GIANTS STAY PUT AT TRADE DEADLINE
Let’s be honest, Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi was in no-man’s land going into Monday’s trade deadline.
After all, there’s no clear protocol on what a team in the still-early stages of a bottomup rebuild should do when they’re in the playoff hunt with a sub-.500 record.
Do you sell? That’d be a tough pill to swallow for fans of a team that’s been laughable the last four years.
Do you buy? That might set the rebuild off course, all so a team that has no chance of winning the World Series could get some positive buzz for a week or so in September.
There was no right answer. So it was best not to take the test.
Ultimately, the Giants didn’t make any serious moves Monday.
In turn, the team’s playoff chances weren’t jeopardized, and neither were the team’s long-term goals.
Neither were augmented, either — unless you consider acquiring recently designated for assignment pitcher Anthony Banda from the Rays for cash to be a game-changing deal.
Ultimately, when you’re in a tricky spot, the smartest move is to avoid disaster.
But it speaks to the job that Zaidi is doing that San Francisco had the opportunity to effectively stand pat Monday. Giants fans should view the lack of activity as a big-picture win.
If the Giants weren’t in the playoff hunt or if the team had a farm system in a bad place, Zaidi surely would have been selling off parts of the 2020 team for anything he and general manager Scott Harris could land in the lead up to Monday afternoon.
But the team is in the hunt, thanks to some clever underthe-radar acquisitions, and it boasts one of the best farm systems in baseball.
In all, the Giants’ organization is in a really healthy place right now.
And when you take a step back to really put that in context, what’s happening with the Giants at this moment is rather incredible.
When Zaidi took over before the start of the 2019 season, he came into a job that was widely considered to be one of the toughest in baseball. The team was a certified loser, having lost 187 games in the two years preceding Zaidi’s arrival, despite plenty of spending, and the farm system was depleated
at best.
To be clear, San Francisco is still in the early stages of a half-decade rebuild, following a model that has worked beyond a shadow of a doubt across baseball. It’ll take time, patience, money, and shrewd moves to pull it off, but should the Giants stay the course, the team will fulfill its juggernaut potential once again.
And to be in a position to make the playoffs — albeit in a preposterously short season with laughably generous qualification standards — so soon is an accomplishment.
There’s so much more work to be done to reach the level of success the Dodgers or even the Padres boast. The homegrown talent needs to keep growing and Zaidi still needs to find a whole lot more players like Mike Yastrzemski and Kevin Gausman. But at the moment, it still seems possible that San Francisco can reach those heights.
And maintaining that vision — that hope for the future — is more important than anything the Giants are doing right now. That’s why I wrote earlier this month that the Giants should still be sellers at the trade deadline. It’s all about the big picture.
That said, never mistake activity for progress. Zaidi has a valuation on every player in the Giants’ organization. He didn’t change those valuations for the sake of making a deal to boost the playoff chances. That’s how teams are swindled and rebuilds are knocked off course.
And selling for the sake of selling? That’s how fanbases abandon teams.
The Giants’ process is working. In fact, because of this pandemic, I’d argue it’s a little bit ahead of schedule. But no matter what happens from here on out — whether the Giants make the playoffs or not, whether their pending free agents hang around or bolt — when we look a back on this strange year, no moves will look like the smart move at the trade deadline.