If you’ve watched the 2023 Giants, you have certainly noticed that they don’t have enough bad hitters.
“Whoa whoa whoa,” you have absolutely said numerous times, especially in the now concluded month of July. “What’s with all these All-Stars coming up, one after another? This is no way to build a baseball team.”
My friend, you are 100% right, and Farhan Zaidi agrees with you, which is why yesterday, he traded for AJ Pollock and Mark Mathias from the Seattle Mariners.
It had been 24 days since the Giants had made a trade with the Mariners — they traded for non-40-man outfielder Jack Larsen back on July 7 — which is practically an eternity in Zaidi-Dipoto terms. What are they supposed to do, not trade each other bad players multiple times a month for opaque reasons that never end up positively impacting either team’s major league roster other than the Giants sending them Tom Murphy at the end of Spring Training in 2019? Would you so curtail their freedoms? How abhorrent.
So Zaidi solved both the problem of not having enough bad hitters (I am now ending this bit without mentioning it again, and I appreciate your discretion in this matter) and the problem of not having called up his buddy Jerry within the last fortnight by trading for Pollock and Mathias. The Giants didn’t give up much — either cash or a player to be named later — which works out, because they didn’t get much. Sometimes capitalism works!
Now, maybe I’m overstating things a bit, right? Pollock has had a nice career, and it’s possible that he still has something left in the tank. Sure, he’s hitting .173/.225/.323 on the season, but against right-handers he’s hitting .214/.262/.500, so he can at least show some power. He’s been a lot better away from Seattle than at T-Mobile Park (.666 OPS versus .452), so maybe that will help him out? He’s hitting .300 in the second half, and please ignore that that’s based on exactly 10 plate appearances. When he’s playing left field, he has an .804 OPS, so just don’t DH him or pinch hit him…which obviously the Giants wouldn’t want to do…because they hate using pinch hitters so much.
Okay, so I might be grasping at straws here. Maybe he’s just bad now, because he’s 35, and that’s ancient in baseball terms, especially in the modern game, where you see 95 MPH fastballs daily. Also, he’s on the IL right now with a bad hamstring? Do the Giants really need another hitter nursing a nagging injury who’s a shadow of the player he used to be? I mean, I guess! Farhan is smarter than me, so he’d know better, I guess.
There is another player in the deal, of course. Mark Mathias is a utility player — he mostly plays second base, but he’s also seen time at third and in the outfield this year, and does technically have professional experience at shortstop, though that was a while ago and in the minors — who’s now been traded three times and claimed off waivers once in the last calendar year. In AAA this year, he’s hit .299/.405/.427 across 190 plate appearances in Tacoma and Indianapolis, though in the majors with Pittsburgh he hit just .231/.355/.269.
Last year, Mathias hit .247/.319/.506 in the majors, mostly with the Rangers, which was an impressive showing. But his 2023 performance gives off some strong Mediocre Farhan Move vibes. Here’s some shit, he said, while throwing it at the wall. Will it stick? If not, I have more!
Admittedly in Mathias’s favor is that he attended the Harvard of the West, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Sure, he’s about to be 29, but what an alma mater!
I don’t want to be unsympathetic to the team’s position here. They need to do something, because the offense clearly isn’t good enough. You can’t just have a new rookie get hot for a couple weeks at a time in perpetuity, and that’s been the Giants’ strategy at the plate since mid-May. But you also don’t want to give away important pieces for the future in order to improve a team that has too many holes and weak spots to be a real contender.
So what do you do? You make moves around the margins and see if they move the needle. You look like you’re doing something without really taking a risk. And hey, maybe one of those guys will figure it out. You never know! Maybe the Giants think they can fix Pollock’s swing or change Mathias’s approach and get him to the next level. It’s entirely possible.
But it’s hard to look at this trade and see the point. Is AJ Pollock better than Heliot Ramos? Is Mark Mathias a major league player and not a AAAA one? Does “hope Mark Mathias gets it going” a better strategy than “hope Marco Luciano gets it going?” It’s hard to see the move as anything more than acquiring new Scooters Gennett or Willies Calhoun.
Maybe I’m being overly cynical, but this seems like the Giants are doing something just to look like they did something. There could be another move coming today, and I think a lot of Giants fans would welcome that. But the one that came yesterday wasn’t particularly impressive, and it’s hard to see a fit for the team doing anything more impactful.
Giants give up nothing for most likely (but possibly not) nothing.
I'm good with this trade.
"Maybe I’m being overly cynical, but this seems like the Giants are doing something just to look like they did something."
What's the over/under on 2 more DFAs this month, Maestro? ;o)