Sports
The Bailey trade isn’t the start of a Giants rebuild, at least not in the traditional sense
Patrick Bailey, once the present and future of the San Francisco Giants, was traded for a prospect and the mere concept of a prospect who will join the organization in a couple of months. Ryan Walker is back with Triple-A Sacramento, a sign that the era of patience and/or mollycoddling is over. Even after a series win against the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Giants are eight games under .500 and have the worst run differential in baseball. Nothing has gone according to plan. Nothing has really come close.
Considering all of the above, it’s not surprising that the word “rebuild” is in the ether. It’s popping up in group chats and talk radio, subreddits and general conversation. A team can’t lose like the Giants have been losing, trade their starting catcher, demote a veteran and not expect the word to come up. It’s a reasonable mental progression to make.
And then, on Sunday, you saw a flash from a mirror universe where the Giants weren’t cursed. They didn’t just look like a normal team, but a fun team. More than that, it was the team you were told to expect. It was a starting pitcher (Tyler Mahle) who looked both electric and entirely hittable from pitch to pitch. It was a bullpen that makes you twitch, just like you were worried about. Yet it was also a team with enough pluck, grit and derring-do (and enough offensive firepower) that it was able to come back and outscore the other team.
When the collective roster piled onto the field in the post-walk-off scrum, it was easy to temporarily forget all of the misery from the previous weeks. A gaggle of happy baseball lads dancing around the infield like goobers on a Sunday afternoon will do that. It was a team that got breaks, but also made breaks, and some of its lineup cornerstones are showing signs of getting hot. Rafael Devers hit two doubles. Heliot Ramos hit an absolute bomb into Andres Galarraga territory. Willy Adames picked up three hits, including the game-tying hit in the tenth.
That’s a description of events that would have read like the most boring speculative fiction to a Giants fan in March. Yeah, of course those guys will have a couple of games where everything clicks. What, you’ve never watched a normal, healthy lineup before?
This hasn’t been a normal, healthy lineup, even if it does a great impression of one when it’s at its best. So it’s easy to be taken in when it scratches and claws and scores just enough to win, like it did Sunday. Don’t forget that the Pirates scored first on a walk that maybe could have been framed into a called strike, followed by a stolen base and an error that allowed the runner to go to third.
This isn’t to pick on Jesus Rodriguez specifically — he did win the danged game, after all — but it’s a reminder that the Giants are embarking on a new era, and it’s one that will come with tradeoffs and learning lessons, steps forward and steps backward. They’re going to have a lot of rookies catching over the next few months, and the hiccups will be noticeable.
That sounds like the be-patient pragmatism of someone discussing a rebuild. Except look around the roster. This isn’t a team built for 2028. This is a team built for now. These are guys who made All-Star teams and appeared on MVP ballots recently. They hit home runs and they caught the ball and threw the ball and caught the ball when it was thrown to them. It was right over there, I promise.
More than that, though, is that this is a core that’s making a lot of money for a long time, and it’s producing like players who should be in danger of losing their roster spots. At least, a lot of them have been, on and off, even though several are showing signs of snapping out of it. (Devers is hitting .333 in May, with two homers and four doubles, for example.) These are not easy players to trade, for the most part.
I’m not going to play pocket GM and pretend I know how much money or prospect payola would have to change hands for each of the players in question. Just know that it’s not as simple as the Giants trading a veteran and receiving a prospect or three. It almost takes an owner screaming yeee-haww and firing six-shooters into the air, but those owners (and managers) are sorely missed these days.
That ends the discussion, and it’s why the Giants are so far from a rebuild that people who only read the first paragraph skipped straight to the comments to yell at me. This is the Giants’ team for a while. They’re going to stick with them for longer than a month. They’re going to stick with them longer than two months. And I’ll tell you what roughly two-thirds of the 2027 Opening Day projected lineup is going to look like: a lot like the one that’s going to face the Los Angeles Dodgers this week.
Veterans like Ryan Walker will need to earn their roster spots. (Charles LeClaire / Imagn Images)
They’re going to make changes, and they’re going to make unpopular decisions. They might resort to an honest-to-goodness benching or two if things continue like this. But there’s no rebuilding with this core. There’s only reloading, and we’ll see how much enthusiasm ownership has for that after this early-season disaster.
Here’s a quick thought experiment, though. Let’s say it’s possible for the Giants to rebuild in the standard sense — prospects in, veterans out. Don’t worry about the details. It’s possible, and it’s practical. It’s done, poof. What kind of roster do the Giants build?
It’s easy to assume they’d go with some of an “Oops! All rookies!” roster that would be as entertaining as it would be maddening, but that’s not always realistic or helpful. There are player options to consider and 40-man roster spots. There are arbitration clocks and organizational depth considerations, Rule 5 worries and other tomfoolery. There would be more than a smattering of players like Christian Koss and Will Brennan — not exactly veterans, but definitely not prospects. Not the first players you would think of in a rebuild, although baseball has definitely come up with stranger surprises.
These players would be in the rotation and the bullpen. They’d be on the bench and in the lineup. You wouldn’t expect them to be a huge part of the 2030 Giants, but they’d be keeping a spot warm for prospects who don’t need to be rushed. This would be especially true for this team, considering its best prospects are mostly teenagers or still with Low-A San Jose.
And while these players are there, they would have to fight to keep their jobs, sure, but maybe a couple of them would surprise you. Maybe they don’t just fill a spot, but they exceed expectations. Maybe everyone wants them around for the long term. The prospects will slot perfectly around these productive veterans in this best-case scenario.
Here’s the twist: I just described the 2026 Giants. Sure, the veteran players are making a lot more money than the Koss/Brennan types I was using as an example, but they’re filling the same role. They’re here to win in a best-case scenario, but they’re clearly going to have to produce if they’re going to fend off younger challengers. The bar is going to be much higher for a Willy Adames to lose his job than a generic place-holding minor-league free agent, of course, but there’s nobody close enough to the majors to make the distinction meaningful.
You don’t need the point belabored too much, but the rotation has a similar feel. The Giants wouldn’t just build a rotation out of rookies. They’d have a veteran or two, even if they tear the rotation down to the studs. They’d be possible trade chips at the deadline, or just inning-absorbing sponges to keep young arms fresh. They’d also have to pitch for their lives to keep younger pitchers away. That’s what’s happening with the roster right now. Adrian Houser isn’t in direct competition with Trevor McDonald, but he’s not not in direct competition with him over the next couple of weeks.
Around these veterans — mostly players with several years of good baseball and one recent month of really, really bad baseball — there are youngsters and rookies, players like McDonald, Bryce Eldridge and Rodriguez. They’ll come up or be sent down, depending on their performance or the various needs of the roster, and some of them might even force their way onto the Opening Day foul lines next season, slam-dunk roster decisions that make the offseason even easier.
This is it. This is the rebuild. Except it’s not a rebuild. It’s just the future of Giants baseball, for better or for worse, and, boy, can they lay the “for worse” part on thick when they’re in the mood. There are going to be prospects and veterans, and there are going to be increasingly impatient people in the front office, who are also fighting for their lives, who are in communication with the manager and coaches, who are also fighting for their lives. Everyone understands the losses need to go away, and everyone understands that the unpopular clubhouse decisions will continue until production (and morale 
And if all these baseball players remember how to baseball like they baseballed in the past, maybe the production and morale will take off again. When they win, they really look like they’re having a blast. Look at them cheesing for the cameras before flying to Los Angeles:
SFGiants
Off to Los Angeles
— SF Giants Bot (@giantbot.bsky.social) May 10, 2026 at 8:31 PM
This is a team that wants to have fun. It wants you to have fun watching it play. And when the rookies arrive — and a few of them have already — they’ll get folded into this wacky goal of “winning” and “having fun,” which the Giants accomplished Sunday.
The rebuild is already here. It’s just called “please, anyone, help us win baseball games now and in the future,” and veterans and rookies alike are going to be thrown at the problem. That sounds a lot like whatever hypothetical rebuild you could possibly come up with. They’re just hoping (and possibly a little desperate) for more series wins to follow. You’re already looking at the future of Giants baseball. Whatever you’re calling it, well, that’s up to you.
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