Could everybody be trying to be MadBum's baby at the non-waiver deadline?

[EasyAce]

By Yours Truly
https://throneberryfields.blogspot.com/2018/05/could-everybody-be-trying-to-be-madbums.html

Don't look now, but there's already talk about what might or might not be come or close to the 31 July non-waiver trade deadline. It may not overshadow the talk around such things as the Dodgers losing their second-least-affordable-loss man (shortstop Corey Seager) for the season to Tommy John surgery, which means a Dodger season that spent April reeling is now officially on the brink. But it's there.

Yardbarker's Justin Mears thinks five players today could find new homes by then: J.T. Realmuto (Marlins, catcher, and a subject of trade rumours even before April ended), Mike Moustakas (Royals, third base/DH), Alex Colome (Rays, closer), Brad Brach (setup man, Orioles), and Starlin Castro (Marlins, middle infield).

And others think the most intriguing non-waiver trade possibility could be Madison Bumgarner himself. Buster Olney of ESPN began tapping that drum in April's final week, when he wrote the Giants---awaiting Bumgarner's return from the pinkie injury he suffered from a spring training line drive---needed to think seriously about pushing the plunger and commencing a serious rebuild.

Olney ponders the following scenarios:

* The Giants could think about extending Bumgarner, even as he hits the age where normal players begin to decline, and commence their rebuild around him, young Chris Stratton (who's looking, little by little, like becoming a rotation mainstay), and catching anchor Buster Posey, while remaking the farm.

* They could flip him for prospects at the non-waiver deadline, then---as the Yankees did with Aroldis Chapman---re-sign him as a free agent, even with the risk of that costing them a bit more than extending him might.

* They could flip him for prospects, say "Thanks for everything you did to get us those three World Series rings," and turn the page entirely.

Plus, any team dealing for Bumgarner if he's made available would find themselves taking on almost shamefully low money risk: his deal has this season and next to go and it's so team friendly---he's earning $12 million this year with a team option for likewise in 2019---it's insane.

That's why Bumgarner is their best trade chip now. Andrew McCutchen, Evan Longoria, Brandon Belt, and Johnny Cueto are owed too much money to be tradable, particularly with a saturated first base market leaving Belt unmovable even if he was owed less.

The risks, as Olney knows, are these:

* If the Giants extend Bumgarner, there's always the chance that it works out the way it did for the Phillies, who waited far too long as their 2008 championship team began aging to remake the team. Their last winning season was 2011. Only now have the remade Phillies begun to show something positive---at 16-12, they're in third place behind the surprising Mets and Braves in a suddenly-tough-again National League East.

* There's always the risk that the prospects for whom they flip Bumgarner prove to be journeymen or worse, but that's a risk every team takes when they're going into rebuild mode.

* They could plan to make a run at bringing him back in free agency after flipping him for prospects, but there's always the risk someone else might show him more money and lure him that way. Bumgarner has never impressed (yet) as someone for whom the dollars matter as much as other things, but even a man who doesn't chase the dollar would be hard pressed to avoid being seduced by it.

What of the other five whom Mears examines?

Realmuto---He, too, is already a trade rumour subject. What a surprise. As Mears notes, All-Star catchers are as common as finding titanium while digging up the back yard. And he's been a live one this season thus far.

And if the Marlins are right in thinking there might be a bidding war for him among the Mets, the Nationals, and the Phillies, all of whom need experienced catching help and fast, they come out the winners and their rebuild (stop snarling, Marlins fan, we know it's always a chance of translating as "rebuild to another fire sale" even under new ownership) continues apace.

Moustakas---The Royals re-signed him for one year. Nobody really knew why, since they were really not likely to have one more postseason run in them just yet, even as nobody could really figure out why a power-hitting third baseman coming off a breakout year would attract such a parched off-season market.

American League contenders would love his bat in the DH slot if they don't have a third base need; National League contenders might want him at third base . . . particularly the Mets or the Braves (whose young incumbent Johan Camargo may not be the power hitter they want at the position just yet).

Colome---The good news is that, at non-waiver deadline approach, contenders always want bullpen bulls with any kind of closing experience. The better news: Colome is also on a team-friendly contract, through 2020. The best news: After showing a little shakiness in the first half of April, Colome's been picking it up considerably, especially, as Mears notes, in his past four gigs.

The Rays may look a little better than advertised right now, but they're not really a contender now. If Colome keeps up his current level, he could bring them some choice prospects and maybe even a young major leaguer to line up for a rebuild finish and maybe contention in a year or two.

Brach---Mears thinks he's likely to be the second-most desirable relief pitcher at non-waiver deadline time in the game behind Colome. Brach's one of the best setup men in the game and has been since 2015. (Lifetime batting average against him: .217.) And when Zach Britton went to the disabled list last year he got some solid closing experience.

He may be 32, but he looks durable enough. And, a possible bargain pickup, especially, as Mears says, if the Orioles can't gin up a bidding war for him.

Castro---He became a Marlin in the deal that made Giancarlo Stanton a Yankee. He's reliable. He's dependable. He's under a team friendly-enough deal. And he's as versatile as the day is long around the infield. Mears thinks that contenders suddenly dealing with injuries might come into play but, for now, the Brewers might have the likeliest desire for him.

All of which might end up playing bridesmaid to any wedding to come between Bumgarner and, well, just about anyone who thinks they're heading for a shot at the World Series. If the Giants decide he's available, MadBum's going to be singing the Carl Perkins chestnut/Beatles favourite "
Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby" (though George Harrison sounded scared shitless at the very prospect of it when he sang it) at maximum volume.
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[skeeter]

With Samardzija and Holland currently in rotation I hope to gosh you're wrong.

Madbum's got plenty of Ks left in that arm.

[EasyAce]

Madbum's got plenty of Ks left in that arm.

He also has the one thing just about nobody else on the Giants this side of Buster Posey (whom they wouldn't trade if you paid them) has---real trade value. And if the Giants are headed for a rebuild, Bumgarner's the only one who can bring back the prospects to get it started right now. Unless---big unless---they a) draft well this time, and b) find a heretofore undetected
bargaining chip allowing them to include Bumgarner in the rebuild.

[skeeter]

He also has the one thing just about nobody else on the Giants this side of Buster Posey (whom they wouldn't trade if you paid them) has---real trade value. And if the Giants are headed for a rebuild, Bumgarner's the only one who can bring back the prospects to get it started right now. Unless---big unless---they a) draft well this time, and b) find a heretofore undetected
bargaining chip allowing them to include Bumgarner in the rebuild.

How about three time Golden Glove Brandon Crawford? Too much left on his contract?

[EasyAce]

How about three time Golden Glove Brandon Crawford? Too much left on his contract?

Three years and $45 million left on his deal. Between that and his drop in plate production last year and (so far) this, he's got little to no market value
right now. If he picks up the pace at the plate, he might have a good trade market over the coming winter, depending on how much the Giants would
ask a trade partner to kick in to cover the rest of his deal.

[Polly Ticks]

I am a huge Madison Bumgarner fan.  Wherever he ends up, stay or go, they'll be lucky to have him. 

[EasyAce]

I am a huge Madison Bumgarner fan.  Wherever he ends up, stay or go, they'll be lucky to have him.

@Polly Ticks
If the Giants decide to make him available, there'll be several contenders in need of veteran pitching. The Braves, the Mets, the Phillies,
and the Yankees come to mind immediately; possibly, too, the Angels and the Brewers.

[Polly Ticks]

@Polly Ticks
If the Giants decide to make him available, there'll be several contenders in need of veteran pitching. The Braves, the Mets, the Phillies,
and the Yankees come to mind immediately; possibly, too, the Angels and the Brewers.

@EasyAce

Yes, agreed.  And Madison is a good ol' boy who would fit right in with the Braves, that's all I'm saying ... !!

[GrouchoTex]

I still believe the Astros need a closer, and I'm still no convinced Brad Lidge Ken Giles is their answer.

[EasyAce]

I still believe the Astros need a closer, and I'm still no convinced Brad Lidge Ken Giles is their answer.

If they're not comfortable with in-house options, I could see the Astros making a play for either Alex Colome or Brad Brach. As I noted in the original essay, they both have closing experience, and Colome is looking good right now in the ninth for the Rays, who may need to flip him for a couple of prospects or maybe a prospect and a major league-ready kid, if they're going to continue rebuilding.

[EasyAce]

I'll say this much for Ken Giles, which is pretty much what I said after Game Four of last year's World Series: at minimum, he stands up like a man and takes responsibility when something goes wrong on his watch. He took it to a slight extreme after Tuesday night, but you'll never hear him offer cheap excuses when things don't go the way he wants them to go:

Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night of the Week
By Yours Truly
31 October 2017

In 1944, Frank Sinatra recorded one of his classic contrast songs, a jaunty swinger with a melancholy lyric. "Saturday night is the loneliest night in the week/I sing the song that I sang for the memories I usually seek," goes one couplet.

Astros closer Ken Giles might have held onto a couplet like that after Game Four of the World Series.

On Saturday night, Giles waited until he had the clubhouse all but alone, other than the reporters around his Minute Maid Park clubhouse locker. Then, the former Phillies right-hander who looks a little jaunty himself when everything is right in his world spoke plainly. "I didn't do my job," Giles said. "Plain and simple. I let my team down."

No excuses. No plea that he entered the game with a stacked deck against him, a right-handed pitcher facing one right-handed hitter in between three left-handed hitters, even though Giles on the regular season was almost as stingy to left-handed hitters (they hit .196 against him) as he was to right-handed hitters. (They hit .200 against him.)

He went out to open the top of the ninth with the Dodgers and the Astros tied at one. He threw Corey Seager an inside fastball, and Seager fisted a cue shot through the Astros' infield shift and into right center for a leadoff hit. He walked Justin Turner on five pitches, four of which were borderline on the corners.

Up stepped Cody Bellinger, who'd scored the tying run in the seventh after his one-out double sent Astros starter Charlie Morton out of a game he'd pitched brilliantly against Dodger starter Alex Wood. Giles started Bellinger with a down and in slider that missed by a hair for ball one.

The next pitch was a fastball just off the middle of the plate. Bellinger drove it deep to left center to break the one-all tie, and Giles's night was over. Manager A.J. Hinch brought in Joe Musgrove, who'd been a starter in the season's first half before being moved to the bullpen in July, where he flourished as a middle-innings man.

All Musgrove had to do was keep the deficit to 2-1. He struck out Yasiel Puig and put Logan Forsythe on intentionally to load the bases for a double play prospect. But he threw Austin Barnes a meaty fastball down the pipe and Barnes hit a sacrifice fly. Then he threw Joc Pederson a slightly up, slightly in fastball on 0-1 and watched it sail over the right field fence.

"Right where I wanted it — fastball up in the zone," said Musgrove after the game. "He just beat me to it. You get away with plenty of fastballs down the middle that guys foul off. You throw one up out of the zone where you want, and they beat you."

Musgrove finally retired the side when he threw Enrique Hernandez a pitch very similar to the one Barnes hit for a sac fly, and Hernandez lined out to left fielder Marwin Gonzalez. But it's Giles who has Astroland ready to build him a gallows.

The unhappy lot of a major league closer is he's noticed far more closely when he fails than when he succeeds. Will Harris and Chris Devenski combined for an inning and two thirds of shutout relief before Hinch handed Giles the ball hoping for the tie to hold. His 34 regular season saves hasn't really saved him this postseason, and they wouldn't save him now.

The analyst tells you that if the tie did hold, what was ultimately Alex Bregman's excuse-me solo homer off Dodger closer Kenley Jansen in the bottom of the ninth would have put the Astros at a 3-1 Series advantage, on the threshold of a Dallas Keuchel/Clayton Kershaw rematch in Game Five.

The analyst would also tell you that, since Giles did get hit for the tie-breaking run, if Musgrove had done his job all the way through and gotten the double play he sought when putting Barnes aboard, Bregman's bomb would have sent the game to extra innings at minimum.

But Musgrove doesn't have the glamour job description, Giles does. It's bad enough to struggle most of a postseason. It's bad enough when you can't keep a tie game tied. But what happens when you have to watch your successor surrender what you left behind? The talk is going to be more about the runs charged to you than those surrendered on your dime, as often as not.

He's hardly the first closer to find himself lost for getting rid of postseason enemy bats, and he won't be anywhere near the last. Jansen himself has had the issue twice this World Series. But he's a well-established great already. Relief pitchers who haven't established their greatness should only be allowed to dust themselves off and either show what their made of the next time out or, if it happens at a World Series's finish, next season out.

"This game's hard. They're not out there trying to fail," says Astros center fielder George Springer, who'd hardly hit half his weight until his two-run homer off Brandon McCarthy broke yet another Game Two tie to stay in the eleventh inning. "I hope [Hinch] keeps giving 'em the ball. I have the utmost confidence in them, and I'm glad they're on my team."

That's the hardest part for Joe and Jane Fan to deal with. They don't want to know how hard baseball really is. They don't like to be reminded that the one rule of sports you can't amend is that somebody has to lose. They don't get that, no matter how much your paycheck reads, you could throw the best you have to throw and the guy at the plate still has a 50-50 chance of making your best look like the worst in one irrevocable instant.

Joe and Jane Fan sometimes know that under baseball's loudest and brightest lights men who aren't anywhere much beyond ordinary sometimes touch and get touched by greatness. They may still remember Moe Drabowsky, a flaky journeyman pitcher who looked like a Hall of Famer on one day of his life — striking out eleven in relief in Game One of the 1966 World Series. That's one example.

And they don't like to be reminded of how many Joe and Jan Fans wouldn't have the stones to go out there and try, anyway, with 45,000 people watching right there in your office, and maybe ten million watching on live television. Relief pitching especially makes loneliness possible in the middle of audiences like that.

Neither Giles nor Joe and Jane Fan wanted to know Saturday night that even the greats, even Hall of Fame relievers, were human enough to be beaten at the wrong times. With the Series tied and the Dodgers managing to wring back home field advantage for a Game Five at minimum, Astroland might find another tropical storm more of a relief. Unless winning that beyond-insanity Game Five really does mean the Astros are now only 27 outs away from their first World Series rings ever.

But that was Mariano Rivera, a Hall of Famer in waiting, who surrendered a World Series-losing base hit to Luis Gonzalez in Game Seven, 2001. He'd already established his greatness; he was secure enough to know that he might have just committed an epic fail but that the flip side is — there will be times when the other guy is just plain better.

The Mariano simply acknowledged he'd just played in the best World Series his team had yet played since he came aboard, dusted himself off over the offseason, and went on with his Hall of Fame-in-waiting career.

Dennis Eckersley gave up Kirk Gibson's game-ender in Game One of the 1988 Series. He faced it dead on afterward with his usual combination of stand-up candor and wit, and continued with what turned out a Hall of Fame career. Including a World Series ring the following season.

Goose Gossage couldn't keep a deficit to one when Gibson hit a three-run homer with one out in the eighth, Game Five, 1984 Series. Gossage simply faced his music, shook it off, and went on with his own Hall of Fame career, including a Series ring from 1978, even if the years that wrote his plaque were already behind him.

Lee Smith, whom many think should be a Hall of Famer, who'd been holding a five-all tie in Game Four of the 1984 National League Championship Series, threw the wrong pitch to Steve Garvey with Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn aboard and one out in the bottom of the ninth.

Garvey drove it over the right center field fence, sending San Diego into a frenzy and setting up a fifth game, another Cub letdown, and what turned out to be Gossage's moment in the cooker. Smith, too, shook it off and went on with a mostly successful career.

Giles may or may not get one more chance at redemption before this World Series finishes. If he doesn't, there's always next year. The Gossages, Smiths, Eckersleys, and Riveras had the comfort of knowing their teams had their backs, because their teams — whatever their vicissitudes — knew one thing above anything else: Baseball players are only human, too.

"I'm gonna have my ups, I'm gonna have my downs, and right now I'm down," Giles said after Game Four. "But the only way to get back on track is to get up, dust myself off and be ready to go."

He has the right attitude. But then so did Byung-Hyun Kim after the Yankees ruined him twice in the 2001 Series — a series Kim's team went on to win. His teammates had his back, and Kim proved resilient during an off-season of ferocious scrutiny. The right-handed submariner came back with a lights-out, all-star 2002.

But as a Red Sox in 2003, weakened by the effects of an early-season ankle injury plus shoulder stiffness, Kim got into a division series game, surrendered a walk, and manager Grady Little hooked him at once. Confidence blown to bits. Managed to eke out a career between starting and relieving for a few more years, with scattered flashes of the pitcher he could have been, but never again as good as he looked in 2002.

Every relief pitcher who ever played the game knew going in that, from the moment he stepped on the mound, no matter how far he shoved the thought right out of his mind, there would only ever be one pitch between himself and disaster. And, it was what he did in disaster's aftermath that showed more of what he was made of than what he accomplished before disaster struck.

The Astros have a fine line to walk with Giles even as they have a World Series yet to play out. They can't afford to blow Giles's already fragile confidence; they can't afford to send him to the mound without gilt-edged insurance.

But there's more crying in baseball than there is gilt-edged insurance. Especially for relief pitchers, with or without "closer" on their job descriptions. And, except for the reporters he faced like a man and not a mouse, Saturday night was still the loneliest night of the week for Ken Giles.

[GrouchoTex]

I'll say this much for Ken Giles, which is pretty much what I said after Game Four of last year's World Series: at minimum, he stands up like a man and takes responsibility when something goes wrong on his watch. He took it to a slight extreme after Tuesday night, but you'll never hear him offer cheap excuses when things don't go the way he wants them to go:

I understand what you're saying, and the article makes its points, but just last night Giles came in tied 0-0, top of the 9th, and gave up 3 runs against the Yankees at home, so it's still fresh in my mind.

He comes in and faces Judge & Gregorius, and they wound up on 2nd and 3rd, no outs.
He strikes out Stanton, so there's a glimmer of hope.
That glimmer faded fast when Sanchez jacked it to deep center field for a 3 run homer.
So, the Yanks aren't The Little Sisters of the Poor, I guess law of averages got him.

In times like these, it is good to remember that the Astros, in post-season play last year, did well against 3 of the top closers in baseball:

Kimbrel for the Red Sox.
Chapman for the Yankees.
Jansen for the Dodgers.

Still, it is no fun when it's your own guy giving it up.