In ’13, Giants knew when to hold ’em
Back in Philly, team playing another tense waiting game
PHILADELPHIA — Javier Lopez mostly remembers the silence. He and his fellow Giants were teammates and friends through two World Seriestitle runs, but nobody said anything because nobody knew what to say.
On a strange afternoon six years ago, the lefty reliever looked around the visiting clubhouse at Citizens Bank Park and wondered which of his buddies would remain when the clock struck 4. As the Giants dressed for batting practice, the July 31 trade deadline ticked closer.
“I kind of remember sitting in that locker room,” Lopez said last week. “You tried to have business as usual and kind of prepare for the game. There were moments we were staring at each other. We were trying to limit the conversation as much as possible.”
The 2013 season had fallen apart and the Giants were pegged as deadline sellers. What a coincidence that in 2019 they have returned to Philadelphia for the trade deadline as potential sellers — or buyers, or standpatters.
That scene from 2013, when Lopez, Hunter Pence and Tim Lincecum were the trade bait, likely will be repeated at the same time in the same room Wednesday as the Giants again prepare to play the Phillies, if they can get past 4 p.m. Philly
“It was a different feel that morning . ... I didn’t have the most restful night of sleep.” Javier Lopez, former Giants pitcher, on the July 31, 2013, trade deadline
time.
The circumstances now are completely different.
In 2013, the Giants were coming off their second World Series title when the season suddenly went south.
They were rolling and celebrated their best win of the season May 25 when the Giants, down a run in the 10th inning, came back to beat the Rockies on Angel Pagan’s insidethepark home run.
But Pagan injured a hamstring on the dash and was not the same thereafter.
The Giants slogged through a 1017 June and the pitching that was so stellar in 2012 faltered. Matt Cain began his slide. Lincecum would end the year with a 4.37 ERA. Ryan Vogelsong struggled and admitted that playing in the World Baseball Classic that March — competing too hard, too soon — affected him.
“Last year, I thought we were dead, to be honest,” pitching coach Dave Righetti said at FanFest before the 2014 season. “They were worn out after four years of grinding. Every game meant something to us, and all of a sudden, it was slipping from us physically.”
The offense went south, too. Pagan was a nonfactor, Pablo Sandoval got bigger again and Marco Scutaro never truly recovered from the brutal takeout hit that the Cardinals’ Matt Holliday administered in the 2012 National League Championship Series.
By July, the Giants knew that 2013 was a lost season. The baseball world expected general manager Brian Sabean to trade Pence and Lopez, and maybe Lincecum. All were potential free agents, as Madison Bumgarner and Will Smith are now.
Six years later, the Giants are roaring toward the deadline after winning 19 of 24. Their win in San Diego on Sunday leaves them 2½ games out of an NL wildcard position.
And the players hope that 4 o’clock this July 31 in Philadelphia will be exactly like it was in 2013.
In a major surprise, Sabean traded nobody. He declared that the offers for his free agents were “almost embarrassing.”
Sabean declared that 2013 was an aberration and he hoped to resign all three free agents after the season and make a run at another championship in 2014 with the 2012 core intact.
And that’s exactly what happened.
“It was definitely an odd day,” Lopez said. “We had the biggest smiles and biggest hugs when 4 o’clock arrived and nothing happened.”
Pence walked through the room pumping his fists and told reporters, “I knew they heard what I had to say.” He had begged Sabean not to trade him and said he wanted to resign (which he did in the season’s final weekend, for five years at $90 million).
Wednesday’s deadline will be different in some ways, starting with Bumgarner. Because he can veto a trade to eight teams, all contenders, the Giants would have to get his blessing well before Wednesday’s witching hour.
With the Giants on a roll, and buyers so protective of their best prospects nowadays, odds of a Bumgarner or Smith trade have become remote anyway.
But other Giants, particularly in the bullpen, might find themselves sitting in the clubhouse staring at one another as Lopez and Co. did in 2013.
Lopez called it a “weird time.” The Giants had just visited the White House on the off day before Philly to celebrate their 2012 title yet knew the team could be busted apart.
A lot of the wives were on the trip because of the White House. Lopez and his wife, Renee, sat in their hotel room the morning of July 31 going over trade scenarios (the Indians were his most ardent pursuers) and the logistics of moving out of their San Francisco apartment.
“It was a different feel that morning,” Lopez said. “That morning, I didn’t have the most restful night of sleep.”
Lopez praised Sabean and his thenassistant, Bobby Evans, for keeping all the potential trade targets apprised of the negotiations with other teams in the days before the deadline.
One suspects that current president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi, or members of his staff, or manager Bruce Bochy, are doing likewise with Bumgarner, Smith, Sam Dyson, Tony Watson and others.
“You always know in the back of your mind when a season is not going well, and you’re a free agent, that you might be traded,” Lopez said.
But six years ago, he and his teammates weren’t. Maybe it was the collective exhalation of relief, but that evening, the Giants clobbered the Phillies 92.
The celebration did not last long. The Giants finished 7686, their first losing season since 2008.
One October later, Pence, Lopez, Lincecum and so many others in the black and orange enjoyed a Champagne party in the visiting clubhouse in Kansas City.