SAN FRANCISCO — There wasn’t one simple explanation for why the Giants swapped one prospect for another Wednesday afternoon, optioning little-used designated hitter Marco Luciano back to Triple-A Sacramento and calling up speedy center fielder Grant McCray to make his major-league debut.
Was it because the Giants lineup has been too static and seemingly incapable of manufacturing runs? Was it because the Giants were seeking a defensive upgrade while conceding to a second-half identity as a team that must win low-scoring games? Or was it simply because Luciano wasn’t playing and there isn’t much point in letting a 22-year-old prospect gather dust?
Advertisem*nt
Giants manager Bob Melvin held his pregame session with reporters and indicated that the answer might be all of the above. Plus, Melvin pointed out, left-hander Robbie Ray was on the mound. And it would benefit the fly-ball pitcher to have McCray’s range in center field.
That’s not quite how it played out. McCray could’ve played center field in swim flippers on Wednesday instead of spikes for all the difference he could have made.
McCray’s blessed acceleration provided no advantage while Ray faced eight batters, hit the first two, walked three, and gave up a grand slam to Michael Harris II that splashed in McCovey Cove. The Atlanta Braves instantly turned a critical game with playoff implications into little more than a question of how to fill garbage time.
(The answer, at least in the ninth, was for Mike Yastrzemski to lob 45 mph floaters from the mound. Two generations of Yastrzemski men have played in 3,531 major-league games. This was the first — and hopefully, after he threw strikes on just eight of 29 pitches, the last — time that a Yastrzemski appeared as a pitcher.)
The Giants’ 13-2 loss knocked them back under .500 and 4 1/2 games behind the Braves for the third and final NL wild-card spot. And the Giants’ practical deficit is one game worse than that because the Braves clinched the season series and hold the tiebreaker if the two clubs finish with identical records.
The Giants needed merely to split this four-game series to seize the tiebreaker with Atlanta. Now they must win Thursday afternoon behindLogan Webbto avoid getting swept in a four-game home series for the first time since theLos Angeles Dodgersdid it Aug. 1-4, 2022.
We really don’t need to tell you what the takeaways are there. But the pregame prospect exchange is a bit more confounding. So let’s attempt to make some sense of it.
Advertisem*nt
The Jorge Soler trade wasn’t made to get at-bats for Luciano
That might have been the front office’s stated position at the time, but it’s clear now that the justification was a convenient crutch. Luciano started five games after the July 30 trade that shipped Soler to Atlanta and opened up the DH spot. Luciano wasn’t immediately productive, going 3 for 17 with eight strikeouts and no walks over those five starts. It also wasn’t a sample that should represent much of anything.
“Things can change in a hurry, and again we’re trying to run our best lineup out there and have our best complementon a particular day,” Melvin said. “It was easy at that point in time to try to envision more at-bats for Luciano, but it kind of dried up in a hurry.”
It seemed almost cruel when the Giants sat Luciano for a week, then started him against Braves left-hander and leading Cy Young Award candidate Chris Sale on Monday.
Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi talked up Luciano’s six home runs in July at Sacramento but was even more excited about the young hitter’s 18 strikeouts vs. 18 walks in the month. Zaidi said that allowing Luciano to focus as a DH might help him get comfortable faster in the big leagues. But it’s nearly impossible for any young player to get comfortable in a new role at the game’s highest level after just five games.
It’s hard to know how much damage has been done here. At minimum, the past two weeks would leave any young player confused about their timeline, their opportunity and their future expectations. Are you unclear about how the Giants envision Luciano fitting into their future? Of course you are. Well, now imagine that you’re Luciano. What must he be thinking?
Casting the Soler trade as an attempt to clear the decks for Luciano might have been a good way to sell what otherwise would’ve been perceived as a white-flag transaction. The unfortunate part is the Giants didn’t need to sell the trade to fans. They saw an opportunity to dump a declining asset and shed the remaining two years of Soler’s three-year, $42 million contract. Even more than a cost-cutting move, it was an acknowledgment that Soler, given his lack of power production, would have been a stodgy fit that hampered roster flexibility over the next two years. The Giants would’ve put up with that inflexibility if Soler, 32, were on pace to hit 30-plus homers and drive in 90-plus runs. But that didn’t happen this season — and his age curve will keep right on curving for the next two years.
Advertisem*nt
The Giants are seeking to rebrand their offense with speed
What they’re doing right now sure as heck isn’t working. So if they’re looking for lightning in a bottle, they might as well try to double down on their one consistent second-half source of juice. That would be Tyler Fitzgerald, who is making things happen on the basepaths and with his extra-base power.
“We’ve seen what Tyler brings to the table as far as his athleticism,” Melvin said.
The Giants have been a woeful situational hitting team all season and a pair of 10th-inning losses Monday and Tuesday only served to underscore their issues.
They probably made the right move on Monday by not telling Yastrzemski to bunt and sacrifice the automatic runner to third base. With Luciano and ice-cold Patrick Bailey due up next, the left-handed matchup with Yastrzemski against Braves closer Raisel Iglesias was probably the Giants’ best chance of pushing across the tying run. (Also, bunting against Iglesias, with Michael Conforto running from second base, meant a successful sacrifice was far from guaranteed.)
The Giants also probably made the right move in the 10th inning Tuesday by instructing Fitzgerald to attempt a bunt in the same situation. With Fitzgerald’s disruptive speed, he might have beaten out a decent bunt — and maybe even pressured the Braves into throwing the ball away.
Both situations blew up. Yastrzemski struck out on Monday. Fitzgerald bunted into an out on Tuesday. (It didn’t matter that the plate umpire botched the call and ruled that Fitzgerald was out because the ball hit him outside the batter’s box. The play would’ve otherwise resulted in an out at third base.)
The takeaway from those two 10th-inning losses? The Giants don’t put enough pressure on opposing defenses and aren’t a reliable run-producing team when they aren’t hitting homers. They’re dead last in the majors with 47 stolen bases. So they’re attempting to give the roster a different look and perhaps coax a different result.
Advertisem*nt
That’s a lot to ask from McCray, who hit just .210 and struck out in 37 percent of his at-bats for Double-A Richmond before getting moved up to Sacramento. He fared better in the lively Pacific Coast League (.272, a 28 percent strikeout rate, 12 doubles, four triples, six homers among his 52 hits), but hitters who post high strikeout rates in the minors and become major-league stars are the rare exception and not the rule.
And oh, by the way, it won’t matter if they successfully squeeze a bit more juice from this offense if the purported “best rotation in baseball” cannot hold up its end a little better.
“I take pride in my defense, and I work really hard for my pitchers.”
Giants call-up Grant McCray explains how he can help the team pic.twitter.com/z8jS9BpfRC
— SF Giants on NBCS (@NBCSGiants) August 14, 2024
Player development is the greatest success story of the season — and also the most confounding story of the season
Heliot Ramos became the Giants’ first homegrown All-Star outfielder since Chili Davis in the 1980s. Fitzgerald has been such a second-half force that he might receive some down-ballot NL Rookie of the Year votes while staking a claim as the franchise’s everyday shortstop in the post-Brandon Crawford era.
The Giants have gone through U.S. presidential administrations when they couldn’t point to one player development success to match either of those. It should be a confetti-throwing event to have two in the same season.
But Ramos, who was optioned in the first wave of spring cuts, needed literally half the Giants’ position players on the roster to land on the injured list to get a chance in the big leagues. Fitzgerald was either the 26th man on the roster or riding the Sacramento shuttle while the Giants watched Nick Ahmed take 172 plate appearances and post an OPS+ of 68. It would be understandable if you concluded that the Giants didn’t know what they had with either young player.
Sure, scouting and player development is the most inexact of sciences and baseball history is replete with unexpected breakouts. But it sure would be easier to feel better about the Giants’ ability to develop and graduate talent if they had a more cohesive and consistent approach when it came to incorporating that talent at the big-league level.
Instead, they are doing what struggling teams usually do when desperately trying to remain in contention: They are reacting in the moment. And that’s understandable. But in the process, they are treating upper-level prospects with the same haphazard here-one-day-gone-the-next churn that has defined the roster in the Zaidi era.
That’s the problem for any player when you’re thrown against the wall to see if you stick. You seldom know where you really stand.
(Photo of Marco Luciano: Robert Edwards / USA Today)
Andrew Baggarly is a senior writer for The Athletic and covers the San Francisco Giants. He has covered Major League Baseball for more than two decades, including the Giants since 2004 for the Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News and Comcast SportsNet Bay Area. He is the author of two books that document the most successful era in franchise history: “A Band of Misfits: Tales of the 2010 San Francisco Giants” and “Giant Splash: Bondsian Blasts, World Series Parades and Other Thrilling Moments By the Bay.” Follow Andrew on Twitter @extrabaggs
