Should the Giants buy or sell at the trade deadline?

New York Times

5 days ago

You already know the answer to the rhetorical question about the San Francisco Giants in the headline. Three games against the Pittsburgh Pirates won't tell you anything that you don't already know. You've been on Team Buy or Team Sell for a week, if not a month. You've been stockpiling rhetorical munitions to lob at people on the other side, and here's a comments section that should be filled with them.
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Some of us, however, are dullards. We have all this information in front of us, but we can't make up our minds. And I'm using the royal 'we' here because I'm one of the undecided. My job is to have opinions about the Giants, but on this crucial issue — one that will have ramifications well into the next decade — I'm a dandelion spore floating on a breeze of deadline winds. Surprise me!
Here's where the Giants stand entering Monday night's action: They're three games out of the wild-card race. They're positioned perfectly between the final wild-card team (Padres) and the fourth-place team (Diamondbacks), with three games separating them on either side. One team is unambiguously in win-now mode, and the other team has already started selling. Right in the middle of them are the Giants, which is almost too perfect. They're what you get when you divide the Padres' hopes by the Diamondbacks' hopes.
So let's talk this out and ask ourselves a pair of important questions.
If there's urgency, why? When you look back at the 2025 Giants in a few years, is there anything that will let you complete the sentence, 'It's a shame that team wasn't a little better, because they could sure ____'?
The obvious answer is the pitching, even if that's getting rickety, both in terms of declining performance and unexpected injuries. The Giants still have a staff that's filled with All-Stars and other helpful pitchers, and if they're going to make the postseason, it will mostly be because of their run prevention. While the outlook is a little cloudy at the moment, with Logan Webb's struggles and Landen Roupp's injury, some savvy win-now trades at the deadline could help shore the staff up. Enough to stick with the plan of out-pitching the other guys, at least.
A less obvious answer is that they have a pretty strong middle of the order, in theory, and they could make it even stronger. The 'in theory' is doing a lot of work in that last sentence, but it's referring mostly to the three .700 OPS guys who could be .800 OPS guys. One of them could even be a .900 OPS guy. They're all in their relative primes. Matt Chapman, Willy Adames and Rafael Devers isn't a bad start to a team's lineup. But you haven't seen two of them hot at the same time this season, much less all three of them.
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If you're optimistic there, then maybe you're opti-realistic about the rest of the lineup, with reasonable hopes like Patrick Bailey hitting like a regular ol' catcher instead of the worst hitter in baseball, which he's already started to do. Maybe Jung Hoo Lee isn't the star he was looking like in April, but perhaps there's a happy medium where he's just a consistently helpful player.
Add a hitter to that group, and now you're cooking with gas. And with the pitching already in place, now you're cooking some duck fat and corn smut on that gas. You don't have to squint hard to see a contender! You might have to ignore the, uh, last few weeks, but this is a talented roster.
It's most certainly a win-now roster, and the urgency is that this might be as good as it gets for a while. For as flawed as this team is — and they are really flawed — they're not in a bad spot. They have talent on the roster right now. Their farm system isn't overflowing with short-term solutions and long-term guarantees. This might be the window. It's got a dead bug in the windowsill, and it looks like someone put their nose up to one of the panes, but it's a window. Might be the widest it's open for a while, even if it isn't open especially wide.
Nobody particularly remembers what Doyle Alexander and Larry Andersen did for the Detroit Tigers and Boston Red Sox, respectively. Everyone remembers what John Smoltz and Jeff Bagwell did for the Atlanta Braves and Houston Astros. The Giants have players like Alexander and Andersen, and they need to exchange them for their own Smoltz and Bagwell. In theory.
In practice, there's a reason why the examples we're using for best-case scenarios happened in 1987 and 1990. Trades involving future franchise cornerstones just don't happen that often. The likelier outcomes are something like what the Giants got from the Minnesota Twins for Sam Dyson. They got a player who got a few MLB at-bats before leaving the organization (Jaylin Davis), a decent prospect they frittered away (Prelander Berroa) and a player whose entire future is still ahead of him (Kai-Wei Teng). Even if the Giants had kept Berroa, we're talking about a trade from 2019 that still gets a big ol' incomplete.
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So if you're hoping the Giants trade Robbie Ray, Camilo Doval, Tyler Rogers and anyone else who might extract some top prospects, do it with that timeline in mind. The Giants might get a player who helps right away, but they also might not. They might not even know the final grade of the trade in 2030.
Let's say that you're aware of this, but you're also pretty sure that by trading Ray, Doval and Rogers, you can guarantee at least one young, majors-ready player who can help a win-now team. Great, but don't forget that you're giving two of them up in this scenario. Ray and Doval are under contact for next season, during which the Giants would ostensibly be trying to win. Rogers isn't, but he should also be an extension candidate.
In other words, it would be really, really hard to make these trades without hurting the 2026 team, too. Maybe you can play seven-dimensional backgammon and turn Ray's salary into a helpful free agent, but a deadline sell gets value back for the Giants because they're not selling rentals. That's an issue for a team that still wants to win soon. They'll just be out there in a couple months looking for a riskier, more expensive Robbie Ray on a longer contract.
Is there a prospect return worth that potential downgrade? Not a leading question, and not one I'm planning to argue for or against. Maybe there is. There are executives who think the Giants would be making a mistake by holding on to Doval.
Hmm. Pretty sure I'm still a believer in the 'win now, buy hard and leave a good looking corpse' method of deadline management here. The window argument convinces me. This is a team with enough talent to work with.
That written, maybe there's a way to thread that needle, folks. The Giants could acquire prospects for Doval that are better than the ones they give up for rotation and/or bullpen help. It would also lessen the impact of the prospects they trade away to help the lineup, buying and selling at the same time.
My conclusion isn't likely to be popular in these dark times, but I still think this is a better team than they've shown since the Devers trade. And it's not that far from being a much better team with one more hitter and everyone else hitting like they're supposed to.
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If you're seeing prospects in Ray, Doval, Rogers, et al trades that make it worth it giving up on that, I understand. Just remember Teng, who might never appear in another game in the majors or might wear a Giants cap on his Hall of Fame plaque. Possibly somewhere in between. Anyway, that was a trade from six deadlines ago. Deadline deals aren't always a quick fix, and that's if they're a fix at all.
I'd still err on the side of the Giants buying at the trade deadline, but they should also stop playing like doofuses so I could feel more confident about it. Your results from this questionnaire may vary.