How Buster Posey's MLB trade deadline selling approach shapes Giants' future originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
SAN FRANCISCO — The last two weeks have been unfathomably bad for the Giants, but Buster Posey has actually watched this movie before.
Posey was one of the stars of the 2016 team that came out of the All-Star break with a 1-7 road trip through San Diego, Boston and New York. If your counter is that this 2025 stretch has been filled with particularly hard-to-watch plays, take a few moments and find a video of Santiago Casilla’s walk-off balk at Petco Park nine years ago.
That collapse led to the stunning Matt Duffy-Matt Moore swap, but there was a key difference back then. The 2016 Giants were the best team in baseball for most of the first half and had built such a cushion that they still found themselves in first place and 17 games above .500 on deadline day.
This year’s group was nine games up just three weeks ago, but has been in a freefall ever since. The Giants dipped under .500 the day before the deadline, and that was enough for Posey to swallow hard and commit to becoming a seller, something the Giants have just about entirely avoided since moving to Oracle Park 25 years ago.
“We wanted to be in a different position, to add. Unfortunately, with the way we’ve played, we had to make a decision here to try to add some talent that we felt like could help us going forward,” the president of baseball operations said. “Overall, I think Zack (Minasian) and myself and the rest of the group are happy with the players that we have coming to put on a Giants uniform now.”
The front office ended up parting with relievers Camilo Doval and Tyler Rogers, along with outfielder Mike Yastrzemski. On Wednesday morning, there were five players on the roster who had played with Posey in his final big league season. By 3 p.m. on Thursday, he had traded three of them. Only Logan Webb and Wilmer Flores remain from the last Giants team to reach the postseason.
A lot has changed for the organization in the past four years, and a lot changed in the past 48 hours. The Giants held out hope for as long as possible that they could add a starting pitcher and make a second half run, but they pivoted to a sale while getting swept by the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Posey said there was no one moment when a white flag was raised. It just became clear what had to be done.
“I think it was watching the way we played over the last month and how poorly we played since the break,” Posey said. “We felt like this was a time that we needed to try to get back some players that will help us going forward in the future.”
Posey did not go nearly as far as he could have — Robbie Ray, Justin Verlander and others who could have been trade chips remained. The Giants would have needed to be “blown away” to trade Ray, and nobody crossed that threshold. Posey said he never approached Verlander to ask whether he wanted to continue his pursuit of 300 wins elsewhere.
The Giants hoped to add to their rotation at the deadline, but when things went south, they opted not to subtract. Those hits went to the bullpen, which is now without the eighth- and ninth-inning arms. The Giants will likely install Randy Rodriguez as their closer, and that might be actually an upgrade, but the team’s best unit was torn apart by the deadline.
Other than that, the Giants remain just about the same. Yastrzemski was in a platoon with Luis Matos, and the young outfielder might now get a chance to play everyday. The Giants also could call up Drew Gilbert — acquired in the Rogers trade — or give a shot to Marco Luciano or Grant McCray, who was scratched from the Triple-A lineup on Thursday, along with Kai-Wei Teng.
There was really no excuse for the Giants to play as poorly as they did on the homestand, and if guys like Rafael Devers, Willy Adames, Matt Chapman, Jung Hoo Lee and Heliot Ramos can get going at the same time, they might still pile up some wins against a soft schedule over their next 53 games.
But the hole is almost certainly already too deep. They are six games behind the San Diego Padres, who hold the final playoff spot at the moment and went absolutely nuts at the deadline, loading up in an attempt to run down the first-place Los Angeles Dodgers. Without Rogers and Doval, the Giants might start coughing up plenty of leads even if they can get them.
The two right-handers were first and third, respectively, in the National League in appearances since 2022. Yastrzemski, one of Farhan Zaidi’s greatest moves, didn’t debut until he was 28, but he ended up playing 790 games for the Giants and posting seven straight two-WAR seasons.
Beyond that, Rogers and Yastrzemski had become clubhouse leaders. They are both close with Webb, who is now the only Giant who has been around since the Bruce Bochy era.
In trading those two and Doval, Posey was sending a message that his predecessor never committed to. Hanging around .500 wasn’t good enough. It was time for a big shakeup, and now it’s time to clean it up.
“We just haven’t looked like the same team as we did at the beginning of the year,” Posey said. “I felt like at the beginning of the year it was, we harped on doing the little things right, it was clean baseball. We’ve kind of taken a 180. We’ve somehow got to recapture that form, that style of baseball that we had at the beginning of the season.
“Losing a guy like Rog, like Doval, like Yaz — these are veteran players that do impact your team, but we still feel like we’ve got a group that should go out there and perform much better than they have the last month or so.”
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