Zaidi gets jump on offseason, adds former Rockies starter Anderson
SAN FRANCISCO >> The World Series hasn’t ended and the Giants haven’t hired a new manager yet, but president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi has already made his first acquisition of the offseason.
The Giants claimed lefthanded pitcher Tyler Anderson, 29, off waivers from the Colorado Rockies on Wednesday, adding a starter who is expected to miss at least part of spring training after undergoing major knee surgery in June.
Anderson, a 2011 firstround pick out of Oregon, has experience in parts of four major league seasons with the Rockies but appeared in only five games in 2019 before undergoing surgery. The operation corrected a chondral defect in Anderson’s left knee, which refers to damage to cartilage that lines the bones in the knee.
Anderson was a fulltime member of the Rockies rotation in 2018, posting a 4.55 ERA in 32 starts while striking out 164 batters in 176.0 innings.
Unlike many Rockies pitchers, Anderson’s splits show he has been worse on the road than at home during his major league career. In 33 road games, Anderson owns a 5.31 ERA while he has a 4.23 ERA in 40 games at hitter-friendly Coors Field.
Adding Anderson is the type of low-risk, high-reward move the Giants have attempted to make several times throughout Zaidi’s first full year with the organization. The Giants missed on most of these moves, but they also hit on a number of key additions including outfielder Mike Yastrzemski and outfielder Alex Dickerson, who were respectively added to the roster in a minor league trade and on waiver claim.
The Giants are in dire need of starting pitchers to fortify a rotation that was among the worst in baseball last season. Outside of top starters Madison Bumgarner — who is set to become a free agent — and Jeff Samardzija, the Giants cycled through a number of pitchers who failed to provide the rotation with any kind of consistency.
Anderson isn’t arbitration-eligible until 2021 and still has one minor league option left, so he provides the Giants with a low-cost option who could theoretically provide rotation depth once he proves he’s healthy. Once Anderson is able to pitch, the Giants can send him to Triple-A Sacramento and give him an opportunity to work his way up to the major league roster.
In September, Colorado manager Bud Black told
Rockies reporters that Anderson would hopefully be back “within the first couple of months” of the 2020 season.
FAIRLY, FORMER GIANTS BROADCASTER, DIES >> Ron Fairly, a San Francisco Giants broadcaster for six years, has died, the Seattle Mariners announced Wednesday. He was 81. Fairly, a baseball star at USC, enjoyed a 21-year playing career in major league baseball. His first 12 seasons, starting when he was 19, were with his hometown Dodgers. He appeared in four World Series with the team, winning three.
The two-time All-Star also played with Montreal, St. Louis, Toronto and the California Angels in addition to a 15-game cup of coffee with the A’s in 1976.
He left his first broadcasting job, with the Angels, to join the Giants in 1987, replacing the popular Hank Greenwald.
Greenwald returned to the Giants two years into Fairly’s tenure there. The Giants decided not to renew Fairly’s contract after the 1992 season.
As a broadcaster, he was best known for his 15 years in Seattle.