The Giants Baseball Blog

The annual MLB Winter Meetings in San Diego came to a close earlier this week and the Giants have to feel pretty decently about what they were able to accomplish while in attendance. No, there was no Gerrit Cole or Stephen Strasburgh signing, and Nick Castellanos has not agreed to come aboard (not yet at least), but the Giants and Farhan Zaidi were able to make a couple of moves that will help them both in the upcoming season, and perhaps for many years to come. In their first notable move of the offseason, the Giants inked free agent starting pitcher Kevin Gausman to a 1-year/$9M deal with incentives added in that could push the deal into the $10M range. We'll talk more about Gausman and what he'll bring to the table in 2020 in a minute but first lets take a look at who they now have locked into their rotation. The Giants, as of now, only have 3 guys cemented into the 5-man rotation, led by Johnny Cueto, Jeff Samardzija and now Gausman. Cueto, although he looked pretty g...

The Giants' most pivotal offseason in over a decade is in full force and with the departure of closer Will Smith, who inked a 4-year pact in Atlanta, marking the first big loss for the ballclub. The second departure from the '19 roster took place Tuesday after backup catcher, and a guy who really took well to this clubhouse and this fan base, Stephen Vogt, decided to take his talents to Arizona. In AZ, he'll be asked to backup and help mentor impressive young backstop Carson Kelly. Now don't get me wrong, the Vogt departure isn't anywhere near as impacting as losing ace closer Will Smith, but as painful and strange as this is to say, Vogt was the teams best catcher in 2019 so he too isn't someone Farhan and Scott Harris can easily replace. I mean, on a roster with a former MVP backstop and someone still relatively in their prime, Vogt was the more productive of the two, and by a good amount. The 32 year-old Vogt slashed a solid .263/.314/.490 over 255 at-bats....

Here we are, a month into the MLB offseason and movement is starting to slowly pick up in the hot stove arena and although things will slow down through the Thanksgiving weekend, you can bet things will heat back up early next week as the Winter Meetings are just a few weeks away. As I've stated many times here, probably as recently as our last post below, this is one of my favorite times of the year on the MLB front by far because this is the time when teams get a blank slate (or as close to one as they can have) and have multiple avenues they can take to improve their respective rosters. Today, since Will Smith was the first to depart from the club and open up a glaring hole at the end of games in the Giants' bullpen, I thought I'd delve a bit into what the Giants have coming back in 2020 while including some of the better options who are out there on the market, both trade and free agency. Before we delve into the more exciting potential positional players the Gian...

First off, welcome back to The Giants Baseball Blog! I took a bit of an extended hiatus and I'll talk a little more on that later, but I figured now would be an ideal time to return as the Giants enter arguably their most pivotal offseason in over a decade. It's one that's seeing them change the brass of the team, including bringing in a new general manager and new field general after the huge acquisition of Farhan Zaidi to take over baseball operations last fall. Finally, after what seemed like a very long search for their GM and manager, the Giants were able to fill both those spots within a couple of days of each other, and now the new hires will join Farhan as they try shift all the focus on getting the Giants back to being a perennial contender. Last week they plucked 32 year-old Scott Harris from the Cubs front office, where he had been a prominent part of their research and development and built a reputation for spotting young talent. Working under Theo Epstei...

The 2019 baseball season officially kicked off it's full slate of games on Thursday, including the Giants opener in San Diego. However, despite the fresh new start, the Giants ran into the same problem that's been at the heart of the team's failures the last few seasons as they once again just couldn't muster much of anything offensively. While the starter the Giants went up against is certainly a quality major league arm, Eric Lauer was easily one of the more underwhelming MLB starters to get the call Thursday, which makes the Giants' five total hits with zero going for extra-bases especially tough to swallow. On a day when great left-handed starters kicked off their respective squad's seasons, Laurer had arguably the best showing of any of them, thanks in large part to the Giants lack of ability to do anything at the plate. They not only had a tough time finding holes in the Padres defense and getting hits to fall, but they simply didn't swing the bat we...

The winter long Bryce Harper watch finally came to an end Thursday, as the slugging 26-year old outfielder chose to play in Philadelphia for the next 13 years, agreeing to a deal that will pay him $330M over that span. Immediately after the deal was announced, it was made public that the Giants were indeed serious on Harper, so much so that they actually offered him a deal that would have paid him slightly more annually than what he got from the Phillies, but it was for 12 years and not 13. The Giants offer was said to for $310M over those 12 years which would have given Harper an overall annual value of $25.5M. The deal he signed is only about 1/2 a million less per year than that, but it does show you that it wasn't just all about the money. I always knew it would have been a long shot for the Giants to ink him, and was very surprised at the offer they did give him, but I was fearful he would land in LA and even with their late push, that luckily did not come to fruition. To te...

We're just weeks away from Spring Training reporting dates and 2 months away from the opening of the regular season but the San Francisco Giants, along with plenty of teams, are still quite a ways away from having their 25-man roster in-tact. Now, obviously Giants' fans weren't expecting a big Bryce Harper or Manny Machado signing, or some huge trade for a Paul Goldschmidt or someone like that. I am, however, a little surprised that they've been as quiet as they have been so far, making a few lower radar additions to their pitching staff and that's about it. Their first addition of the winter was a nice, under the radar grab in obtaining 34 year-old switch- pitcher, Pat Venditte. This move gained a consensus thumbs up from everyone around the organization, including from us here at The Giants Baseball Blog . Venditte gives Boch the flexibility of essentially having two pitchers in one, slotted into one of the bullpen spots which is extremely valuable if Venditte...