As is now a Farhan-era tradition, the Giants half-assed the trade deadline. They didn’t go whole hog on selling like the Marlins, but they also didn’t buy a whole lot, only acquiring Mark Canha, presumably because Wilmer Flores won’t be back for a while. Are they a playoff team? Are they a disappointment? The front office stubbornly refused to give us answers, insisting that the rotation is good enough to compete, but also not supplementing that rotation with outfield or middle infield talent that might help them do so.
The generous way of looking at it is the Giants were trying to thread the needle, neither giving up on this season (which current players and free agents alike would view as a distinct negative) nor mortgaging the future (which might prevent the team from both being competitive and saving money in the near term). The less generous way of looking at it is that they were scared to make a mistake, which prevented them from making a good move, but since we can’t prove they would have made a good move, hey, guess what, we can’t pin this on them.
People think Farhan being smart means that he knows how to make the team better, but really what it means is he knows how to avoid blame for the team being bad. Also an important skill!
I guess at some point here I should say what the Giants actually did at the deadline, huh? In addition to trading Jorge Soler and Luke Jackson, they also traded Alex Cobb to Cleveland and acquired Mark Canha from Detroit. The prospects going the other way in all of these trades weren’t overwhelming; when the Giants sold, it was more to make room on the roster for younger players and also, conveniently, clear some payroll along the way.
So, as has become routine, there were no franchise-altering moves for the Giants. No Hunter Pences coming, no Zack Wheelers heading out. There will be no spark coming from outside. There may be a spark coming from the inside — Jerar Encarnacion, who has been crushing the ball since getting to Sacramento from the Mexican League, is going to be called up tomorrow — but we didn’t see the splashy move that makes everyone sit up and say, “Wow!”
I’ve seen a lot of Giants fans who are mad about this. Specifically, I’ve seen Giants fans who are absolutely livid that the team didn’t tear it down to the studs, trade everyone with value, and hoard those sweet, sweet prospects. Because if we’re being honest about this team, they might well be good enough to sneak into the postseason as the third wild card, but there is just no way their offense is good enough to win four rounds of playoff baseball.
I have not seen people made that the Giants didn’t sell the farm to make a push this year, as is right and proper, and we will not be addressing that side of the issue again.
So why not sell, then? Blake Snell is probably opting out at the end of the year, and the team won’t get any draft pick compensation when he does, so why not get some value for him now? If Robbie Ray has a strong finish — no guarantee, considering that his first start against a non-Rockies team went badly, but certainly possible — he might opt out too. And then where will the Giants be next year? What’s that bird in the hand even going to do for them this year? Why not swap it for an unspecified number of birds in the bush?
There are a couple of answers to that. The objectively practical one, meeting the argument on its own level, is that teams weren’t trading good prospects this year. No one from Baseball America’s top 100 prospects moved at the deadline, and with only a couple months left on Snell’s contract, it’s not likely they’d have come back for him either. The entire industry is just terrified to look bad on a trade like this.
The other reason not to trade Snell et al (Ray, Mike Yastrzemski, Michael Conforto, Matt Chapman, and any other veteran with value) is that it’s quitting. It’s a quitter move done by a quitter in order to quit quittingly. And that sucks.
Look at the Rays. At the end of play Monday, they were 54-52, 3 games back of the third wild card in the AL. What did they do? They sold everything. They tore down the team, gave up on the season, and amassed prospects for the future. It was a bold, Smart move executed by a front office that isn’t afraid of making moves exactly like that.
And it’s awful. Yeah, their returns were good and everything, but who cares? Why would you ever root for that team? Baseball isn’t about financial flexibility; baseball is about watching a (hopefully good) baseball team play baseball. If you have a team that’s in contention, and then you get a good return for selling, it raises the extremely pertinent question: Who cares? What’s the point? You’ll have a couple years where you’re good, and then you’ll give up. Who wants to root for a quitter?
Sports is about trying your hardest to win, and if you’re not going to do that, there had better be overwhelming White Sox-esque proof that it’s not going to work. That wasn’t the case with the Rays, and that’s not the case with the Giants. They still could be good! There have been stretches this season where they’ve played very well against strong opponents. With a much stronger rotation now than they had then, who’s to say that can’t happen again?
To me, if there’s any kind of argument for taking your shot, you take your shot. Do the Giants actually have the best rotation in baseball, like Farhan Zaidi claimed? Probably not. Do they have a good rotation? They should, but we’re not going to know until Ray and Snell and Hayden Birdsong all pitch a few more times. Is it worth giving up on the season before you even know what you have? I don’t think so.
So the Giants might not make the playoffs, and they also won’t get any players in return whenever their players aren’t on the team anymore. But that’s how sports work. That’s how risk works. If you quit before you ever try, then you might not be embarrassed, but you also won’t get anywhere. And what’s the point of that?
Doug, for me its more like, what's more important at this point? The next two months, or the next two years? We are six years into the pretty much dull, brutal Farhan era. What's another two months to use it letting the kids play, fail, try again, and hopefully get better at the major league level? I'd much rather watch that for two months than Canha, Conforto, Yaz, Flores, Ray or even Snell play with the crazy hope they will be going anywhere in the post season.....IF they could leap frog four teams and get the third wild card.
"It’s a quitter move done by a quitter in order to quit quittingly. And that sucks."
To borrow from my Defector homies "Quit Like A Champion"
I have found it helpful for my mental health to consider the Farhan Experience as about saving the organization money while putting out a "just good enough that games are fun just often enough" team. When the team Chairman says the goal of the ball club is "to just break even" THAT is what sucks.
As you pointed out in a previous post, the Soler signing was a way to goose ticket sales when they were panicking about whether they would land Matt Chapman (only a 1-year deal!?!) and try to get the narrative of the season into something other than "We probably should've signed Correa when we had the chance" .
Anyway, let us run riot on the soft underbelly of the remaining schedule and get into the playoffs on cussedness and hopefully a very large man from the DR mashing the ball into the bay like it owes him money.
Of course, your mileage may vary.