As soon as SF Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi arrived at Winter Meetings in Nashville, Tennessee, he continued hinting that the team will likely add some young position players via trades. In an interview with MLB Network radio, Zaidi suggested that the Giants would be interested in making trades to improve athleticism for their key position players.
"We're gonna try to advance our goal at the start of the offseason, which was really to try to improve our athleticism on our position player side... particularly at shortstop and center field," Zaidi said on Tuesday. "When you're looking at premium defensive positions you usually want guys who are in their twenties, the younger guys who still have all their speed and athleticism. And so, you know, it'll be an interesting week for us in terms of trade targets."
The Giants are rumored to be connected to players like Matt Chapman and Cody Bellinger, who are ranked among the top free agents this offseason, especially in such a thin class that's so pitcher heavy. But this latest nugget from Zaidi seems to hint that they might not be the direction the Giants are headed this winter–or at least maybe not their first-choice path.
Apparently, there are pieces of the Giants' organization that the front office would be willing to part with in exchange for a bit more youth in the most athletically demanding positions on the field. While defensively talented, outfielders Mike Yastrzemski and Austin Slater, 33 and 30 respectively, both struggled through hitting slumps in 2023. At their athletically demanding positions, it's easy to envision why the front office might want some insurance in the form of a young trade target.
Shortstop is a slightly different picture. With Brandon Crawford unlikely to return to the Giants in 2024, many expected the baton to be all but handed to top prospect Marco Luciano, who made a brief and bright cameo in the majors in 2023. But it's well understood that despite his enormous potential as a power hitter, his defensive chops at shortstop could use more time baking. There, too, having a contingency plan in place makes some sense.
But none of this is really what SF Giants fans care most about, a fact that Zaidi seemed to understand as he closed out his interview seeming to reference the team's serious push for phenom Shohei Ohtani.
"It's gotta be a comprehensive strategy, not just, 'Let's land a big fish, let's land a star player,' but how are we gonna build a competitive team around that player," Zaidi shared. "Again, that's not signing three or four more free agents necessarily, sometimes it's going out and trading, getting the right kind of complementary players."
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