Maybe we've been viewing Harrison Bader all wrong. Not that he hasn't behaved like a Thanksgiving ham in a batting helmet, but he may have spurred his soon-to-be former employers to accept their current situation with a clearer eye and purpose. And with some gelignite.
The San Francisco Giants have been freefalling all season long, which if nothing else marks a refreshing change from their decade of mediocrity in stasis. The amazing thing about their season is that they still haven't chased away their in-house fan base despite an uninterrupted series of decisions that would not be much different if they had been aimed at doing just that. Maybe lousy community and corporate relationships, plus some truly hideous baseball have unlocked some masochistic impulse in the regional baseball-going public; it seems to have worked for Love Island, after all.
On Monday, with the looming MLB trade deadline and 112 games of diaper-grade baseball as impetus, the fellows finally faced their fears and fraudulence and began tackling the rebuild they had always said they wouldn't entertain. Not with Bader, mind you—they're just trying to void his contract on the grounds that a professional athlete should be able to avoid driving his scooter into a fire truck—but with what has happened since.
First, pitcher Tyler Mahle was sent to the Braves in a deal resoundingly hailed by most Deadline Day analysts as epochally meh. Then Luis Arraez was moved to the Phillies in a move that sets up Philadelphia for observations like this while kicking the Giants the usual lottery tickets. Next, their second best starting pitcher, pending free agent Robbie Ray, was sent to their divisional/geographical rival San Diego for a decent haul (as in two of the remaining three) of the Padres' useful prospects. And in the last hour before the deadline, the Giants shifted their once most-prized prospect Heliot Ramos, who is now more of a platoon outfielder with some thump, to the Yankees for two prospects, and then reliever Erik Miller to Boston for tarnished former mega-prospect Marcelo Mayer. How the team's embattled head of baseball ops, Buster Posey, stopped before redeploying Rafael Devers, Matt Chapman, and Willy Adames is due either to his phone dying, or frying, or possibly the league's opinion of the team's best-paid trio of position players. In doing all this, Posey staked himself to a new battle cry, retiring "We're not rebuilding" and rolling out "Boom goes the dynamite."
None of these deals, the combination of all of them, or any moves thereafter, matched the same throw-weight as Tarik Skubal to the Dodgers or the backlash thereto; the Giants don't have anyone good enough to generate that sort of uproar. It's hard to say that any of them quite add up to the moves that sent Adley Rutschman to the Red Sox or let's go with Foster Griffin to the Guardians. And for sheer volume of moves, the Giants still trailed the Mets and Angels. The decision to sell in itself is notable mostly because the Giants have been one of the sport's most active bumblers this season—in this case, they really are right there with the Mets and Angels—and belatedly appear to have noticed as much. Staggering from a terrible start to settle in for a season-long fight to stay above the Colorado Rockies is one thing. To lose one's identity just as its prime competition, the West Sacramento Mudslide, has left town is a marketing stroke of rare calamity.
The Arraez trade has piqued the interest of the Defector Philadelphia Bureau for obvious (read: anything to do with Alec Bohm) reasons, and that is their business. But for those of us in a mood for nonpartisan rubble analysis, the Giants' last few days have been every bit as fascinating. Their 21st century has been an amalgam of weirdness laid out in easy-to-identify micro-eras. While most teams tend to find a lane and keep to it more or less, the Giants have lurched back and forth as though they aren't sure who, what, or why they are. From the joys and irritations of the Barry Bonds era (2000-04) to the inevitable hangover and reset (2005-08) to the Tim Lincecum/Madison Bumgarner/World Series Parade In Triplicate renaissance (2009-15) to The Stasis Years (2016-20) to The 102-Win Year That Made No Sense (2021) to Stasis Redux (2022-25) and now, finally, a bottoming out—poor results, poor PR, disgruntled and unlovable personnel, and the belated acknowledgement that the Stasis Years are no longer something be avoided but cherished.
But Arraez is also a pending Bill Madlock (four batting titles, no other Hall of Fame attributes), and the Giants' ability to turn him into a fairly useful defender for the first time in his career was one of the few successes the Giants have had in this forlorn year. The Giants packaged him with reliever Caleb Kilian, a free-agent foundling who was one of those other semi-successes, in exchange for two prospects that may, if they hit, be part of the 2030 Giants; the most we can say about this now is that it is clear-eyed. By the time we know more, the Giants could be cleaning house in the executive suite as well as the dugout, spending their marketing budget complaining that they need a new stadium while threatening to move to Nashville, or sold to some ne'er-do-well billionaire friend of the current president. Or, worst of all, Tom Dundon.
That's why they were reluctant to claim plans for a rebuild: Rebuilds take time, and while there is no need to put too fine a point on it, Giants owner Charles Johnson is 93. Dumping the remaining salary commitments to Mahle, Arraez, and Ray (plus Kilian) would also appeal to an owner of any age, both on principle and in the context of a team that will struggle to reach 70 wins. Or an owner of any age who is looking at a lockout in 2027 with a team that still draws 37,000 saps ... sorry, "marks" ... pardon me, fans per game. Johnson may be anti-union (and rest assured he is) but that's still money he won't have next year.
But on the off chance that these were simply baseball deals, it may mark the end of San Francisco's flirtation with name players after the six years of Farhan Zaidi rolling out cleverly constructed rosters of 4-A types to extremely predictable results. Posey's ambitions, restrained though they were, did not come close to those of the Dodgers or Padres, and the fact that the Giants have even lost ground in the division to Arizona's more modest revamp basically laughed at the team's claims that "REBUILD" was a profanity that they would not utter.
Now here we are. Gravity has raced upward and yanked the Giants by the seater toward the Earth's crust. That Monday's fire sale ends up being the most positive development on their 2026 desk calendar—next to Tony Vitello saying "bullshit" in defense of Adames, who was surely shopped but not traded—tells you how the rest of the year has gone, on and off the field. The cleanout may not be done yet, but this was at least a firm acknowledgement that Phase 1 of Busterama had beached itself a couple of phases short of a sea change, and a renunciation of the roster that process built. Even a lockout might be sold as progress relative to more of that, if that's your idea of triumph.
