Per John Shea andothers, Buster Posey has told reporters at the GM Meetings in Las Vegas that Harrison Bader will remain in the Giants organization. After suspending him without pay for the final two months of 2026, there was some thought that the team would go through the administrative procedure needed to void his $13 million salary for 2027. Alas!
As Alex Pavlovic notes, “there will be an official update from MLB and Giants on the Harrison Bader situation soon,” which could mean that a suspension
of some sort is in the offing. The incident that caused the team to suspend him — getting drunk the night before the team had booked him a flight to see a specialist to examine his injured foot and then driving into the back of a fire truck which rolled over that injured foot — doesn’t run afoul of the major categories of league suspension (PEDs, domestic/sexual/child abuse violence, gambling on baseball, or Drugs of Abuse, on-field incident), so I wonder if this will be a novel form of suspension, a joint statement that features a fine disguised as a donation, or simply a “dude has gone through the administrative process and it has now been completed without further incident.”
We’re left to speculate on that part, but from the team perspective, the President of Baseball Operations has said that the player will be involved in the team’s plans for 2027, which at the very least signals that some or all of his salary will be on their books. That doesn’t preclude them from trading him, but it’s hard to see how much value he’ll have on the trade market, even if the owners are somehow able to pressure the MLBPA into accepting a floor & cap system. Harrison Bader is not a $13 million a player to anyone but the Giants and even those teams that will simply meet the floor by taking on any ol’ contract might not consider Bader even worthy of that effort, given his off-field behavior.
So, a dream of a Drew Gilbert-Jonah Cox platoon will have to wait at least a little longer, until Bader plays his way out of consideration, anyway (also, Jonah Cox will need to stop striking out 40% of the time). A Bader-Gilbert platoon has a lot more promise in the near-term, anyway; at least on paper. Bader has 8 years of MLB service time and has a career wRC+ of 94 to go with elite defense in centerfield. In 857 plate appearances versus LHP, he’s slashing .245/.312/.451 (.762 OPS — 106 wRC+). Gilbert slashed .264/.357/.444 (.801 OPS) against righties (343 PA) in 2026 with solid defense in center.
From a payroll standpoint it’s not ideal, but given Buster Posey’s comments on Day One of the aforementioned GM Meetings, maybe it doesn’t matter at all? There’s no reasonable pathway to winning much more than 67 games in 2027, the team had to solicit new investors just to cover their 2026 commitments… maybe this will be an offseason for the Giants to hibernate. GM Zack Minasian is quoted by John Shea in a postto the SF Standard this morning:
Asked about taking big swings in free agency, Minasian said, “We’ll see. I think in the spirit of being here and where we’re at, you try to be open-minded. I think at this point, it’s still a lot of information gathering. And once we get that, yeah, there’s probably potential for things that are a little faster than years past because of potentially what we’re going to be facing.”
[…]
Could the Giants move young middle infielders to improve their big-league pitching staff?
[…]
“[…] You don’t trade just because you have depth. But I think it’s in our best interest to stay open-minded, and we feel like we have talent to work with that would be interesting to other teams […]”
For the past few years, I’ve put together a “Just how much money do the Giants have to spend on payroll?”-type post, but after a 95-loss season, I feel that the air has gone out of that type of thing. Like, who cares? The Giants aren’t 2-3 free agent moves away or big salary-absorbing trades away from being a good team. Any success they have in the next two years will be entirely by luck and in large part because of players already in the organization.
BUT!
Under the terms of the current CBA, the Giants are currently $73.9 million under the first luxury tax threshold ($247 million). Under the most recent cap proposal by MLB, they’d be $71 million under. In actual dollars — since the Competitive Balance Tax threshold & the cap proposal would involve Average Annual Value of contracts plus player healthcare costs plus mandatory team contribution to the pre-arbitration bonus pool — the Giants have committed $171.23 million already for 2027, a rare season in which there’s not much separation between their real money & CBT payrolls. Bader’s $13 million real money salary is only $10.25 million on the CBT/Tax side because of how his deal was structured (he was owed $7.5 million in 2026 before the suspension).
For the past several years, the Giants have hovered around $250 million in expenses for their total baseball operation budget (that includes coaches, staff, scouts, technology, mortgages/construction costs) with last year being a notable exception on account of needing to pay $7.5 million extra for Bob Melvin’s contract and Tony Vitello’s Tennessee contract buyout. They ended 2026 with $189.7 million in actual payroll ($224.1 million CBT figure). They did spend $210 million in real money in 2024, but if you recall, Farhan Zaidi talked about how many other cuts he had to make around the operation to get that MLB payroll in under the total budget. I doubt the vast ownership group has the appetite to spend $200 million on a 75-win team, and the past decade has proved time and again that more money doesn’t translate to wins.
The Giants aren’t Harrison Bader’s contract away from getting Tarik Skubal or Seiya Suzuki and they’re not a Tarik Skubal and Seiya Suzuki away from being a good baseball team, so, all we’re left with is the news that a Bad Giant (.170/.198/.358 in 111 PA, off-field shenanigans that cost him the season) shall return for another season.
For now.
