Will Giants and A’s be buyers or sellers?
A bit more than a month before the July 31 trade deadline, the Giants and A’s are hovering around .500, perhaps the toughest place to be when deciding to buy or sell.
For the A’s, the direction is more understood because they’re in a division with the Astros and Mariners, meaning their record leaves them far from playoff contention.
The Giants, on the other hand, play in a division that allows them to be within striking distance. Neither the Diamondbacks nor Dodgers appears capable of running away from the pack.
So in that regard, the A’s would be sellers and the Giants buyers.
It’s not that easy.
Two of Oakland’s trade chips could be Blake Treinen and Jed Lowrie. Treinen would fetch the biggest haul, but at what cost? If the A’s have designs on contending as early as next season, they’d need a dominant closer such as Treinen, a free agent in 2021.
As for Lowrie, a free agent after this season, he wasn’t swooped up at last year’s deadline or over the summer, and it’s uncertain what his market value will be this time. Perhaps the Red Sox or Yankees would call with the intention of deepening their rosters heading to October.
The Giants have a different mind-set. They added Andrew McCutchen and Evan Longoria to make a playoff run, and they’ve moved past last year’s 98-loss madness with their top three starters mostly missing. With Jeff Samardzija and Johnny Cueto about to join Madison Bumgarner, there’s reason for optimism.
But this is a team keeping the competitive balance tax in mind with every transaction. By staying under the $197 million luxury-tax threshold, they’d reset their penalty rate and position themselves for any Bryce Harper sweepstakes when McCutchen and Hunter Pence are off the books after this season.
So it might be unlikely the Giants beef up at the trade deadline unless they move big-league parts — Samardzija? McCutchen? a reliever or two? — to make it a financial wash. Or they simply could move a guy to assure they’d remain under the tax.
Either way, the Giants and A’s will have different philosophies at the deadline even if their records remain in the .500 neighborhood.