The Giants had a choice. They could trade away their veterans, building for a better future but alienating the rest of the team. Or they could trade their prospects for big-leaguers, sacrificing the future but bolstering the team today. You’re building a team, right? You’re either building it for today or tomorrow, but you’re building it. So are you choosing the present? Or are you choosing the future? You have to choose.
So, like every sitcom character torn between two beaus in a season finale, the Farhan Zaidi Giants said, “I choose me.”
The Giants did not sell off their veterans to build for a more prosperous future. They did not buy players to make a playoff run in the present. They didn’t even draw on the past and insist that we remember all the wins in 2021. They just…kinda…half-assed it, going on basically as they did before, only with JD Davis instead of Darin Ruf.
To be fair to the front office, they were in a tough spot. On August 2, the team was close enough to a playoff spot that one hot streak would change the complexion of the whole year. If you sell several good players when you still have a shot at the playoffs, people will remember that. I mean, it’s been 25 years since the White Flag trade and a whole lot of us can still remember the three players the White Sox traded to the Giants. If you sell, you might be pilloried for decades.
And if you buy? You buy? With this team? This crapfest of a dogshit team? What’s that gonna do? You’re giving up part of your future so a team that can’t catch the goddamn ball can be, like, two games better? No. No, absolutely not. Who would do that?
Having said all that, well, get over it and do your job.
Yes, the Giants should have sold. It was a failure that they didn’t sell. It was a failure that they couldn’t build on the team’s small, isolated successes to set up larger, better, more sustainable successes in the future. When you’re a team that’s not good enough — and the Giants are absolutely not good enough — you should be able to get a good prospect for Carlos Rodon who is, according to Fangraphs, the best pitcher in the majors.
Seems like a couple teams could use the best pitcher in the majors! Maybe they could be informed of the other team’s offer and then feel pressured to increase their own offer in order to not lose out. I dunno, just spitballing.
Now, the Giants say they didn’t get any good offers for Rodon. But they also didn’t decide early enough to shop him, and if they’d been more aggressive in setting the market or selling their player or doing anything other than telling teams, “I dunno if I’m trading any players. Are you trading any players?” while idly twirling their hair, then they’d have had a shot at improing the team for the long term.
And remember: the Padres got Juan Fucking Soto. The Dodgers are an unstoppable juggernaut who get a new superstar every year. The Giants cannot compete with them by trading Matthew Boyd and Curt Casali for a couple of minor prospects. That does nothing for the team, now or a year from now or three years from now.
There are extenuating factors, I’m sure. Everyone loves team control, and Rodon can be a free agent at the end of the year, so they might not have offered as much. Internally, we never know about it at the time, but four years after the fact we always hear that, “Oh yeah, Giants ownership would never have approved that veterans-for-prospects trade because they thought attendance would decline.” Joc Pederson, presumably one of the team’s top trade chips, has been awful for the last month, and got concussed on top of it.
But even with all that, it’s hard not to be underwhelmed. The Giants, essentially, stood pat. They solved their problem of an impending roster crunch by trading away the guys who would have crunched the roster, though they also likely would have improved it. No help came for the bullpen or the defense, and JD Davis is a perfectly okay hitter who’s not really an improvement over Darin Ruf.
So I don’t know. Maybe it was unfair of me to hope for clarity from the trade deadline, clarity over what kind of team this is and how much the front office believes in them. What we got instead was equivocation. They believe in the team, but not enough to pay to make them better. They won’t tear it down to the studs, but they also won’t shore up the foundation. We got a half-answer that you can read into either way, depending on your mood.
That’s an answer too, I guess. Just not a satisfying one.
Trust the process.
Compensatory picks are nice, and there's always a chance the Giants resign Rodon. It's an even year, and Zaidi still probably has those powerpoint slides that remind ownership that somehow someway the Padres will flop.
This morning at the drive thru, I told the attendant not to bother giving me straws because I already had some... firmly grasped in my hands.