Hip hip not Jorge anymore

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The Giants traded Jorge Soler and Luke Jackson to the Braves last night, starting what many observers believe will be a massive sell-off at this year’s trade deadline, certainly including Blake Snell, who is overwhelmingly likely to opt out of his contract after the season.

Correction: The Giants traded Jorge Soler and Luke Jackson to the Braves last night, getting out of paying them a bunch of money, while Blake Snell is still overwhelmingly likely to opt out of his contract after the season, which will save the Giants even more money!

Hell yeah. I love it when Giants ownership saves money. That’s what it’s all about!

It’s worth asking the question: What did the Giants think they were getting with Jorge Soler?

In his career, Soler has had a 112 wRC+ and a 113 OPS+ (both numbers that measure his offensive effectiveness against the league average in slightly different ways, so in the first he’s been a 12% better hitter than league average and in the second a 13% better hitter than the league). This year, he’s had a 115 wRC+ and a 116 OPS+. He’s walking more and striking out less than he has historically. Some of his Statcast numbers — exit velocity, barrels — are down from the last few years, but not actively bad, and Statcast suggests he’s gotten at least a little unlucky this year.

So what was the problem? That he’s not hitting as many homers as he usually does? Well, that’s to be expected when he plays half his games in San Francisco. Is the issue that he wasn’t signed to be a leadoff hitter? He seems to be doing pretty well there, so that doesn’t seem like an actual problem. Is it that he doesn’t do well in RBI situations? That’s possible, I guess, but what kind of modern front office bases their decisions on RBIs? It’s insulting to ever consider that!

No, from what Andrew Baggarly reported, the problem seems to be that he’s not repeating the career year he had last year:

Soler, as an exclusive DH, limited the Giants’ lineup and roster flexibility. That wouldn’t have been a problem if he were on pace to hit 36 home runs, as he did for the Miami Marlins last season. When the Giants signed Soler, it was with the heady expectation that he would contribute the franchise’s first 30-home run season since Barry Bonds in 2004. But Soler, 32, has hit just 12 home runs this season…

Yes, 2023 Jorge Soler was a great and fearsome hitter. But he’d spent the three years before that being a fine hitter, who in terms of overall value wasn’t anything special. Before the Giants signed him to a 3-year deal, presumably they checked Baseball Reference and found that out, thus realizing that the most likely result for an early 30s DH would be closer to that reality than to hitting .250/.341/.512 like he did in 2023. He’s hit 30 homers in a season exactly twice in his career, so to get halfway through the first season of a three-year contract and go, “That’s not happening, better get rid of him,” well, that just seems a little strange.

Unless…they never believed in him.

Think back to this offseason. Before they signed Chapman or Snell, the Giants hadn’t done a lot to improve the team that was bad enough to get its manager fired last year. They had gone out and gotten Jung Hoo Lee, and traded for Robbie Ray — though it was widely reported that Ray wasn’t going to be available until midseason — but the team needed more than that. More to the point, the team needed more than that to sell to the fanbase that, yeah, they were trying and it was worth buying season tickets.

Enter Jorge Soler. Do you remember the discourse around him when he signed? He was going to bring so much power to the team! The Giants had gotten so much more exciting! All the beat writers were on board with the messaging, and there wasn’t a ton of pushback about his actual track record as someone with 3500 career plate appearances and less than 8 fWAR. But there’s no way the Giants didn’t know that.

So, I feel like I have to ask, is this what the Giants planned to do all along? Or, if not Plan A — which would have been Soler hitting his way to an .875 OPS and a bunch of dingers — was it an extremely plausible Plan B? Or was it just a hope that, once Soler was only okay, someone would be willing to take on his entire salary and get the Giants out of a contract they never really believed in?

The line from the team, filtered through the beat writers, has been that this trade was really about Marco Luciano, who’s been on a tear in Sacramento over the last month and deserves a shot in the majors, so they’re not really sellers. But again, if you take all of the front office’s actions at face value, something doesn’t add up. They always planned for Luciano to be up this year. Is Luciano utterly unplayable at second base to the extent that he can only DH? Is there absolutely nothing he can do defensively? It’s not like his defensive struggles were a secret coming into the year, and neither were Soler’s. What was the plan, if not this?

And if this was the plan, why get excited about next year’s Jorge Soler, who the Giants will sign and put the word out to GET HYPE? The team sees players as nothing more than assets, and from a fan’s perspective, I’m not super jazzed about assets. I want players and people and quirks and fun things I can look forward to. The Giants clearly don’t see a need to provide any of that, and yet next offseason, they’ll be back paying lip service to the fan experience, knowing full well that they don’t really care about any of that shit.

Luke Jackson was also traded, and we wish him well in his future endeavors.