The San Francisco Giants have been one of the worst teams in baseball, already 12 games under .500 after just 56 games, and are showing no signs of being able to turn this terrible season around.
So naturally, when a sports season starts off this bad, some people start to wonder if the team should just lean into that bad year and tank. It’s a tried-and-true strategy across American sports (and perhaps too popular in some leagues), and some Giants fans have started to wonder if they should do it now.
Thanks to a weird MLB rule and a few lucky pingpong balls last December, though, the Giants can’t even tank their way out of this disaster.
The last collective bargaining agreement in 2022 brought a draft lottery to MLB, with the top six choices selected by a draw of pingpong balls each year — the most picks up for grabs in a lottery of any of the major U.S. leagues. All 18 teams that miss the postseason would, in theory, have a chance to get any of the top six picks and the extra money that comes with those picks in the draft’s slot value system.
But in an effort to discourage teams from tanking for multiple seasons in a row, there are limits on how often a team can win a lottery pick. And within those rules, there’s a split between the big-money teams and the ones from smaller markets. Teams who receive revenue-sharing payments from MLB are not allowed to receive a lottery pick in three seasons in a row. Teams that don’t get those payments — large market teams like the Dodgers, Yankees, Mets, Red Sox and, yes, the Giants — can’t land in the lottery in back-to-back seasons. Those teams are deemed ineligible for the lottery, no matter how bad their records are in the season; the highest their first-round pick will be is 10th.
For the 2026 draft, three teams were ineligible for the lottery, most prominently the 119-loss Rockies. That ended up directly benefiting the Giants when their number came up for the No. 4 pick in the draft, which is scheduled to take place in mid-July.
That wouldn’t be a problem if the Giants were contenders, like they expected to be. But instead, they look destined to miss the playoffs AND be ineligible for a lottery pick. Even if they end up with the worst record in MLB, the highest the Giants will pick in the first round is at No. 10.
That fact alone basically kills most of the practical benefits that would come from tanking. It also adds even more importance to their upcoming draft, given they have the No. 4 pick and also picked up the No. 29 overall pick in the Patrick Bailey trade earlier this month. In their ideal future, the Giants won’t be drafting this high again soon because they are making the playoffs annually, so they absolutely cannot miss with this year’s top pick.
That’s why you might have seen a bunch of rumors around the Giants’ draft plans already. With their new pick coming with a slot value of $3.27 million, the Giants’ total bonus pool is now the fourth-highest in the draft, at $17.35 million. And several baseball insiders who specialize in draft coverage have connected the Giants with Roch Cholowsky, a Bay-Area born shortstop at UCLA (just like Brandon Crawford once was) who is widely considered the top prospect in the draft.
ESPN, MLB.com and USA Today have all reported hearing rumors about the Giants’ interest in getting Cholowsky to fall to them at No. 4 by offering him a larger bonus than what other teams are willing to pay. USA Today even reported that both Buster Posey and Brandon Crawford have met with Cholowsky already. But others around the sport and around the Giants have batted down the likelihood of being able to pull that move off. When it was brought up in an interview on KNBR last week, Posey downplayed the idea.
“I think sometimes, that’s a little bit overblown,” Posey said. “I got to go through the draft as a player and then I watched it when I was playing and now being in this position, now, I think most of the time, teams are going to take who they want to take. There’s probably certain scenarios where a team might pass based on signability, but my opinion is that’s pretty rare.”