Monday's Deadline Is the Only Interesting Thing Left About This Season, and Buster Posey Cannot Blink Again
Forty-seven and sixty-four. Ten games out of a wild card that four teams ahead of us also do not deserve. The deadline is Monday. There is exactly one correct answer here and I am terrified we are going to get a version of it that is half right, because that is what this organization does.
There is no argument left. None.
I have listened to every version of the "but we're only a few pieces away" argument for four straight months and I am done with all of them. The Giants left the All-Star break at 41-55. They have gone 6-9 since, which included beating the best team in baseball twice and getting two-hit by a bullpen game in San Diego, because that is the emotional range of this club. They are seventeen games under .500. They are twenty-one and thirty-six on the road. They are roughly ten games out of the last wild card with two months left and four teams to climb over.
This is not a bad-luck season. This is a bad team that has occasionally played well. Those are different things, and every year that this front office confuses the two, we lose another twelve months of Logan Webb's prime.
What we know they are actually doing
The word going around is that Jung Hoo Lee is not moving and Heliot Ramos is. That is the plan as it has been described to other clubs — Lee stays, Ramos is available to whoever wants a corner outfielder with pop who has not put it all together. Ramos had nine homers and thirty-one RBIs with an OPS in the .730s when the interest started building. He is twenty-six. He is not untouchable and nobody sane thinks he is, but he is also exactly the kind of player this team keeps trading at the bottom of his value and then watching turn into something somewhere else.
Luis Arraez is on an expiring deal and made the All-Star team. Robbie Ray is on an expiring deal and has been the most reliable starter in the rotation behind Webb, a former Cy Young winner with an ERA in the low threes. Both of those men should be pitching and hitting for a contender in ten days, and the return for both should be arms and bats that are twenty-three years old. Webb is not going anywhere and should not — he is the one player on this roster you build the next good Giants team around, and I do not want to hear a single creative idea about moving him.
Posey has also said the club may use the deadline to add bullpen help. And look, the bullpen is the worst part of this roster and has personally cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen games this year, so I understand the instinct. But adding a reliever in August of a 47-64 season is exactly the kind of move that makes the front office feel like it is doing something while accomplishing precisely nothing. Fix the bullpen in the winter. Fix it with the prospects you get back on Monday.
He did it right last year. He has to do it right again.
Give the man credit where it belongs: last deadline Posey moved Camilo Doval to the Yankees, Tyler Rogers to the Mets and Mike Yastrzemski to the Royals. That was a clean, honest sell-off of veterans who were not part of the next good team. He did not get sentimental about it. He read the room and he acted.
This year the read is even more obvious and the stakes are higher, because this is the deadline where the organization decides whether it is rebuilding or whether it is going to spend another offseason bolting parts onto a 75-win roster and calling it a plan. If the Giants do not fully commit to tearing it down now — at seventeen under, in August, with a manager the fanbase has lost patience with and a lineup that changes shape every single day — then they are never going to do it, and we are going to spend the next three years exactly here.
What I actually want by Monday night
Arraez gone. Ray gone. Ramos gone if somebody pays properly, kept if they do not, because the one thing worse than trading him is trading him for a lottery ticket and a handshake. Any veteran reliever with a pulse and a contract that ends this year, gone. Webb stays. Eldridge plays every day, in one spot in the order, for the next two months. Drew Gilbert and Osleivis Basabe and the rest of the kids get four hundred plate appearances between them so we actually learn something about them before spring training.
And then in October, somebody in that building needs to have an honest conversation about the manager, because you cannot evaluate a young roster when the guy filling out the card treats it like a lottery draw. But that is a column for a different day, and honestly I have already written most of it.
Monday. Sell. Do it properly. That is the whole ask. Go Giants.
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