Should trading Logan Webb be on the table for SF Giants if rebuild is necessary?

The SF Giants completely wasted another masterful Logan Webb start on Monday night. He pitched eight scoreless innings and allowed just one run but manager Tony Vitello decided to bring in Keaton Winn for the ninth inning. It proved to be a disastrous decision as three runs went on to score and the Washington Nationals won 4-3.

Now the Giants are 27-40 on the year. What an ugly record. It’s never good when your win total is in the 20’s and your loss total is in the 40’s. Unsurprisingly based on that poor record, the Giants figure to be sellers at the trade deadline which is naturally going to lead to speculation about Webb.

He has been San Francisco’s ace since the second half of 2021. Coincidentally that was the last time the Giants made it to the playoffs. Webb has been thirsting for another chance at that high-intensity October baseball and he at least got a taste of it by pitching for Team USA in the World Baseball Classic, but it is worth wondering whether he will ever make it back to the playoffs with San Francisco.

The Giants finished around .500 each of the last four seasons and are now on pace to finish well below that mark. They are seemingly stuck with an expensive, aging core group of players who have not consistently played up to what they are being paid. 

Worst of all, they seem completely unwilling to invest any real money into the pitching staff. They signed Adrian Houser and Tyler Mahle who have been pretty much dreadful and they didn’t adequately spend on the bullpen which has come back to bite them multiple times.

Is this team really built to contend the rest of this decade? That is the question the front office has to ask itself when thinking about trading Webb.

Giants front office would be admitting defeat by trading Webb

He is under contract for 2027 and 2028 and if the Giants do an about face and actually decide to invest money in the pitching staff this offseason then they can reasonably look themselves in the mirror and say they are trying to win. But if they aren’t willing to do that then it’s really tough to see a world in which they are all that competitive. 

We know the Giants don’t really rebuild. They’ll trade some players off but they have never gone for the full-scale, tear-it-down rebuild. Trading Webb would be a signal that the Giants know they cannot be competitive for the next few years and it would basically amount to an admission of defeat and fault by president of baseball operations Buster Posey.

That’s why it is unlikely they will decide to deal Webb. Posey can’t just pull the plug on this whole thing and say that he messed up in year two on the job. Yes, the Giants would get a lot of prospects for Webb but the cost would be much higher to the front office. It would show the players on the team that the Giants are not only giving up on 2026 but they’re also giving up on the next few seasons.

How are guys going to keep fighting if they feel like the front office is basically pulling the rug out from under them?

A trade might make sense from a baseball standpoint and the Giants should listen to offers for Webb, but if they pull the trigger on a trade they do so knowing full well that they are embarking on dangerous waters in which the term rebuild will be bandied about quite a bit. Maybe that's the only way to finally turn the ship around, though.

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