Meg Vogel-Imagn Content Services, LLC
In assembling Reds West, a team whose three certain starting pitchers are all former Reds, who has given major league deals to a catcher and reliever who wore Reds jerseys, whose hitting coach came from Cincinnati, the Giants have set themselves up for the juiciest question of the offseason.
Would they add the most prominent former Red on the free-agent market and make a nine-digit splash for Trevor Bauer?
There have been persistent whiffs of interest around the big-ticket free agents during Farhan Zaidi’s tenure, as there should be for a team in the San Francisco market. But nothing has been consummated, the only multiyear deal given out by Zaidi’s Giants belonging to Wilmer Flores.
Bauer is the class of the free-agent starting pitcher market, top-shelf fare without a shelf below it. The Cy Young winner would immediately give the Giants legitimacy across the league, would send signals to the Dodgers and Padres that there’s a third team that wants the NL West, would position the Giants as a threat today without blocking spots for their hopeful threats of tomorrow, the Marco Lucianos and Heliot Ramoses of the world potentially joining a club that more needs pieces rather than a foundation.
But it’s a long shot. Everything from Zaidi’s past suggests a hesitation in committing major, lengthy deals to arms that can fade. Even with Bauer, the Giants would not be in the Dodgers’ eyeline. The best teams in today’s game have built themselves internally and then added from the outside, not importing stars who earned their contracts through performances given on other teams.
This sort of internal divide is what the Giants’ front office has to wrestle with while knowing it has less money to work with this offseason, even if other teams are broadcasting they are in more dire financial straits. Is there money in the budget for, say, $150 million for one pitcher?
“We’ll continue to sort of say generally that I’m in touch with ownership and our board,” Zaidi said on a Zoom call Wednesday. “They continue to be supportive of us making smart baseball decisions, and when there’s an opportunity that makes sense for a multiyear deal for a free agent, we’ll certainly discuss that. But beyond that, our operating charge continues to just be to make smart baseball decisions.”
A smart baseball decision was Drew Smyly last offseason. As was Kevin Gausman last offseason and this offseason. As was Anthony DeSclafani, who signed Wednesday. While the jury is out on DeSclafani, Zaidi’s Giants have proven excellent at identifying pitchers who are ready for a bounce-back, and Zaidi’s Giants have provided those pitchers with the tools to bounce back.
Zaidi’s Giants have gone big-fish hunting, namely with Bryce Harper, but they have not landed any. Is Bauer the right fit? Considering the amount of Reds influences around the Giants, they should know the personality and know the arm well.
Hitting coach Donnie Ecker was around Bauer in August and September of 2019, when he was a part of the Reds’ hitting staff. DeSclafani pitched alongside Bauer those two months as well as the 2020 campaign.
Bauer is as polarizing a personality as exists in baseball today. Young pitchers often flock to him, looking for bits of advice from an exceedingly public person who prides himself on being a student of the game, one of the posterchilds of Driveline who looks for any route toward upping his spin rates. He uses his online presence to teach and spread the game; he helped spearhead a sandlot game featuring plenty of star power that took place in March, shortly after spring training shut down. His Twitter and Instagram now basically exist to drum up more hype about where he will wind up, a frenzy his agent, Rachel Luba, also is leaning into that helps stories like this get written.
He also has used his influence for bad, notably, in early 2019, repeatedly directing his legions of followers at a woman who criticized him. She said she felt harassed, and he did not stop.
Bauer and Yankees star Gerrit Cole have a long-running feud that dates back to their UCLA days. Input from Brandon Crawford, Cole’s brother-in-law (who did not overlap with Bauer at UCLA), surely would be sought.
Would a personality like this thrive at Oracle Park? The Giants will find out.
“What we look for is players who are going to be good teammates and good representatives of the organization. You can be that in many ways,” said Zaidi, asked if a personality such as Bauer’s enters the equation when deliberating deals. “You can be that as somebody who’s relatively quiet, and you can also be that as somebody who’s really active on social media and kind of anywhere in between.
“So as we talked about with DeSclafani, we always do our homework on players, and the biggest component of that is talking to former teammates and coaches that have had these players. That’s where we make our assessment of whether the person is a fit for the culture that we’re trying to create. Sometimes that can be a little bit at odds with the public persona or the social-media persona, and that’s OK as long as we have confidence that the personal references that we’re getting from people that really know these players are good.”
Even if the personality passes the test, the arm might not. Bauer’s market is being helped by his excellence during the shortened 2020 season and by the dearth of any other aces on the market, and what may be forgotten is his career ERA is a shade under 4.00 (3.90).
Since debuting in 2012, Bauer has logged nearly 1,200 big-league innings and was merely a middling starter until his breakthrough in 2018, when, with Cleveland, he led the league in ERA at 2.44 and fully lived up to the billing that had made him the third-overall pick in 2011. But his 2019 season, in which he was flipped from Cleveland to Cincinnati, was inconsistent and finished with a 4.48 ERA. His 2020 campaign was brilliant, but his velocity actually was down, an average 94.6-mph fastball in ’19 buzzing at 93.5 mph last year. Personality aside, is his arm, turning 30 next month, the right investment?
The Giants’ front office has homework. Fortunately for the execs, the free-agency freeze is providing plenty of snow days before their work is due.