The Giants Baseball Blog

Finally, on December 19th, the Giants have found their third basemen for the 2015 season. It wasn't a big deal like for David Freese, Pedro Alvarez or Ben Zobrist. Not even a Trevor Plouffe or Lonnie Chisenhall, who would have been at least interesting in a new league. Instead, the Giants sent low-level minor league arms Kendry Flores and Luis Castillo to Miami for Casey McGehee. The 32 year-old third basemen hit .287 with 4 HR, 76 RBI and a .712 OPS in 2014, which won him NL Comeback Player of the Year honors. That's a higher average than Pablo Sandoval provided last year, but a huge fall-off in the power department. McGehee does have a track record of showing more power, including a 23 HR/104 RBI year for Milwaukee in 2010. The good part of this deal is the Giants didn't have to really part with any of their elite prospects, and that's probably what ultimately pushed them in the direction of McGehee. He does at least provide a better option at third than Arias and...

The offseason seems to really be heating up and despite all the action that's gone on over the last couple of weeks, one of the biggest markets in baseball and the reigning World Series champs have been one of the last to get going. They did make their first notable moves of the offseason this week though, bringing back one of the most important components to their bullpen in Sergio Romo, and the guy they traded for last July, Jake Peavy. They re-signed Romo, to a 2 year/$15M deal. Romo is coming off a bit of a down year, as he started out strong in the closers role, but relinquished the gig part-way through the season to Santiago Casilla. Romo did start thriving again in the set-up role, and likely could have taken back over as closer had Casilla got into any kind of trouble, but it was never an issue. Romo will enter 2015 as the primary set-up man once again, but will be first in line should anything happen to Casilla. I like this deal a lot as Romo is still one of the best rig...

Well, so far, it's been a tough offseason for the Giants as they've failed at retaining Pablo Sandoval and came up short in the bidding for the top left-hander on the marker, Jon Lester. In fairness to them, money was not an issue in either case, as they outbid both the Red Sox and Cubs for Sandoval and Lester, but the two just chose to take a different course. In Pablo's case, he wanted the bright lights and the challenge of playing for an East Coast powerhouse. I'm not quite sure why Lester choose Chicago over San Francisco though, as he's from the North West (Washington) and the Giants were supposedly offering more money than the $155M over six years that he signed for. But, instead of pondering what could have been, the Giants better get busy with plan B, cause they still have a lot of work to do and I expect the Lester signing to kick-start the starting pitching market. The other top guy out there, and the guy I originally wanted over Lester, is Max Scherzer,...