The Giants Got Marcelo Mayer for a Reliever Who Walks Everybody. Explain That One, Boston.

I have spent this entire season screaming at this front office. So understand what it costs me to write the following sentence: the Giants just fleeced the Boston Red Sox. Fourth overall pick. Twenty-three years old. At least five years of control. And the price was Erik Miller, a 28-year-old middle reliever who cannot throw strikes and has never been able to throw strikes.

Read the two sides of this trade again

San Francisco sent Boston a left-handed reliever and an outfield prospect named Carlos Gutierrez. Boston sent San Francisco Marcelo Mayer. That is the deal. That is the whole deal.

Mayer was the fourth overall pick in the 2021 draft. Not a sleeper, not a helium guy, not somebody's pet ranking — the fourth pick, a consensus top-of-the-sport shortstop prospect who spent years on every list that matters as the centerpiece of a Boston rebuild everybody in New England was told to be patient about. He is twenty-three years old. He has one year of big-league service time. He still has all of his minor league options. That means the Giants control him for at least five more seasons, and they can send him to Sacramento to breathe and figure it out without burning anything.

Erik Miller is twenty-eight. He is a Stanford guy, he throws hard from the left side, and he has been genuinely useful — 2.76 ERA in 32 and two-thirds innings this year, 45 strikeouts, a .198 batting average against, 3.05 for his career across 147 appearances. Good reliever. I liked watching him. But he also walked TWENTY-TWO men in those 32 innings. That is almost sixteen percent of the hitters he faced. That is not a blip, that is who he has been in the minors, in the big leagues, everywhere. He hits arbitration this winter and gets expensive. He is a good middle reliever with a strike-throwing problem and a rising price tag.

"He hasn't hit yet." Okay. He's twenty-three.

I know what Boston will say, because Boston has already said it. Mayer has not hit in the majors. He slashed .228/.272/.402 in 44 rookie games before a wrist injury ended his season, and this year he was at .220 with a .594 OPS in 228 plate appearances before a bone stress reaction in his left forearm shelved him at the end of June. Career line, .223/.278/.346. Twenty-four walks, eighty-four strikeouts. Nobody is pretending those numbers are good.

They are also 364 plate appearances. Three hundred and sixty-four, from a kid who has spent both of his big-league seasons hurt. A wrist injury one year, a forearm the next — those are two of the injuries that most directly destroy a hitter's ability to hit, and he played through and around both of them while being asked to prove himself in a pennant race in the hardest media market in the sport. Then Boston looked at that sample and decided it was conclusive.

The stated reasoning is what really gets me. Franklin Arias passed him on the shortstop depth chart. Curtis Mead and Caleb Durbin came in and clogged the infield. So the fourth overall pick became a roster-crunch problem, and instead of moving one of the guys they acquired last week, they moved the guy they drafted and developed for five years — for bullpen help. That is not a baseball evaluation. That is an organization solving a spreadsheet problem with a franchise asset.

Every single one of us has watched the other side of this movie

You know why this one lands differently for me? Because we are the team that does this. WE are the ones who ship out the twenty-three-year-old and take back the useful arm and then watch that kid turn into somebody in another uniform for a decade. That has been the Giants' signature move for most of my adult life. I have written that column. I will probably write it again in October.

So to sit here and watch Boston do it to themselves — to hand a Bay Area front office a top-five draft pick with five years of control and take back a reliever who will be non-tendered in two years — I genuinely do not know what to do with my hands. This is the trade the other guys usually make with us.

Now the cold water, because I have been burned before

On paper this is a robbery. On paper. Mayer still has to hit, and he is currently rehabbing a forearm, and forearms are the injury you never want to hear about from anybody who swings or throws. There is a real world where the bat plays exactly as it has played, and the Giants have a twenty-eight-year-old utility infielder in three years and Boston has a lefty who gets big outs in the ALDS, and everybody in New England is allowed to laugh at this column. That world exists.

But that is the point of the deal. The Giants gave up an asset with a known, capped, fairly modest ceiling — a good middle reliever, the most replaceable thing in modern baseball, a role this organization has literally filled off the scrap heap multiple times this season — for a lottery ticket that used to be the fourth-best amateur player on Earth. When the downside is "we needed a lefty in the seventh" and the upside is "we found a shortstop for the next six years," you make that trade every hour of every day. You make it while this team is 48-67 and has nothing else to be excited about.

Just play him. Please. Immediately.

Here is my one request, and after this season you will forgive me for having no faith it will be honored: when Marcelo Mayer is healthy, he plays. Every day. Not a platoon. Not a Tuesday-and-Friday arrangement while Tony Vitello runs his sixtieth lineup of the year. Every day, in the middle of the order, next to Bryce Eldridge, for the rest of this lost season and all of next spring.

Boston quit on a twenty-three-year-old because it was inconvenient. The way you make them regret it is not by writing columns like this one. It is by handing the kid a position and leaving him alone.

For once, the Giants ended up on the right side of the ledger. Let's not immediately find a way to lose that too. Go Giants.

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