Following Sunday’s 3-2 victory over the Minnesota Twins that earned themselves a series win, the San Francisco Giants officially reached the All-Star break.
This is a good time for everyone involved with this team to take a breather and assess what they are going to do moving forward when they are back in action starting July 19.
After the first half of the season, they sit three games below .500, fourth in their division, and three games out of the final Wild Card spot.
The only thing that matters is that last point.
It doesn’t matter how poorly the Giants have played to date, all they have to do is start playing good baseball like a roster of this caliber should and they could find themselves firmly in the mix of the playoff race.
But, the front office will have a tough decision to make ahead of July 30.
Right now, the market is shaping up to benefit teams who are selling since so many teams are hovering around a postseason spot and aren’t ready to trade away their players. San Francisco could take advantage of that and get back pieces to help them in the future.
It sounds simple, but Grant Brisbee of The Athletic laid out why this team shouldn’t be sellers since shipping out many on their current roster is much more difficult than one might think.
“The Giants cannot have a traditional fire sale. It’s not that they don’t have good players, it’s that they don’t have a lot of good players who aren’t signed to cumbersome or unusual contracts … They should listen. They should make calls. They should propose deals that make other GMs mad. But it’s hard to see them having a transformative deadline, one way or the other,” he writes as his conclusion.
What got him there?
Brisbee took a look at every player on the active roster and put them into tiers starting with those they are not going to trade (Logan Webb, Kyle Harrison, Heliot Ramos, Patrick Bailey).
The problem San Francisco has is that their roster is either full of players underperforming causing teams to not give up many assets to acquire them, or those who are still young and would only net them prospects in return they would have to hope turn into the players they just traded away.
Long story short, there isn’t a lot of gold in this mine.
That’s likely why the Giants will be fairly dormant around the deadline, not being sellers or buyers, but instead seeing if this group can finally play up to expectations. With players they have returning from the injured list, they’re going to get a bump like they made additions anyway.
It’s certainly an interesting spot this organization finds themselves in.
They aren’t good enough to be aggressive before July 30, they aren’t bad enough where they should start selling everything to begin a rebuild, and they don’t have enough valuable pieces to take advantage of this type of market.
So, San Francisco has to hope that all the money they spent on high-profile players during the offseason finally starts resulting in wins.
