San Francisco Giants Trade Block: What Might it Look Like?

The San Francisco Giants don’t look good right now, and it is time to start considering them as sellers. Even if they become contenders by July 1st, there are still a few pieces worth selling. Here is a run down of how we see the Giants trade block.

When it comes to the trade season, the San Francisco Giants have been buyers as opposed to sellers every season since 2009. In 2013 the Giants decided to “stand pat” and it paid off when they won a World Series the next season. At the time, standing pat felt like the right thing to do. They had a young core, and a group of vets that weren’t too expensive, and had plenty of juice left in them. That’s not the case this season.

The Giants are the oldest they’ve been since 2010, and after the 2010 season we saw the Giants still re-tool big time, and get a younger squad. The average age from their 2010 championship season to their 2012 championship season dropped nearly three years from roughly 30 (29.8), to 27. Now the Giants are hovering at that “nearly 30” average age again. They’re long in the tooth when it comes to position players, especially outfielders, and as the core of the team gets older, they need to be filling in some younger talent around it.

As we explained in an article earlier, it’s much harder to do this through free-agency. Younger players don’t hit free agency very often, and when they do, they command premium price. The Giants can’t afford to add much to the payroll at this point, so they need to get younger and cheaper. You do that by trading for prospects, and closer to MLB-Ready prospects at that rate.

Now we need to look at the pieces on this team and who could we see getting shopped? We’re breaking it into a few categories here:

1. Who they’d be willing to part with
2. Who teams would have to over-pay to get
3. Don’t even think about it
4. What they need in return

Just to be clear, this is not worth taking as actual rumors, this is us playing GM, and what we might do hypothetically. If there is anything of a rumor leading to why we believe that would happen, we’ll state it.