The Giants should be damn happy they play in the same division as the Rockies. If it weren’t for the best-run front office of 2004, San Francisco would be in an even worse spot than their current .420 winning percentage, but regardless look to be sellers at the trade deadline. I’m of the opinion that the entire organization needs to be taken back to formula and Buster Posey is perhaps not the guy to run things, but in the medium term at least, they will attempt a more conventional rebuild.
The chief
challenge with the fit between the Yankees and Giants is the discrepancy in the latter’s asset performance. The Yankees need bullpen help, no question, and there are a trio of San Fran relievers who are free agents at the end of the year, classic trade bait pieces: Tyler Mahle, JT Brubaker, and Sam Hentges. Unfortunately Mahle is terrible, and while the other two both boast sub-3.00 ERAs, any other underlying metric indicates that those ERAs will not stay that low for long. Hentges is walking a comical 19.7 percent of batters faced, and Brubaker’s 17 percent strikeout rate does not help a Yankee bullpen that desperately needs some more whiffs.
If I had to pick one of the three, I would roll the dice on Hentges since he’s never had a year this bad from a walk rate perspective. Before 2026 he sat at a comfortable 8.4 percent rate for his career, so I’m going to be optimistic and say this is a flukey thing or the Giants are just bad at managing their pitchers. Still, I’m burned enough by Camilo Doval that I don’t really want any bullpen help from San Francisco.
If the Yankees choose to shore up their pitching rotation instead, given the impact of injuries and the potential of moving one of their own starters to the bullpen, Robbie Ray is also coming up on free agency. The 34 year old former Cy Young winner has a 3.45 ERA, pretty good, but you’ll never guess what happens if you look under the hood. The third-worst strikeout rate of his career matched with an unholy home run rate while playing in a park that doesn’t allow a lot of dingers should make us all very frightened of the idea of Ray pitching in the Bronx.
So the pitching’s all kinda bunk.
It may be unsurprising for a 37-51 team but the offense doesn’t look all that much better. The Giants have a bunch of pretty fat contracts on the books that I’m sure they’d be interested in trying to dump, but there’s no fit for Rafael Devers on this team. The Yankees certainly aren’t going to take on some $150 million worth of Willy Adames, and while I suppose you could squint and rub the bridge of your nose and maybe huff a Sharpie and see a spot for Matt Chapman on the club, he’s not even been a league average hitter in 2026. The Yankees already have a defensively-talented third baseman who can’t hit, and he isn’t under contract through his age-38 seeason.
I guess the one guy you could ask about, especially if it’s true that Aaron Judge won’t be back until September, would be Jung Hoo Lee, but I don’t know why the Giants would want to move one of their only productive hitters who’s still 27 and under team control for four more seasons at a relatively reasonable rate. I feel like there are some dark times coming for the Giants, perhaps some moral judgement for the harms the Bay Area have visited on the globe over the last two decades. There’s just not a lot here, and the prospect capital the Yankees would be expected to give up is probably best suited going elsewhere.
