The majority of us are pretty big fans of general manager Trent Baalke right now, no? He's thrown together a couple impressive drafts, did not impede the signing of Jim Harbaugh and his excellent underlings and brought in some very key free agents this past offseason. This isn't some term to boost the impact he actually had, the free agents that were brought in under him legitimately were key to our success in 2012.
One of them broke multiple records, one of them provided some much-needed stability, two of them had career years and there were some other contributors. David Akers, Jonathan Goodwin, Carlos Rogers and Donte Whitner are the players I'm referencing in that order, if you didn't get that. I suppose it's debatable that Whitner had a career year, but the guy definitely looked like a completely different player in comparison to year's past.
Anyway, the recent contract extension got me thinking back to this past offseason, when everyone was going crazy about Harbaugh and Michael Lombardi and who was going to be doing what. There were initial reports that Harbaugh would only come to San Francisco if there was an established general manager in place, and that was followed by word that it simply needed to be someone that Harbaugh could work with.
Of course, there was then all the drama that Lombardi said about the job always belonging to Baalke and flashing his jealousy, but that's a story for another time. Going back and reading over the thousands upon thousands of posts during that time, I'm pretty happy to see the early support for Baalke, even with the doubts that he might not be able to land Harbaugh. Even the people that said they'd only support Baalke if he brought in Harbaugh had a lot of confidence in Baalke to do so.
Even if our organization makes some mistakes, I like to think we're pretty level-headed with what we got. Some of us (myself included) had the wool pulled over our eyes when Mike Singletary took charge, but I strangely feel like ten times better about Baalke now because of how much support he had here even in such an uncertain time. So I guess what I'm saying is ... go Trent Baalke?