SAN FRANCISCO — The Patrick Bailey trade was a stunner. Teams don’t often trade pre-arb multiple-time Gold Glove Award winners, and they certainly don’t do it in May.
But when the dust settled, it became clear that Bailey himself wasn’t all that surprised.
After a rocky road trip, he started just once on the homestand before that Saturday morning trade to the Cleveland Guardians. He didn’t seem particularly disgruntled that week, but rather seemed to know what was coming. For Bailey himself, it ended up being a big win.
Bailey revealed after the trade that his wife, Leigha, was pregnant with their third child. It was difficult enough spending so much time away from his two young children, and Cleveland is significantly closer to the family’s North Carolina home. Professionally, the deal paired Bailey with Stephen Vogt, a huge positive. But it was from a personal standpoint that it truly became a home run.
For everyone else, it’s still too early to fully tell, although this is as good of a week as any to try.
The Giants will play three games in Cleveland starting Tuesday, and they called up Matt Wilkinson just in time to face the team that sent him across the country in exchange for Bailey. There will be some serious subplots, and the series also is pretty meaningful for Bailey’s new team.
The Guardians are six games out in the AL Central but just one game out of a Wild Card spot. The Bailey and Wilkinson stories might suck up most of the oxygen, but for Vogt, this is a chance to make up some ground against a Giants club that’s coming off one of its worst weekends of the year.
The Giants certainly have missed Bailey at points, and while his defensive numbers have taken a dip in Cleveland, a lot of that likely has to do with learning a new staff on the fly. There are metrics that rank Daniel Susac more favorably, but some Giants people admit they have missed Bailey’s guidance with pitchers, and that half of the team certainly has had a rough year. Before the trade, Giants pitchers had a 3.66 ERA when throwing to Bailey.
The Giants still have a chance to end up in a good place, though. Susac’s defensive numbers are strong, and before he suffered a season-ending injury he ranked among the game’s best framers and throwers. Alex Burg, the team’s catching coach, said the external numbers match what he has seen.
“He’s extremely skillful, he’s extremely talented, he has wonderful timing back there, really good hands, and obviously it’s a bazooka,” Burg said. “He has a chance to be a really good thrower. Any time you lose Bailey, that’s tough. This guy has shown that he’s the best in the world at what he does, but I think these guys (still here) are doing a tremendous job and I think Susac has a chance to be as good as anybody back there.”
Burg was and remains close with Bailey, but he’s also very excited about the young trio he’s working with now. The Giants traded Bailey in part because of their faith in the 25-year-old Susac and 24-year-old Jesús Rodríguez, who is the best athlete of the group but has been slowed by an injury. Those two have been joined by Drew Cavanaugh, 24, and Burg believes he will be an above-average big league defender in time.
The defense and game-calling overall has been inconsistent, which is to be expected from rookies, and there have been some notable in-season discussions about pitch-calling. The trio also still is a work in progress offensively.
Susac finally showed power right before he got hurt, raising his wRC+ to 83. Rodriguez is the wild card; he has a 104 wRC+ and ultimately might end up as a super-utility guy, but the Giants continue to work on his catching.
Cavanaugh, the newcomer, currently is at 87 in wRC+, and while he hasn’t flashed power, he has a .360 on-base percentage and has shown a very strong grasp of the strike zone. He will be the starter the rest of the way, and the Giants are excited to see the growth.
“Cavanaugh is probably the best blocker of the bunch and has gotten much better at throwing, and we’re seeing the receiving starting to tick up,” Burg said. “He’s incredible — we didn’t have him in spring training, so this guy is making massive changes on the fly in the big leagues. That’s such an irrational thing to have a young kid be comfortable doing, and he’s taken to it with ease.”
Overall, Giants catchers have a 66 wRC+ and eight homers since the day of the Bailey trade and have combined for 0.2 fWAR (although Susac is at 1.1 for his entire season, which included a scorching stretch in April). Bailey is at 0.3 fWAR in Cleveland with a 71 wRC+ and five homers.
The Giants have to feel pretty good about that part of the equation, along with the fact that they have gone younger (and cheaper) at the position. Ultimately, though, the success of the Bailey trade might not hinge on the players who directly replace him.
For an organization that desperately lacked pitching talent, the return has a chance to be impactful down the line.
The focus on trade day was Wilkinson, who should make his debut this week. Wilkinson had a 5.15 ERA in the hitter-friendly PCL with about a strikeout per inning, but overall this season he has a 3.40 ERA in 20 minor league starts. The Giants will take a look to see if he can be in the rotation mix next year, and at the very least, the fact that he’s holding lefties to a .385 OPS makes him a potential bullpen option.
The bigger prize likely will be the No. 29 pick that was thrown into that deal and, crucially, the draft flexibility that came along with it.
With that selection, the Giants took high school left-hander Carson Bolemon, now their No. 11 prospect, and they also benefited from the boost to their overall pool money. Because teams are able to spend five percent more than they’re allotted, the trade actually gave them the slot value of the No. 29 pick ($3.27 million) plus an additional $163,510 to spread around. They ended up signing 19 of their 21 draft picks and spending every single dollar available to them, and that added flexibility certainly helped.
It will take a few years to know if Bolemon can be a consistent part of the rotation, or if going well over slot for someone like second-rounder Kaden Waechter was the right move, but right now, the Giants are thrilled to have added the pitching depth, and they feel like they will be just fine behind the plate in the future.
“They’re just sponges,” Burg said of the trio of rookies. “They’re trying to learn, they’re trying to establish themselves as big leaguers. It’s been a ton of fun.”
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