“Trade everybody.”
It shouldn’t be surprising that fans of a 29-43 team want the roster turned over, which is not just a tough undertaking but darn near impossible.
In the Giants’ case, their three highest-priced players were supposed to lead the team to a successful 2026 season, but that’s not happening. Rafael Devers, Willy Adames, and Matt Chapman struggled early and often, and their collective performances helped bury the Giants in the standings.
Chapman has played his best baseball this month, but the others remain in funks, and the Giants continue to lose games even with the rise of Bryce Eldridge and Casey Schmitt and consistency of Luis Arráez and Jung Hoo Lee.
The Aug. 3 trade deadline is seven weeks away, and because the Giants have shown they’re not a team to mount any kind of magical comeback, it has been apparent for a while that president of baseball operations Buster Posey would be focusing on selling at the deadline to build a deeper stable of prospects.
Trading Devers, which would be as stunning as obtaining him in the first place, would mean two things. No. 1, the Giants would be admitting the trade to acquire the slugger from Boston was a mistake. And No. 2, they’d need to eat much of his remaining contract and possibly offer an appealing prospect to the other team — after this season, Devers is owed $211 million through 2033.
The major road block on trading Chapman or Adames is they have full no-trade clauses in their contracts, meaning they could veto any trade the Giants present them. Many accomplished players include no-trade provisions to prevent teams from trading them to unfavorable destinations or any locale at all, giving them the security to stay in place or agree to a desirable location.
In an interview with The Standard, Chapman was asked how he’d feel if the Giants came to him with a trade proposal.
“I mean, it’s hard to predict the future, right?” he said. “I signed here for six years because I believed in Buster, and I believed in what they want to do, and I believed in the organization. I’m committed to being a Giant. Until I’m told otherwise. Obviously, I have a full no-trade, and I have control over what might happen, but it’s too hard to predict the future. A lot can happen. But I want to be here, and I want to win here.”
In a perfect world for Chapman, he’d prefer to see it through with the Giants and win a World Series title in San Francisco. He has repeatedly stated he likes it here. It’s his 10th season, and he has spent all but two of them in the Bay Area including his first six in Oakland.
“Yeah of course,” he said. “There’s nothing more that I’d like to do than to win here. I can’t predict what the front office wants to do and what’s going to happen, but I believe that we still share the same vision of winning a championship here.”
Chapman, 33, is hitting .412 with six homers, 20 RBIs, and a 1.421 OPS in 13 games in June. His defense has been stellar of late — it’s hard to find another third baseman with a better footwork-arm combination — and his 3.2 WAR leads the Giants by a good margin. Arráez is No. 2 at 2.1.
After this season, Chapman is due $100 million through 2030 while Adames will have $140 million owed through 2031. Including Devers, the Giants committed to $451 million for the three players from 2027 on.
The most likely trade candidates approaching the Aug. 3 deadline are Arráez and Robbie Ray, both of whom will be free agents after the season and make $12 million and $25 million, respectively. Because Ray has already received a qualifying offer (after the 2021 season from the Blue Jays), the Giants couldn’t give him another, meaning they’d receive no draft-pick compensation in return by keeping him until the end of the season.
That makes it more of a reason Ray could be traded for the fifth time in his career. Ray told The Standard last month that if the Giants aren’t in position at the deadline to contend, “it makes the most sense in the situation where you’d want to go out and get something for me. I totally understand that. It’s part of baseball. It’s part of the business side of it.”
In the same breath, Ray articulated how much he and his family enjoy the Bay Area. Arráez, who knows the drill after being traded twice, had similar sentiments and said, “I trust this team. We have a lot of talent here. We just need to continue competing.”
No veteran on the roster would attract a bigger haul in a trade than Logan Webb, 29, who’ll make $23 million in 2027 and $24 million in 2028. But trading Webb is a serious longshot, given his long-standing value to the organization and the fact the Giants would want to build a rotation around him if they want to be winners in the near future.
As Webb told The Standard two weeks ago, “I didn’t sign the contract to play for a couple of years and then get traded. I don’t make those decisions. I have no say, really, in any of that stuff. But right now, I’m a Giant, and I’ll be a Giant until I’m not.”
In four starts since coming off the injured list, Webb has a 0.66 ERA and 23 strikeouts and four walks in 27 ⅓ innings. In the process, his ERA improved from 5.06 to 3.46. Sunday, he pitched eight innings for the second straight start and beat the Cubs 5-1.
The fact is, because of the Giants’ dire situation, they would be wise to listen to all offers on all players – though Bryce Eldridge suddenly is untouchable as he hits his way to becoming the face of the franchise, and certainly no one in the organization wants to move Webb.
As GM Zack Minasian said, “The only thing I would say is we’re looking for Logan Webbs.”
As the Giants get closer to the deadline, more will be determined about their possible trade chips. Until then, the daily task of seeking wins is the priority, and it would help if Devers and Adames started hitting closer to their career norms so that all three of the top hitters would be in sync.
“Not everyone’s going to be hot all year long,” Chapman said. “You’d like to be more consistent and limit the highs and lows, but even Aaron Judge gets cold. We did start slow and then went on this crazy little tear, and now we’re kind of leveling out. Being able to just find ways to put runs up, and it doesn’t matter how it comes, is the important thing.”
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