The San Francisco Giants have been thoroughly mediocre for the entirety of the 2024 season. But as the trade deadline passed with little to write home about for Giants fans, president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi made his perception of this team clear.
Zaidi spoke to the media after the Giants mostly stood pat at the deadline and said he felt the team has “the best rotation in baseball” and has the makings of a playoff team, despite currently being two games under .500 at 53-55 and four games out of a playoff spot.
“When you have starting pitching like that, it can get you on a roll,” Zaidi said. “For us, to keep that group together, seeing how we played this past weekend, was really high priority. Obviously, we had to be open to things that might come up, but that was really our central philosophy going into the deadline, is: We have a rotation that can carry this team down the stretch and get us on a roll.”
The Giants were back at their season-low six games under .500 entering Friday but swept a four-game series against the last-place Colorado Rockies over the weekend, indeed led by their starting pitching. That team-wide performance seems to be why the Giants elected to keep this core together rather than pursue a plan to supplement the current roster or to trade away some of the top players for prospects.
Several of Major League Baseball’s top contenders were reported to have checked in on Giants starter Blake Snell, who had a horrendous start to the season after signing a two-year, $62 million deal in mid-March. But Snell has been dominant of late, striking out 30 batters in 24 innings across four starts and only allowing two runs, good for a 0.75 ERA. In what was his final start with the Giants, Snell struck out a career-high 15 hitters in six innings, the most from a Giant since Tim Lincecum’s famous first playoff start in 2010 and the first pitcher to ever finish with 15 strikeouts in six innings or fewer.
Zaidi acknowledged that discussions about trading Snell happened, but said the offers weren’t up to the Giants’ price – which wasn’t just for the pitcher, but for the season.
“Trading him would have changed the course of this season, where we still believe in what we can accomplish,” Zaidi said. “Leaning into our youth, leaning in to our rotation was really the plan. So if someone came to us with something we thought could really change our future, and you’re making that sort of trade-off of the present versus 2026, 2027, that’s challenging.”
The biggest move the Giants made came on Monday night when the team shipped out struggling designated hitter Jorge Soler and reliever Luke Jackson to the Braves. The move – which Giants All-Star Heliot Ramos told reporters was a “surprise” to him on Tuesday – came with a significant financial benefit for the Giants, as the Braves took on Soler’s entire remaining contract from the three-year, $42 million deal he signed with the Giants in February.
The Giants also sent rehabbing starter Alex Cobb to the Cleveland Guardians on Tuesday for a minor-league pitcher. Right before the deadline, the Giants added outfielder Mark Canha, a Bay Area native who went to Cal, in a trade from the Detroit Tigers for minor league pitcher Eric Silva.
Zaidi was emphatic that he thinks the Giants’ roster is capable of making the postseason. If other executives around the league are to be believed, that may be what it takes for Zaidi to keep his job in San Francisco.
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