limited himself to an opening statement and declined to take questions.
The next day, KNBR said he would appear on the June 25 executive show, only to swap him out for Larry Baer 90 minutes before airtime. SFGATE asked the Giants why Posey was suddenly unavailable, but the team did not respond.
Thursday’s interview, by contrast, sounded mostly like a standard baseball conversation. Murphy flagged the earlier tension before the 7:30 a.m. call, but the 25-minute segment itself stayed on track. Posey talked about the recent MLB Draft and the Giants’ picks, discussed the club’s approach to the Aug. 3 trade deadline, and said first-year manager Tony Vitello has done “a great job” despite the team’s 41-55 record.
Then came the off-air mess.
As Murphy and Boucher were breaking down Posey’s comments, an unnamed KNBR producer could be heard in the background doing a microphone test. The producer repeated “talk” several times and then said, “Yeah, I hear ya, I gotcha. I gotcha 100%.”
Nothing on the YouTube broadcast suggested Murphy or Boucher reacted in the moment, and the show rolled into a commercial break. But once the next segment began, a caller identified as James in Crescent City jumped straight to the hot mic moment and said he heard the person say “Posey sucks” while listening.
Murphy and Boucher tried to defuse it while making clear the remark did not come from them. Murphy said, “We’ll do an investigation behind the scenes.” Boucher added that they might have been “hacked” and joked it could be “some of that AI BS going on these days,” setting up a year-old soundbite from Giants legend Will Clark.
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