The Giants Get a New Best Outfielder
The Toronto Blue Jays, in yet another sign that their slightly announced rebuild is continuing, are sending Kevin Pillar to the San Francisco Giants in return for three players. Heading to the land of colorful currency and milk distressingly sold in bags in return are relief pitcher Derek Law, former-Pirate-prospect-turned-useful-utility-guy Alen Hanson, and minor league pitcher Juan De Paula.
With free agency arriving after the 2020 season and the Blue Jays unlikely to go anywhere positive before then, it was only a matter of time until Pillar was traded to someone in need of outfield help. And when looking up “someone in need of outfield help” in a very odd dictionary, you might see a picture of the San Francisco Giants. If you checked out our positional power rankings last week — and you will be quizzed on those — you’d see the Giants ranking 30th, 27th, and 28th in the outfield, from left to right.
The Giants outfield has been a problem for awhile, and the winter before last, the team attempted to solve it by seriously going after all three Marlins outfielders, Giancarlo Stanton, Christian Yelich, and Marcell Ozuna, and after missing out on two of the three, picked up Andrew McCutchen as a stopgap option. This winter, on the other hand, with little desire to increase payroll, the Giants decided to collect 17 outfielders each worth about 0.5 WAR and somehow combine them into some form of Eldritch abomination undulating its way to a three-WAR season while hopefully consuming the souls of various Dodgers as a side benefit and then maybe things would be alright.
Narrator: Things were not alright.
Before updating the Giants depth charts, San Fran’s outfield projected at 1.1 WAR. Not each. Combined. Even with questions about his defensive numbers slipping in 2018, ZiPS projects Pillar to be a significant upgrade over the entire Giants outfield, with a .263/.299/.397 line and above-average defense in center, en route to a 2.4 WAR season. Getting Pillar for 2020 is a nice bonus, with the team’s farm system extremely unlikely to develop superior options to Pillar over the next calendar year.
The fundamental problem, however, is that this is largely a case of too-little, too-late. The Giants have had more than their fair share of bad fortune and probably were never as poor a roster as the 73 and 64 wins collected during the last two seasons. Better luck, however, isn’t enough to stretch the gap between where the Giants were in 2017-2018 and playoff relevance in 2019. Pillar and two more outfielders like him are necessary for the Giants to have a good shot at a playoff run, but it may not be sufficient. As an example of this, let’s start with the ZiPS NL West projections as of Tuesday morning.
| Team | W | L | GB | PCT | DIV% | WC% | PLAYOFF% | WS WIN% | #1 PICK | AVG DRAFT POS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Los Angeles Dodgers | 92 | 70 | — | .568 | 87.4% | 3.7% | 91.1% | 8.8% | 0.0% | 23.8 |
| San Diego Padres | 79 | 83 | 13 | .488 | 6.4% | 10.0% | 16.4% | 0.7% | 0.0% | 13.5 |
| Colorado Rockies | 77 | 85 | 15 | .475 | 3.5% | 5.9% | 9.4% | 0.4% | 0.1% | 11.7 |
| Arizona Diamondbacks | 76 | 86 | 16 | .469 | 2.6% | 4.6% | 7.3% | 0.3% | 0.1% | 11.0 |
| San Francisco Giants | 69 | 93 | 23 | .426 | 0.2% | 0.3% | 0.5% | 0.0% | 1.6% | 6.1 |
Prior to the trade, ZiPS was not all that hopeful about the Giants getting close enough to that 80-85 win margin to at least be interesting in 2019. There are simply too many weaknesses in the outfield and starting rotation, and with the Padres rapidly improving, the computer saw the NL West as a three-tier division with the Giants the only team in the bottom tier. It’s also not a case of ZiPS having some kind of history of underrating the Giants, missing high in both of the last two seasons and overrating the Giants by 0.4 wins a year over the last decade.
Picking up Pillar gets the Giants closer to the bottom of that second-tier in the NL West, but they are still a long way from a playoff spot.
| Team | W | L | GB | PCT | DIV% | WC% | PLAYOFF% | WS WIN% | #1 PICK | AVG DRAFT POS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Los Angeles Dodgers | 92 | 70 | — | .568 | 87.1% | 3.8% | 90.9% | 8.8% | 0.0% | 23.8 |
| San Diego Padres | 79 | 83 | 13 | .488 | 6.3% | 9.9% | 16.2% | 0.7% | 0.0% | 13.4 |
| Colorado Rockies | 77 | 85 | 15 | .475 | 3.5% | 5.9% | 9.3% | 0.4% | 0.1% | 11.6 |
| Arizona Diamondbacks | 76 | 86 | 16 | .469 | 2.6% | 4.6% | 7.2% | 0.3% | 0.1% | 10.9 |
| San Francisco Giants | 72 | 90 | 20 | .444 | 0.5% | 1.0% | 1.5% | 0.0% | 0.6% | 7.5 |
But let’s ask the question in reverse. The Giants are not a team on the upswing, they’re a declining franchise at the moment, an old, expensive team that isn’t very good and has one of the worst farm systems in baseball. To keep a team like that in win-now mode and not trade players that actually have value — the Giants have some — what chance at the playoffs do you need to justify this plan? Just as a ballpark, I’d say that you probably need at least a 10% chance of making the playoffs to make keeping the window open arguably the best approach. So how do you get the Giants to a 10% chance at the playoffs in 2019?
The point, at least in the ZiPS projections, turns out to be 6.2 additional wins after the Pillar trade. In other words, to become fringe playoff contenders in a single trade, the Giants needed to acquire Mike Trout, not Kevin Pillar. Now, that’s obviously a theoretical that had approximately zero chance of happening given that they probably couldn’t trade the entire current roster for Trout, but that’s the magnitude of challenge the 2019 Giants face in order to be a going concern.
But enough about the Giants. What do the Blue Jays get in return? Similar to the J.A. Happ trade last summer that fetched older, high-floor/low-ceiling players in Brandon Drury and Billy McKinney, the Jays get two players that are MLB contributors right now. Law, a non-entity the last two seasons after a huge dropoff from his 2.13 ERA/2.53 FIP rookie season, is likely a perfectly serviceable reliever at the back of the bullpen. Hanson, a former shortstop prospect for the Pirates and a longtime ZiPS favorite of those days, hasn’t re-established his value as someone you want starting, but he showed enough power and versatility that he may carve out a niche as an interesting utility man that can smack an occasional homer or two.
The only big unknown in the trade is the third player heading to Toronto, 21-year-old low-level minor-league pitcher in De Paula. This is already De Paula’s fourth organization thanks to being a popular trading token, now having been traded for Pillar, Ben Gamel, and McCutchen before even making it to High-A ball. He’s too low in the minors for a projection system to have anything that useful to say about him and I’ve never seen him play, but we have another terrific source of information here at FanGraphs in the form of prospect guru Kiley McDaniel, half of the McDongenhagen Project. De Paula’s fastball hit 93-95 late in spring training, but with a middling changeup and slurve, he lacks a real out pitch. Kiley seems him as most likely a power relief pitcher if he’s able to develop an offering to complement the fastball.
For the San Francisco Giants, this move is unlikely to make an impact this year, with the team literally needing to pull off a trade like this three or so more times this month to make a real difference, which is very unlikely to happen. In a vacuum, the Giants get good value for what they’re giving up and the organization’s problems have little to do with this trade itself. For the Blue Jays, the decision to trade Pillar was necessary, but as with the Happ trade, I’m unsure as to the wisdom of the Blue Jays picking up older fringe major leaguers rather than riskier prospects with higher upside. De Paula fits that bill, but the trade feels a little light to me.
Dan Szymborski is a senior writer for FanGraphs and the developer of the ZiPS projection system. He was a writer for ESPN.com from 2010-2018, a regular guest on a number of radio shows and podcasts, and a voting BBWAA member. He also maintains a terrible Twitter account at @DSzymborski.
Watching the Giants frantically cling to some imaginary hope of making the playoffs has to be painful for the fanbase. As much as you love getting 3 rings, I would want my team to be realistic about the current and future state of the franchise, which would mean rebuild and start gathering YOUNG talent. This should have happened in 2017, but they are still trying to do something that has zero chance of happening.
Pretty amazing how fast you gloss over the 3 rings. SF fans have no right to complain for at least a decade. Signed, most of the fanbases in MLB.
Winning a World Series comes at a cost. Doing it three times is an even bigger hit. Sure, it’ll take some time to rebuild and recover, but I guarantee that every team in baseball would do anything to be in the Giants’ position if it meant three championships in a decade.
Being a Dodger fan, I’m sure I won’t get a lot of pity points here due to the recent success, but having been born in 1989 and never seeing a World Series win, I just want one. One damn championship is all I ask.
As much as I hate the Dodgers, I feel ya: I had been a fan of the Giants for 40 seasons before they finally won in 2010 (that was my 40th season).
Well, they still have enough talent in the infield (aside from 3B, while Belt at 1B is too good to bench but not good enough and too expensive to have much trade value) to want to avoid blowing it up completely. That being said, I expect they’ll trade off some guys like Bumgarner at the deadline assuming things go as expected.
Belt is a better hitter than basically everyone in the mlb according to wRC+ which I think is a bit off tbh
I kind of hate this deal for the Blue Jays, and don’t like it much for the Giants either. The Blue Jays somehow managed to get less for Pillar than the Brewers did for Broxton, and that wasn’t a very good deal for Milwaukee either. Hanson was DFA’d, Law is a replacement-level reliever, and de Paula is a lottery ticket. You couldn’t get something better than that from the Reds? They just gave up a guy projected to be a league-average center fielder (and another year of control) for nothing more than $5.8M in salary relief, some guys out of options, and a 21 year old with control problems will need Rule 5 protection soon.
The Giants pretty clearly won on value–they gave up almost nothing and got a half-decent center fielder on a not-too-expensive salary. I’m a fan of teams continuing to try and put a decent product on the field without giving up future value in a rebuild, so I like it from that perspective. But unless they see this as an arbitrage opportunity, it’s hard to like it too much for them either unless they’ve given up on Duggar. It’s entirely possible that they have. I never quite understood what the Giants saw in their endless stream of Quad-A outfielders. So if they’ve determined Duggar’s nothing more than a 4th outfielder, then I suppose you might as well just cut bait. But they have been very passive about their outfield situation this offseason, making me think they wanted to see what they had in Duggar. It makes me think they don’t really have a plan.
My understanding is that Pillar will be playing left for the Giants—I think they still like Duggar. He covers a lot of ground in center, and his at bats have looked pretty competent. I also kind of feel like someone at an EDM concert waiting for the beat to drop, the DJ being Zaidi and the beat coming in the form of a waiver wire pickup who hits 35 home runs.
That’s even weirder! The guy isn’t exactly a terrifying hitter, and Carlos Gonzalez was signed, what, a week ago? Denard Span is still a free agent, and the fans already like him (don’t they?).
Signing Span was an unfortunate mistake the first time around. Pillar and Parra are just more worn-out furniture on the dumpster fire, but I guess it needs to keep smoldering for another six months so they won’t have to refund season tickets. In a limited way, it’s too bad that MLB doesn’t have relegation for the crappy, tanking franchises–and I do include my own favorite team in that pool of mediocrity, incompetence, and disgrace.
Seems like the plan is for Pillar to get comfortable in SF first, so he gets to play CF for now, with Duggar, who has recently played RF (but not in SF). After all, it’s a new team, new park, new city, emotional departure from his first team, and, BTW, please learn to play a new position, in a park where RF is very different from other parks, it’s like the Green Monster that the Red Sox has in terms of different learning.
But I believe (hope?) the long term plan is what Bochy noted when Pillar was acquired: Duggar in CF, Pillar will backup CF, but mostly play in the corners, and more likely, RF, as none of the other guys on the 25-man are really RF either, other than Parra, who might see RF duty when Joe or Solarte see time in LF (maybe Belt too).
Pillar has not been a league average CF for two years now. I see the AA-can-do-no-wrong-and-Shapiro-and-Atkins-can-do-no-right league has infected Fangraphs. Le sigh.
2016: 2.4 fWAR
2017: 2.0 fWAR
2018: 2.0 fWAR
If we are willing to agree that two wins is a league-average starter, then that seems pretty much right on target.
fWAR overly flatters his defensive skills.
And Inside Edge Fielding says last year he got the following:
98.8% of “routine” plays (expected range: 90-100%)
81.3% of “likely” plays (expected range: 60-90%)
75.5% of “even” plays (expected range: 40-60%)
50% of “unlikely” plays (expected range: 10-40%)
15.8% of “impossible” plays (expected range: 1-10%)
DRS had him at a -2 value for last year, but a whopping +15 the year before that (but overall, bWAR has a particularly rosy view of his performance because DRS is prone to extreme values; going with that, he has put up 3.5 wins, 3 wins, and 2.5 wins over the last 3 years).
It’s worth noting that UZR hasn’t given him particularly awesome marks for his defense the last couple of years. He’s mostly getting by because he’s a not-terrible hitter at a premium defensive position. You can make the argument that he will continue to decline on defense, and that his baserunning last year was a fluke, but it’s really hard to argue that he’s been worse than league-average the last couple of years unless you do some violence to the data.
I would note that both baseball-reference and baseball prospectus both valued Pillar’s defense as pretty good in 2018, as well as fangraphs.
He’s no longer elite, but from all indications, he still appears to be a fine fielder, and perhaps can be good, or even elite, once again in RF.
Dan points out in the article that Pillar’s three-year baseline (see ST above) is twice what the entire Giants outfield was projected for this season, combined. A league average CF is a giant (har de har har) improvement. This team gave Gorkys Hernandez like 900 at bats the last two years.
Who in the hell are “Michael Reed” and “Connor Joe”? It’s really hard to be bad enough at finding outfielders that you’re starting two waiver claims opening week.
He’s been by-definition league average for three years now…? Try clicking on his player page and you’ll see that.
“AA-can-do-no-wrong”? He was pilloried in Toronto pre-2015.
Pillar and Broxton may be providing us with more evidence — if we even still need any — that outfield, and especially CF, defense is currently having one of the biggest market corrections in the game.
The Blue Jays want to give Alford extended run. The Brewers had a minimum of four outfielders ahead of Broxton; see selling Brett Phillips last year, and exchanging Santana (needs consistent at bats) for Gamel (does not).
Not sure we learned of a market correction. These were available players because Toronto has a younger pre-arb clone that needs a trial, and Milwaukee has Lorenzo Cain.
Control/contract is the difference between the Broxton and Pillar deals. Pillar will be a below average LF in SF (understanding that fWAR overstates his defensive value in CF as it is) and will likely get an arbitration bump up to the 9 mil range in 2020, placing him squarely in DFA territory.
Meanwhile, Broxton has 4 years of control including this year at a minimum salary, and actual elite defense in center. he’s a worse hitter…but not by enough to make up the difference.
Bizarre take. Broxton is making minimum salary. It’d be hard to find a similarly valuable OFer making that little. Pillar is making almost $6M and will get a raise in arbitration next year as well. Pillar is also clearly declining and is getting close to the point of being not very useful. His UZER/150 last 3 years. 16.8, 6.3, and then 2.5. Because Pillar can’t really hit, even a slight decline in fielding would be devastating and at 30, it will likely happen pretty soon.
Consuming the souls of various Dodgers isn’t a side benefit, it’s the primary goal.
Sabes, Evans, and Boch have been consuming the souls of Giants fans for over a decade. Only our holy saviours–Timmy, Cainer, Buster, Panda, Giraffe, Uuuribe!, MadBum, Sanchy, et al (but NOT including Terrible Z)–were able to deliver us from the evil incompetence of management.
This incompetent management are the ones who drafted and developed most of those guys, and led us to the championships. Had Dusty been manager, you can bet that Rowand would not have sat for Torres, and Zito would have made the 2010 playoff rosters.
The only incompetence I see is from people who don’t understand that this was all delivered to us by Sabean, who was the guy who pursued Bochy even when he was still under contract with San Diego, the reputation he has now with the Giants is basically the same as it was coming from the Padres: loves vet, hates youth, great bullpens. What most don’t realize is Bochy loves production, and he sat Rowand down to play Torres, sat Zito out for the entirety of the 2010 playoffs, and sat Sandoval in the World Series to play Renteria.
And they got the men they wanted in the draft. They were hoping Lincecum would fall to them: Tidrow asked Sabean not to scout Lincecum and tip their hand that they were interested, and so they pounced when he reached them. And with Bumgarner, an opposing scout saw Tidrow leave soon after the game started, and said to the Giants scout, “he hates his cross-body motion, right?” But later, when the scout met with Tidrow, Tidrow said, succinctly, “I love him”. And a Giants scout loved Belt, even though Belt wasn’t much of anything when drafted, they fixed him up.
“Heading to the land of colo[u]rful currency and milk distressingly sold in bags” …Hey now, I do like our colourful money and bags of milk.
As for Pillar, he was a fan favourite in Toronto and Canada for that matter. Some dark days in Toronto until Junior gets in on the action.
“Weird Al” Yankovic:
And you know what else is too funny
Their stupid monopoly money
Can’t take ’em seriously at all
The light return for the Blue Jays leads me to believe that they were more interested in shedding Pillar’s $5.8m salary than in acquiring these particular players. The Jays aren’t contending this year and, if they decide they need one next year, 30-something league-average-ish OFs aren’t really going for a lot of money in free agency these days.
Take your last sentence, replace “Jays” with “Giants”, and it would be just as valid.
Who cares if the Giants got a “good deal”? They’re not going to have a chance at finishing higher than 4th in their division for years. If they really wanted to fix that joke of an outfield, they should have traded Bumgarner by now for someone that actually has some potential.
Baumgartner is untradable at his current contract and performance.
As with the Morales trade, the most valuable thing the Jays got was an open roster spot.
‘Hello, hello, anybody home?’ Raps knuckle on Cleveland’s head! ‘Think Cleveland, think!’
It is shocking what the Indians are doing. I can’t even figure it out. Padres have more outfielders than they know what to do with. Plenty of mlb averageish outfielders are floating around, and they seem perfectly content. I do, however think Leonys is underrated.
I hate to be that guy but in the 10th paragraph you wrote “the Giants get two players that are MLB contributors right now” when it seems you are referring to the Jays
This makes perfect sense for the Giants and what is likely their plan: pray for a miracle for two months, sell everything as the trade deadline approaches. SF got a good deal on Pillar and they can always trade him in the near future.
I still don’t get why so many teams are willing to stomach such awful starting outfielders when decent veterans like Matt Holliday are still available for cheap on the free agent market.
I’d rather have Duggar than Pillar, but Pillar still is a huge upgrade in the Giants OF. This says much more about the Giants OF than it does Pillar.
I must be missing something – this sentence says this:
The Giants outfield has been a problem for awhile, and the winter before last, the team attempted to solve it by seriously going after all three Marlins outfielders, Giancarlo Stanton, Christian Yelich, and Marcell Ozuna, and after missing out on two of the three, picked up Andrew McCutchen as a stopgap option.
But Stanton went to the Yankees, Yelich to the Brewers, and Ozuna to the Cardinals…so how did the Giants miss out on “two of the three”?
Yeah, that bothered me too.
I liked the trade . Zaidi did not share much about his plans for the off-season improvement of the Giants, but these quotes seem the most pertinent.
First, he said that the Giants were .500 (68-68) to the start of September, and that it is great for the players as well as the fans to be competitive. Second, he noted that this being a low-run park, fielding defense to support the pitching, is therefore very important, and he especially wanted to improve the corner OF defense, the one and only specific area of improvement that he talked about in all of the interviews I’ve heard. So Pillar finally fulfills this goal, as it’s expected that he’ll be manning the corners more often, with Duggar as the starting CF (he appears to be playing CF now until he gets a chance to get enough practice playing RF in SF).
That’s the thing people like to gloss over, the Giants were .500 until they tanked in September, either trading away (Cutch) or basically DLing (Posey, Belt, Crawford, Duggar) the rest of their productive lineup (there is no DL in September, and, of course, is now IL). They basically have that same team, and many of the injuries are one-off type of injuries: Bumgarner hit by hit, Longoria HBP, Belt appendicitis, Crawford knee injury, Strickland hand meet steel door, Duggar injured by tag. They also have a good group of young players, adding D-Rod, Moronta, Duggar, and Suarez looked good as well, and Bergen and Gott added this season, Joe looks interesting as well.
They were also hampered by Bochy using the wrong guy at leadoff (.270 OBP until Cutch put there), and just using the same actual lineup results, and shifting leadoff to 7th, would have added 3-5 wins to the team. Thus, their 68-68 record at the start of September, could have been 71 to 73 wins, instead, which would have put them in the mix for the division title with LA and CO. This should be fixed by Duggar, who looks like he can handle leadoff (at minimum, he should beat the .270 OBP), and perhaps can be good at it, which would yield the wins that they could have had.
Also, Pomeranz appears healthy and if he can return to closer to 2017 results than 2018, then that would be a big plus for the rotation. And if he can return to prior goodness (around 4 WAR pitcher), that would be a huge boost to the team as well. And Pillar has been a 2 WAR player, so he adds another 2 wins.
Looking at it another way also yields good results. Once Bumgarner returned to the rotation in June, the Giants averaged 4.00 runs allowed for those four months (during which the Giants were 42-38, or 85 win rate), with basically the same pitching staff and fielding defense, only improved (Pomeranz should be better than Suarez; Shark may be better than Stratton, but if not, Suarez could be brought up and he’ll definitely be better; Duggar and Pillar are huge upgrades defensively in OF, each probably add a win on defense over 2018). Taking ZIPS, even with Joe in LF and Duggar hitting only his ZIPS projection, and plugging into lineup calculator yields a 4.19 runs scored offense. Using Pythagorean, this RS/RA results in an 84 win team, which is basically what they did for 3 months in 2018.
So I believe that the Giants can be a winning team in 2019, and with a few more breaks in terms of less injuries, plus Pomeranz return to ace status and Duggar being the leadoff hitter that was missing last season (and saves Bochy the error of using the wrong guy), I would not be surprised if they are in playoff contention (but, I don’t see the playoffs as likely, although I think that they’ll be in contention during the season).