Jake Roth-USA TODAY Sports
It sounds as if Giants fans can put down the torches that were aimed at Farhan Zaidi.
The team’s president of baseball operations suggested dealing with the Dodgers would not be as sensible as when he first said he was open to the thought, on June 6.
The Giants entered play Friday 3 1/2 games back of an NL wild card, stunningly in a race that seemed impossible six weeks earlier. The winner of the wild-card game likely would see the National League-leading Dodgers in a divisional series.
While cautioning that “things can change drastically,” Zaidi was not as optimistic that a fourth trade between the rivals since 1958 was on the horizon.
“It would be hard for a lot of reasons,” Zaidi told KNBR’s “Tolbert, Krueger & Brooks” on Thursday. “… I do think it is a different thing if we’re in full rebuilding mode versus the position that we find ourselves in today. Like you said, we may be facing the guys we move to other teams. I think it’s certainly more complicated than when I first made those comments.”
The Dodgers’ glaring weakness is in their bullpen, where the Giants are stacked. Will Smith will be a free agent at season’s close, and San Francisco also has Tony Watson, Sam Dyson and Reyes Moronta, all of whom would help Los Angeles.
But the Giants are not the surefire sellers they used to be.
“It’s something that we are going to have to evaluate with any trade scenario we look at,” said Zaidi, who will be busy with the trade deadline on Wednesday. “Even if it’s not necessarily trading a veteran for a prospect — us making a baseball trade, filling need for need, you are sending a player to a team that is in wild-card contention, that might be even tougher for us because you don’t necessarily want to help out a team you could be directly fighting for a playoff spot with.”