In failing to do so, they might’ve protected their future.
Ken Rosenthal’s MLB notes that went up this morning on The Athletic (sub required) briefly mentioned the San Francisco Giants as one of the teams that have tried to trade for Chicago White Sox outfielder Luis Robert Jr.
Although the 27-year old is coming off the worst year of his career due in part to injuries (just 100 games, 425 PA) — and the other part because he plays for the White Sox — he’s just a sesaon removed from being an All-Star and garnering some MVP votes with a 130 OPS+ (38 HR, 80 RBI). In his rookie season of 2020, he placed second in Rookie of the Year voting and won a Gold Glove. He’s set to make $15 million in 2025 and the the White Sox hold a pair of team options of $20 million each for 2026 and 2027. He’d be a good get if the injury concerns are limited.
Of course, even though Rosenthal doesn’t give the reason for why the trade didn’t happen, we know why the Giants did not pull the trigger: the White Sox asked for Bryce Eldridge. Earlier this month, Andrew Baggarly (also for The Athletic) reported that the White Sox had asked for Eldridge in a potential trade for LHP Garrett Crochet. A reminder that Eldridge, the left-handed slugging first baseman, is generally considered to be the Giants’ top prospect. You can imagine Buster Posey and Zack Minasian pivoting from Luis Robert Jr. when they were told the cost includes Bryce Eldridge to Crochet and still getting “starts with Eldridge.”
While the Giants appeared ready to trade an “uncomfortable” number of players to get Crochet (and possibly even Robert), they didn’t want to include Eldridge, according to Baggarly. It’s this bit that I want to focus on because it relates to a Luis Robert Jr. trade situation in a very specific way: the team managed to avoid repeating the Bryan Reynolds trade that sunk a decent chunk of the past 8 years of Giants Baseball.
Good job, everybody!
It must’ve been a relief for senior advisor Bobby Evans to either steer Buster away from or be overruled by Buster to not trade away 6+ years of Eldridge’s potential for 3 years of solid floor-uncertain ceiling with Luis Robert Jr. It’s not a 1:1 that Robert is Andrew McCutchen or even Evan Longoria, but the simple notion of trading one of the team’s top hitting prospects — who could develop into the envy of most of other teams — in a “win the winter”-type move is one the team is still not in a position to make without careful consideration.
Maybe Evans got too caught up in the mission, tasked with putting an entertaining product on the field with big names (McCutchen! Longoria!) while reducing salary, but it felt like an iffy move at the time because coming off a 98-loss season, it seemed like gathering good prospects was the wiser course of action. In this situation, I think Buster Posey might’ve been even more justified than that: purging the last guy’s players is a time-honored tradition of short-sighted ego that basically everyone agrees is acceptable.
Eldridge is still a prospect and, therefore, an uncertainty — plus, because he’s a Giants prospect, the odds are stacked against him developing successfully. Robert’s age 27, 28, and 29 seasons are not the same as McCutchen’s age-31 season or Longoria’s 32-36. Robert looks to be a projectable 3-win player in each of the next 3 seasons (if all goes well), which factors out to about $6 million per win above replacement — a bargain in SABR terms.
But this was simply a wise decision. Robert’s 2023 season looks like an outlier right now, not only because of total performance, but the number of games played (145; 545 PA). He’s hit the IL every season since 2020. In 2021, it was a hip flexor strain. In 2022, blurred vision and later on a sprained wrist. In 2023, he missed time with an MCL sprain. Last season, the hip flexor issue returned and caused him to miss two months.
The White Sox want to extract as much as they can from a trading team because they’re in a long-term rebuild cycle. The Giants are trying to come out of one of their own and trading away their top prospect plus an uncomfortable number of others just to get the uncertainty of a Luis Robert Jr. or a Garrett Crochet doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Besides, they’re not a Luis Robert Jr. away from being a great team. In fact, they’re more likely to go from… whatever it is that they are now… to great with their current portfolio of prospects than zeroing out the top of their lists to obtain one All-Star player with questionable availability.
Still, it’s great to see the Giants checking in on good players. Maybe they’ve always done this and there’s been a bit more secrecy about it, but in any case, the check in balanced out by restraint is nice to see. Maybe it was Brian Sabean who said that prospects were meant to be traded? That attitude doesn’t really hold water in today’s game, though, and it’s good to see one 21st century lesson sticking around the new front office for now.