Kurtenbach: The SF Giants showed their true colors at the MLB trade deadline

The trade deadline was an opportunity for the Giants to pick a direction this season.

Would they be bold, push some chips into the middle of the table, and buy, pushing for a Wild Card playoff berth in the National League?

Or would they see the writing on the wall and sell players amid an outstanding seller’s market? One step back this season (and, at this point, what’s another step?) could net the kind of prospects that could have this team running in years to come.

Well, it turns out they did neither.

Instead, they dumped salary.

Winning big league games? Building up an enviable farm system? No, what really matters to the Giants is exactly what Giants chairman Greg Johnson told everyone last year:

“Our goal is to somewhat break even.”

And I’ll be damned, they might just do it.

By offloading Jorge Soler, Alex Cobb, and Luke Jackson in the 24 hours proceeding Tuesday’s 3 p.m. deadline, the Giants shaved more than $30 million off the team’s payroll and dropped the team down a tier in the luxury tax.

The Giants are a bit worse for trading Soler and Jackson and no better off in the long term for trading them or Cobb.

In exchange for the three players, the Giants landed a mid-tier prospect from the Braves (Atlanta has a bad farm system for position players) and a non-ranked prospect from the Guardians.

Money out, nothing in.

These moves obviously don’t help the team this season, and they did nothing to bolster the farm system — something other selling teams were able to do with aplomb over the last few days.

It does help the bottom line, though.

The Giants tried out spending this past offseason, taking on second-tier free agents like Soler after another high-profile rejection. The ruse of spending like a big-market team didn’t even last a full season.

And my goodness, what a missed opportunity this deadline was for the Giants.

Half the teams in baseball are in financial straits as their regional television contracts have gone up in smoke, and there were only a handful of teams that (like the Giants) were trying to sell players of consequence.

Had the Giants retained some salary from Soler, Jackson, or Cobb, they could have landed a couple of prospects of consequence.

The Orioles traded the No. 5 prospect in their loaded farm system for a lefty starter who has a 4.92 ERA over his last 230 innings.

Closer Carlos Estevez landed the Angels two of the Phillies’ top-10 prospects and then the Marlins landed three of the Padres’ top-five prospects for two (maybe three) months of closer Tanner Scott, a pending free agent.

Meanwhile, the Giants traded a player they just signed to a three-year, $42 million deal — a slugger with serious bonafides who has posted a .899 OPS in his last 140 at-bats — for a toss-in player.

Cobb, an All-Star last year, landed the Giants Baseball America’s No. 491 in the 2023 MLB Draft.

But perhaps I’m being harsh on the Giants, after all, they did add a big leaguer at the deadline.

Former A’s standout Mark Canha — a favorite of now-Giants manager Bob Melvin — will be coming back home to the Bay.

Seeing as Canha has been unplayable this season (bottom five percent in expected batting average, slugging percentage, and seventh percentile in bat speed), I’m sure Zaidi’s former lieutenant, Tigers top executive Scott Harris, cackled after hanging up the phone.

But Zaidi, a former A’s exec, couldn’t go more than a few weeks without using the friends and family discount — a hallmark of the team’s offseasons. He did some solid, cost-cutting work for ownership, and they let him make a trade for himself before the deadline passed.

And why wouldn’t Zaidi want to reassemble the A’s, a team that, when Melvin was in the dugout, won a single playoff series (a three-gamer over the White Sox in 2020)?

It’s been true for a while now, but now it’s undeniable: the 2024 Giants are going nowhere because this is an organization that’s going nowhere. They can make move after move, but nothing ever really changes.

And that will be the case so long as this organization, which is in the baseball business, cares more about the business than the baseball.