Bryce Eldridge Is on the Bereavement List, and the Only Thing I Want to Know Is That His Family's Okay

He played Sunday in Boston, got two hits, drove in a run, and then he was gone. A 21 year old in the middle of a lost Giants summer, and the roster move that matters least on the standings page and most everywhere else.

Bryce Eldridge is 21 years old. He's six foot seven, he turns 22 in October, and for two years now he's been the one guy in this organization that Giants fans wouldn't let anybody talk about trading. Not at a deadline, not for a rental starter, not for anything.

On Monday the Giants put him on the bereavement list. That's it. That's the whole thing anybody knows.

He'll be away about a week. There's no explanation attached to it and there isn't going to be one, and I'm glad about that, because it's nobody's business, including mine. I'm sitting here writing about a baseball team and somewhere out there a kid lost somebody. Whatever that is for him, I hope his people are around him and I hope they're taking care of him.

The bereavement list is the one transaction in this sport that doesn't come with a reason. Everything else does. A hamstring gets a grade and a timeline. An elbow gets an MRI and a leak about what the second opinion said. A guy gets optioned and we all spend four days deciding whether the front office botched his development. This one just says the words and then it stops, and you're left looking at a name and doing the math on what it probably means.

He was in there Sunday at Fenway. Four at bats, two hits, drove in a run in a game the Giants lost anyway. If you watched it you had no idea. That's the part that got me. He stood in the box and did his job on Sunday afternoon and by Monday he was on a plane going somewhere that had nothing to do with baseball.

I've argued about this kid all summer. I wrote in July that he's the only future this team has. I wrote in August that his fourteenth home run in Cleveland was the entire offense, because it was. I've complained about where Vitello keeps hitting him. Eighty seven games, .252 with a .346 on base, 14 homers, 45 walks. Forty five walks at 21 in the big leagues. He was going to be the whole conversation in this town for the next decade.

And none of that matters this week. Not one bit of it.

The Giants are 54 and 78. They're 26 games out in the West and 16 and a half out of a wild card that stopped being a real thing back in July, so the roster question that would normally follow a move like this doesn't even come up. Nobody's asking how they replace his bat. Who cares. Shay Whitcomb came up, Grant McCray came up, Nate Furman came up, and half the roster turned over on Monday anyway with Adames and Bericoto and Brubaker all going down at once. It was a loud, strange day of paperwork, and this was the one line in it with a person behind it.

My old man died in November and I remember exactly how useless the phone was for about ten days. People say the right things and you can't hear any of them. You go where you're supposed to go, you stand where you're supposed to stand, and about four days in you catch yourself thinking about something completely stupid and normal, like whether you left the garage light on, and then you feel guilty about the thirty seconds you weren't thinking about it. That's what a week in August is for. Not rest. Room.

Should he even come back this year? If he needs the rest of September, take the rest of September. There's nothing at stake here. The Giants aren't playing for anything, and a 21 year old hitting .252 on a fourth place club has the rest of his life to hit. Buster isn't going to say that out loud and neither is Vitello, but if the kid wants the month, give him the month.

He'll be back in a week. He'll walk into the clubhouse and everybody will do the thing where they don't quite know what to say to him, and then somebody will make a joke about his batting gloves and it'll get a little easier, and then he'll go pop up twice and nobody in the building will care.

Take the week, kid. Take two if you need them. The rest of us will be right here, losing, exactly like we were when you left.

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