Giants at the break: Will recent surge keep the team intact?
2 series may clarify which direction S.F. will choose
With 3,691 home runs hit by the AllStar break, Major League Baseball has become a Sunday beer league, so it’s quite appropriate that the future of the 2019 Giants could hinge on seven games at Miller Park and Coors Field.
Between now and July 31, the Giants need to make a wrenching decision on whether to trade franchise icon Madison Bumgarner and a host of desirable relievers to build for 2020 and beyond.
The players have made that call a little tougher by winning 15 of their past 25 games and painting a faint ribbon of hope onto a season that started chaotically and has invited comparisons to the 100loss 1985 season.
Now, the selfevaluation becomes keener as contenders come calling for Bumgarner, Will Smith, Sam Dyson and others. The picture should become more sharply focused after the Giants face Milwaukee and Colorado in two ballparks that have chewed them alive.
The Giants play three at Milwaukee’s Miller Park, where they were swept last year and have lost 12 of their past 20 games. They then play four games in three days at Coors Field, where they have staggered to 19 losses in their past 22 games.
Common sense needs to prevail over nostalgia or the sliver of hope that the Giants can continue to win and slide into a wildcard spot. Deep down, everyone knows president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi needs to be serious about trading his best assets — for the right price — to accelerate the Giants’ principal goal of sustained success into the 2020s.
There is little doubt that contenders will light up Zaidi’s phone in a summer with few premium starters available and so many otherwise solid teams being sabotaged by their inability to get the last three to nine outs of a ballgame. The prescription for those teams is Smith, Dyson and lefty Tony Watson.
“It’s always a good thing when you have players other teams want, but that usually means you want them yourself,” Zaidi said. “We’re going to have to see how these next few weeks go, but we don’t feel we have any imperatives over these last few weeks.”
Several times during a Sunday morning chat with reporters, Zaidi sounded the same note, saying the Giants do not have to trade anybody, that they could buy under the right circumstances and are open to what the industry now calls “baseball trades,” where combinations of younger and older players are dealt for talent that can help a team now and into the future.
A lot of this could be negotiating posture, a way for Zaidi to let teams know he is not going to trade his jewels for other teams’ flotsam and jetsam.
“Some of the narratives out there about what we might do at the trade deadline are probably going to conflict with that goal to keep pushing in a season where we still hope to accomplish things,” Zaidi said.
The Giants have provided their new boss with the best leverage they could. They are winning at the right time. After giving fans little reason to pay attention for the first two months, they are at least interesting, and the players seem to be having fun.
That’s quite a turnaround from the beginning of the season, when losses mounted and older players privately were wondering and grumbling about Zaidi’s transactionaday team building that had clubhouse staffers scrambling to sew new names onto uniforms.
“Early on, yeah, it felt like the last weekend of spring training and really into the first month, month and a half of the season, it was like a revolving door,” third baseman Evan Longoria said.
Manager Bruce Bochy had to address the issue within his clubhouse.
“The core guys, we talked about it,” Bochy said. “We were trying to get settled in. Sometimes that takes a little time. I think every sport is the same. Farhan was trying to do all he could to get us some help early in the season. We had guys who didn’t have great springs. We made some changes we thought would help us.”
Core players who look around the clubhouse now have to conclude they have a better team with newcomers Alex Dickerson, Kevin Pillar, Donovan Solano, Tyler Austin, Tyler Beede, Shaun Anderson, Austin Slater, Stephen Vogt, Mike Yastrzemski and others whom Zaidi plucked from other organizations or summoned from the minors.
“To Farhan’s credit, he’s had a track record of success ... finding guys who can help in the moment and fill roles and be positive contributors,” Longoria said.
Nobody should look at the Giants with blinders on. They are still 4148. They rank 13th in the 15team National League in runs, 14th in homers and OPS, and ninth in ERA.
The Giants proved during their championship run they did not need to be statistical giants to win World Series, but the 2019 team has enough underlying flaws to suggest the proper course through the rest of July is to build for the future.
You won’t find a soul in the clubhouse who will say publicly or privately that Zaidi should trade Bumgarner, but they all know it’s possible even if the players profess hope that Zaidi actually will add talent and provide them a shot to keep winning.
“We know he’s a pretty smart guy,” pitcher Jeff Samardzija said. “He’s going to watch the team. He sees (when a team) is playing good baseball and not playing baseball. You can tell just by how things are going how it’s going to look in a month.
“If we keep showing we can hit and pitch, and obviously we have the bullpen to do what we need to do in the long run, I don’t think there’s doubt in anybody’s minds in here that he’s going to do what it takes to win ballgames.”