Sunday morning, the news came as a shock: Logan Webb and Jake McGee were going on the injured list. This was bizarre. McGee had pitched the night before, and he gave up two runs and blew the save — which is bad! — but he didn’t look injured. Webb, after having been removed from the rotation, had been put right back in it to take Johnny Cueto’s place, and from all accounts had been totally fine.
He’d made mechanical adjustments! Surely now everything will be fine, we all thought.
And then, the next piece of news:
The second shot of the two-shot vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna, is said to often be extremely unpleasant; Dan Szymborski described his experience waking up the day after getting it as “feeling like a truck ran over me.” It can take a couple of days for the side effects to clear up too, so if a guy is unavailable for a game or two, then it’s within the rules to put them on the short-term COVID Injured List, call someone else up, and then send him right down two days later.
But if a guy’s only out for a day or two…is that really what the IL is for? Baseball has spent its entire history where if a guy can’t play for one day, you just play a man short that day. The Giants were notorious for doing this with Angel Pagan; he would get hurt and they’d say it would be a couple of days and leave him on the roster, and then 8 days later they’d finally admit he wouldn’t be back within the week and bring up another player.
Of course, this leads to a natural conclusion: Farhan Zaidi was up to some Farhan Zaidi shit.
During his time with the Dodgers and in his first couple of years with the Giants, Farhan was notorious for playing games with injury reports to get fresh arms on the roster. Push every advantage, bend every rule, do everything you can to get a 0.1% edge tomorrow. Push a reliever harder than he’s used to, then put him on the IL next day, get a fresh arm who you sent down three days ago because his matchups in the last series were bad but his matchups in the current series are good.
This was no different. Jake McGee pitched badly on Saturday and threw a lot of pitches anyway and Logan Webb wasn’t going to pitch until Tuesday. They were both taken off the roster for two games, giving the team a couple of fresh arms in case of emergency. Come Tuesday, they were both right back on the roster, with those fresh arms — not used in either game — shipped back to the Alternate Site. Webb started the game, and McGee finished it. The plan worked, except for the part where it was totally unneccessary and added nothing and got Trevor Gott DFA’d for that one day on the roster.
Setting that aside, though, the intention was clear. Push every advantage. Bend every rule. Get that tiny edge, even if it’s against the spirit of the rules and everyone can see what you’re doing.
And to that, I say: good.
This is not a Giants thing. I hope every team does this. I hope when they do, MLB looks the other way. I hope the word gets out that this is the thing to do and then teams that would not have done it decide to do it. I want this rule bending to happen as much as possible.
Because the more teams that bend the rules, the more players get vaccinated. The more public the rule-flouting is, the more comfortable guys will be getting a shot that might knock them out for a day or two, knowing that the team might be downgraded, but it won’t be shorthanded. The more players get vaccinated, the better it is for them and baseball (no more COVID postponements!), but also the better it is for fans paying attention who might be on the fence about getting their own shots.
The whole thing is good for the players, good for the teams, good for the fans, good for everyone. Generally, I think the gamesmanship with the 25th and 26th spots on the roster is boring and pretty useless and that any marginal performance gains are offset by players feeling either that they don’t belong or that they’ll be sent back to AAA at any moment, but in this case it serves a legitimate purpose.
So, entirely unsarcastically, way to work the system, Giants. May your roster machinations be a model for teams all over the league.