SAN FRANCISCO — Blake Snell is Nostradamus with a better breaking ball.
“We win, I ain’t going nowhere,” predicted Snell on Saturday, between games of a doubleheader against the Colorado Rockies.
The Giants obliged. They kept beating a mistake-prone opponent. They captured Game 2 of their doubleheader. They won again on Sunday. They dragged a disappointing and problematic roster within two games of .500 and 3 1/2 games of the final National League playoff spot to set up a conundrum for president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi.
The trade deadline angel hovered past their door on Tuesday. And Snell, who can opt for free agency after this season and who might have made the greatest three-month impact of any of the dozens of players who changed teams, still had a locker in the Giants’ home clubhouse.
He went nowhere.
After doing more roster tweaking than selling, it’ll be the front office’s worst nightmare if the Giants go nowhere fast, too.
The immediate returns were not encouraging. Hours after Zaidi called his starting staff “the best rotation in baseball,” left-hander Robbie Ray gave up three home runs and got chased in the fifth inning. Hours after Zaidi described a trade deadline strategy built around creating opportunities for young players, a youth-studded lineup collected five hits, didn’t advance a runner into scoring position until the sixth inning and didn’t get on the board until the eighth in a desultory, 5-2 loss to the last-place Oakland A’s Tuesday night.
In the days before the trade deadline, the Giants received an avalanche of calls and texts about Snell, who is a good bet to opt out of his $30 million contract after the season. But none of the incentives existed that would have prompted Zaidi to move the two-time Cy Young Award winner.
There weren’t enough financial incentives. Because of the way Snell’s contract was structured, subtracting him would have made a minimal impact on any effort to sneak under the $237 million luxury tax threshold. There weren’t enough talent acquisition incentives. The Giants made it clear that they wanted ready-made difference-makers and/or top-shelf prospects who could become franchise stars and those offers did not materialize.
Mostly, Giants officials looked at a ballpark that featured near sellout crowds last weekend, they looked at a National League dance floor surrounded by wild-card wallflowers, and they considered a team that finally has the starting rotation that they hoped would power them to a sizzling second half. They viewed the opportunity to keep that rotation together as more valuable than whatever might be gained by following another path.
“That was really our central philosophy going into the deadline: we have a rotation that can carry this team down the stretch and get us on a roll,” Zaidi said. “The other thing is that this season really has been about some breakthroughs by young players. Often those breakthroughs don’t happen until you give a guy a real opportunity.”
“We’re making an organizational decision and a baseball decision that we believe some of these young guys can help us get to where we’re trying to get to,” he continued. “That’s a responsibility there. We have to be right about that.”
And they still have to win. Otherwise, nowhere is the only possible destination.
The Giants traded two disappointing players, designated hitter Jorge Soler and right-hander Luke Jackson, to Atlanta on Monday to create long-term roster flexibility and at-bats for top prospect Marco Luciano. They traded rehabbing right-hander Alex Cobb to Cleveland on Tuesday so that right-hander Hayden Birdsong could claim a place in a rotation that is now charged with living up to Zaidi’s high praise. They made one buy at the final bell, acquiring outfielder/first baseman Mark Canha from the Detroit Tigers for left-hander Eric Silva, a 21-year-old former fourth-round pick who was pitching in relief at Double-A Richmond.
Now Giants manager Bob Melvin knows what his roster will look like for the final two months. Here are three takeaways from the Giants’ activity at the trade deadline and the impact that those moves will have on a team that continues to operate with an imperative to win but is running out of time to start racking up victories.
Marco Luciano, shown early this season, was recalled from Triple A on Tuesday and will likely fill in at DH after the trade of Jorge Soler. (Robert Edwards / USA Today)
No, Marco Luciano isn’t a 22-year-old full-time DH
Not yet, anyway.
The Giants recalled Luciano, who hit six home runs and has a .416 on-base percentage in July for Triple-A Sacramento while drawing as many walks as strikeouts. Zaidi and Melvin made it clear that Luciano will get everyday at-bats and most of those opportunities will come in Soler’s place as the DH.
“I think it takes a little off his plate at the big league level to focus on hitting, which might be good for him,” Melvin said. “You gain some confidence and it works its way into the field as well. So one of the reasons this was done was to get Marco here and get him some at-bats.”
Luciano was always viewed as a bat-first prospect. The Giants will let that bat continue to develop against major league pitching and they have time to figure out the rest. Perhaps as Melvin suggested, getting established as a hitter will allow Luciano to create a sense of belonging, allow him to slow the game down and help him avoid some of the damaging errors he made at shortstop in the late innings of games earlier this season. Maybe being among big league coaches will allow Luciano to work pregame with coaches at a number of spots — third base is likely to be another spot the Giants will be tasked with filling if Matt Chapman opts out — without the pressure to be polished right away.
If the Giants left Luciano at Triple A much longer, or if they allowed his defensive inconsistencies to delay his arrival, then they could have been left with a brooding or disinterested player who still has the potential to be a middle-of-the-order impact hitter — the kind of player that fans have been most desperate to welcome to the big leagues.
Luciano is here now. And he should be here to stay.
Giants starting pitcher Hayden Birdsong could see more innings after the trade of Alex Cobb. (Ron Chenoy / USA Today)
Hayden Birdsong’s emergence is real
At least, it better be.
The Giants traded Cobb, a popular and inspirational veteran who was on the cusp of returning to the rotation because it became undeniable that Birdsong, a 22-year-old rookie, needed to keep getting the baseball every fifth day.
The trade was not without risk. Birdsong has thrown 87 2/3 innings this season across three levels and is likely to be capped after 40 or 50 more. Rookie left-hander Kyle Harrison is sitting at 97 2/3 innings and likely faces a similar restriction. With 53 games remaining and at least 10 turns through the rotation, it’ll be tricky for either young pitcher to make it to the finish line, let alone contribute innings in October’s postseason cauldron.
Ray, Snell and Logan Webb are not made of titanium, ether. The Giants gutted through most of June with barely two starting pitchers and a steady stream of bullpen games. It’s not likely that their bullpen will be hardy enough to withstand similar demands in August and September. It was thought that Cobb’s return could take the pressure off others.
“It creates some risk, but for us, the job Hayden’s done and for us to really believe in the roll this group of starters can get on, we’ve got to take a little bit of a leap of faith that they’re going to be healthy,” Zaidi said. “If something else happens, we’ll have to figure out another plan. We’ve got a couple guys at Triple A that we think can come up and do the job for us. We’ve had to improvise at different times. That’s not Plan A, but if it happens, we’ll figure it out.”
It would’ve been tough to manage the roster with a six-man starting staff that included Birdsong and Cobb, especially with Jordan Hicks headed to the bullpen to ride out the remainder of his first full season as a starter. But there were ways to make it happen. There also was no guarantee that Cobb, a 36-year-old who has dealt with elbow, shoulder and blister setbacks while coming back from offseason hip surgery, would be able to maintain a run of good health and be available every time the club needed him.
There was quite a bit of interest in Cobb, even though he hadn’t thrown a pitch all season, because of how well he’s respected across the league. Dodgers president Andrew Friedman inquired about Cobb, and because of a rare schedule quirk in which the Giants and their archrivals completed their season series in late July, it wasn’t out of the question that a deal might have been possible. But in addition to Friedman, Cleveland manager Stephen Vogt also knew Cobb from their time with the Tampa Bay Rays. So the Guardians, who have the best record in the AL, took on the remaining $3 million or so of Cobb’s salary and hope to give him the platform he most desired: returning to pitch in the postseason for the first time since 2013, when he happened to pitch the Rays past Cleveland in the AL Wild Card game.
“My wife asked me if I knew any players there,” Cobb said in a phone interview. “I said, `No, but I know the entire coaching staff.’ She said, `OK, well, thanks, that makes me feel old.’
“Vogt caught me in the minor leagues, he was my teammate in the big leagues, and with his personality, you knew he was destined to be a manager. He’s absolutely hit the ground running with that team. I can’t wait to be a part of it.
“I also loved every minute of being a San Francisco Giant. I made so many great relationships. It’s tough to leave those guys but you keep reminding yourself about the situation you’re going into. It’s the team with the best record in the league. I’m hoping to fulfill my dream of pitching in the postseason again.”
What does Cobb make of the Giants rotation that he was set to join? The one that is held in such high regard by the front office that they no longer had room for him in it?
“I haven’t seen pitching as good as that last four-game series (against the Rockies),” Cobb said. “It was a clinic of what pitching should look like. The offense, you know, it’s hard to say. Soler was traded when he seemed to be starting to hit his stride. But you’ll see it happen when a team’s starting pitchers get on a roll. It frees up guys at the plate and helps them feel more confident. They’re not pressing with every runner in scoring position.
“So I think this is going to be an exciting time to be a Giants fan.”
Another Bay Area boy in the Black & Orange 🤝 pic.twitter.com/aBFBWFaB38
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) July 31, 2024
The trade for Canha is mostly cosmetic
Zaidi joked that Melvin got a hold of the car keys at the buzzer and drove the bus to acquire Canha, one of his former players from his time in Oakland.
Melvin called Canha, who attended Bellarmine Prep in San Jose and played at Cal, “a pretty tenacious player. He’s the kind of guy who you don’t particularly care for on the other side and you love him when he’s on your team. He’s so excited about coming back to the Bay Area. There’s a lot to like about him and how he feels about the Bay Area. Sometimes those things inspire you a little bit, too. His numbers maybe recently haven’t looked great. Maybe we targeted him to play a little bit more against left-handed pitching. But when you’re inspired, sometimes things can pick up.”
“The last acquisition made it clearer what we were trying to do.”
The Giants needed to do something besides not trading Snell to show their clubhouse and fans that they were invested in this group. Their goal was to acquire a defensive stalwart in center field that could allow them to move Heliot Ramos to a corner and improve their defense while leaning into their pitching strengths. But Kevin Kiermaier went to the Dodgers. Trent Grisham wasn’t moved. Luis Robert and Cody Bellinger weren’t traded, either. The Giants weren’t going to give up a top-10 prospect to further the ambitions of this team, which already is facing playoff odds that might fall into the single digits after another loss or two.
So the Canha trade is cosmetic. It’s more than what the Giants did at the deadline a year ago, when they were 58-48 and leading the NL wild card standings and added a creaky A.J. Pollock. It might be a little nearer to the deal they made to add in 2019, when they traded relievers while picking up Scooter Gennett from the Cincinnati Reds — a move that made it a little easier to justify releasing fan favorite Joe Panik.
Gennett had just 67 plate appearances as a Giant. Pollock had six.
At least Canha is healthy and he matches what the roster needs: a right-handed hitter who brings some athleticism to the outfield and can complement LaMonte Wade Jr. at first base while Wilmer Flores is on the injured list.
Canha’s presence does one other thing. It blocks 22-year-old Luis Matos.
If you feel like the Giants sent a mixed message with their trade deadline activity, then imagine how confused Matos must be. They are creating avenues for their young players. Except barely a month after trading Austin Slater to clear a path for Matos, they acquired another veteran who basically does the same thing.
“Luis isn’t here right now (but) we’ll see what September brings,” Melvin said. “I’m not necessarily saying he’s going to be here. But he’s another guy we have in our system that we feel good about who’s had a nice run as well. So it’s in him.”
If Tuesday night’s loss was the beginning of a flatline, there’s nothing that would prevent the Giants from reversing course. If it becomes an obvious tack to abandon all playoff hope, they could let Matos learn through struggle in the big leagues, place Canha on waivers and see if someone else is interested in paying the remainder of his salary. They could do the same with Michael Conforto or Taylor Rogers, and if enough of those players were claimed swiftly enough, they (not likely but not impossibly) might even save enough money to slip under the luxury tax.
It all comes down to whether the Giants can get on that elusive winning streak. And how quickly they can do it.
Otherwise, they’ll all get nowhere fast.
(Top photo of manager Bob Melvin taking the ball from pitcher Robbie Ray: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)
