Bryce Eldridge Is Back, and Buddy Kennedy Is the One Who Paid for It
Eldridge came off the bereavement list Thursday. To make room the Giants designated Buddy Kennedy for assignment, and Kennedy goes on waivers with a chance to land back in Sacramento if he clears.
He's back. That's the whole thing I cared about this morning, and I'm not going to bury it under transaction language for four paragraphs the way everybody else will.
Bryce Eldridge is off the bereavement list and back with the club. Three days away, whatever he was dealing with at home he got to deal with at home, and now he's back in the lineup for a team that has thirty games left and nothing to play for except him.
To make room they designated Buddy Kennedy for assignment.
I want to be careful here, because I don't think Kennedy is the villain of anything. He's a big league infielder who got picked up for exactly this reason, to cover a hole in a season where the holes kept opening, and he covered it. Twenty games in San Francisco. Thirty three at bats. Four hits. One run driven in. A .121 average and a slugging percentage that's also .121, which is a long way of saying every hit he got here was a single.
Nobody cuts a guy for that if the roster's healthy. This roster hasn't been healthy since June.
Look at what the last four days alone did to it. Adames to the injured list with a sprained left elbow. Bericoto with a bone bruise in his right knee. Brubaker with bruised ribs. Whisenhunt's elbow went from fifteen days to sixty, which is the season, and Houser's forearm followed him a day later. Roxby's contract got selected. Bivens came back up. McCray, Furman, Whitcomb and Walker all came up from Sacramento in one afternoon on the 24th. They've been running a shuttle to the River Cats for two weeks, and Kennedy is what happens when the shuttle runs out of open seats.
So it's a forty man roster move dressed up as a baseball decision. Fine. Every last place team makes them in late August.
What I actually want to talk about is the other half of it.
Eldridge is hitting .252 with a .346 on base and a .435 slug, fourteen home runs, thirty five driven in, eighty seven games. He turns twenty two in October. Go find another first baseman in this organization's recent history who showed up at twenty one and put up a league average bat while the roster around him was being dismantled and half his lineup protection went to the injured list or somebody else's team. You won't. Will Clark's the last name anybody would even reach for, and I'm not making that comparison, I'm saying that's the only neighborhood worth checking.
The team is 54-79. Twenty six games back in the West, seventeen and a half out of the last wild card. There's no October. There's no math. I quit doing the math around the deadline and I've felt better ever since.
What's left is watching one kid grow up in real time in an empty September, which is the thing this franchise has actually been asking us to do since Buster took over the front office, and I've spent all year yelling about the manager and the bullpen and the deadline while quietly not admitting that the reason I still turn it on at 7:15 is him.
He was gone three days. I noticed. My brother texted me Tuesday asking why Eldridge wasn't in the lineup and I had to explain what a bereavement list is, and then neither of us typed anything for a minute, because whatever put him on it is a great deal bigger than a last place baseball team.
He's back. Kennedy's on waivers and probably headed back to Sacramento if he clears, and I hope somebody gives him another shot, and I'll have forgotten his name by Halloween. That's the honest version.
Thirty games of Bryce Eldridge. That's the season now. Truthfully that's been the season for a while.
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