ARLINGTON, Texas — It’s simple mathematics.
Six players subtracted from the Giants’ roster trade deadline means just as many opportunities for other, younger players over the final seven odd weeks of the regular season.
San Francisco wasted no time getting on board with the youth movement. After all the dust settled, the average age of the 26-man roster was 27.2 years old — tied for fourth-youngest.
“I think as much as anything it’s going to be an opportunity for us as a front office and a coaching staff to evaluate some of our players,” president of baseball operations Buster Posey said. “Some of them are going to get longer runways than they have in the past.”
These five players have the most to gain from the Giants’ trade deadline moves:
Marcelo Mayer
Talk about a change of scenery.
The California kid is back in his home state. He’s out of pressure-packed Boston and the weighty expectations of rabid fans who eagerly awaited his arrival as a top prospect.
Mayer has a chance to hit the restart button on his big league career that never quite got off the ground with the Red Sox. Remember, he is still only 23 with less than a season of MLB service time — lots of time for him to get his career .625 OPS closer to his .826 figure in the minors.
“[We] still believe there’s a lot of upside there,” Posey said.
Sure, it would be great if he was able to recapture what made him a No. 4 overall draft pick and a consensus top-20 prospect for four years running. But the Giants’ future hardly hangs in the balance. The infield is already crowded, and all this lottery ticket cost was a bullpen arm.
Once he is cleared to return from a stress reaction in his forearm, Mayer should be the regular starter at second base for the rest of the season. If anything, he’ll be part of an extra friendly competition for playing time next spring — with fellow Chula Vista High alum Casey Schmitt.
Blade Tidwell
After the trades of Robbie Ray and Tyler Mahle, as well as the elbow surgery Trevor McDonald is set to undergo this week, the Giants have three vacancies in their starting rotation.
Tidwell was the first pitcher called up from Triple-A to get an audition and will certainly get more after limiting the Rangers to two runs on six hits over five innings. Needing 100 pitches to make it through the longest outing of his young career, he was determined to pitch more efficiently.
“I don’t want to be the five and dive guy,” Tidwell said.
He could have helped their beleaguered bullpen earlier in the season but was instead stretched out as a starter at Triple-A. All along, manager Tony Vitello said, “he was champing at the bit.”
He really only used his four-seamer and his best secondary weapon, a slider, in his brief look in the bullpen. As a starter, Tidwell recently added a curveball to expand his arsenal to six pitches.
Vitello, who coached him at Tennessee, described the stocky 6-foot-3 right-hander as a Skittle — “rough on the exterior but a little softer than people realize on the inside.”
Now, maybe fans will get a chance to get to know him as well as his college coach.
Keaton Winn
Vitello was asked about the situation in the back end of the bullpen after the Giants shipped away Erik Miller and Caleb Kilian, the last two arms to close games for them.
“Interesting,” he said with a nervous smile. “I think opportunity is the word that stands out.”
The Giants’ bullpen wasn’t strong to begin with, and it’s even more depleted of high-leverage, backend arms after trading its two most sought-after relievers at the deadline.
The brief experiment using Winn as the closer blew up when Vitello called on the former starter for a third day in a row for the first time in his career, causing a mild elbow strain.
But he’s back healthy and, almost by default, possesses the nastiest stuff of any of the remaining relievers. If he can rediscover the upper 90s with his fastball and combine that with his devastating splitter, that’s a closer’s archetype if there ever was one.
The job, if it even exists, is again his for the taking, especially after Dylan Smith allowed the Giants to be walked off Tuesday in Texas for the second time in his past three appearances.
Victor Bericoto
The primary reason the Giants were comfortable trading Heliot Ramos was because of the package of prospects he garnered in return (6-foot-7 lefty Henry Lalane and Kaeden Kent, whose dad just went into the Hall of Fame). But it probably wouldn’t have happened if Bericoto didn’t break out in the way he did this year before going down with an oblique strain.
All he did was hit: A spring training OPS of 1.121 that earned him the Barney Nugent Award as the top player in his first big-league camp. An .804 OPS in 43 games at Triple-A. And even better results in 24 games in the majors, batting .293 with four homers for an .857 OPS.
The 24-year-old Venezuelan is on the mend now — he just began a rehab assignment — and there should be a spot in left field waiting for him once he is fully recovered.
If not Bericoto, then maybe Bo Davidson gets his first look in the big leagues, though the undrafted community college product has run into trouble after recently reaching Triple-A.
Parks Harber is another worthy option, but the Giants may not want to add him to the 40-man roster with a lockout anticipated this winter. Davidson would also require a 40-man spot, but that’s a decision the Giants have to make this winter or risk losing him to the Rule 5 draft.
Adrian Houser
It was a bit of a surprise to see Houser enter in the eighth inning of Tuesday’s loss to the Rangers. But he only threw two pitches, and Vitello said that the shortest of Houser’s eight relief appearances since being demoted to the bullpen had no bearing on the conventional wisdom.
That being Houser’s likely return to the starting rotation.
With one more year left on the contract he signed last offseason, it’s worth seeing if Houser can perform in the role he was brought in to do, especially with how dicey next year’s rotation looks.
The results have been better since his move to the bullpen: A 2.08 ERA in 26 innings (though with a 4.17 FIP), opposed to the 5.73 ERA he posted in 14 starts to begin the year.
It might not end up looking all that different. Houser has thrown four-plus innings four times in relief, and the Giants will discuss using him behind an opener if he returns to the rotation.
