{"id":5766,"date":"2026-07-29T14:08:02","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T14:08:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=5766"},"modified":"2026-07-29T14:08:02","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T14:08:02","slug":"kurtenbach-the-bottomed-out-sf-giants-have-a-golden-opportunity-at-the-mlb-trade-deadline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=5766","title":{"rendered":"Kurtenbach: The bottomed-out SF Giants have a golden opportunity at the MLB trade deadline"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div>\n<p>Things are not going well for your team when the most interesting conversation surrounding it involves which players should no longer be on the roster.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=5764\">Review: Actors, not action, give \u2018Spider-Man: Brand New Day\u2019 its groove<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Alas, that is where the San Francisco Giants have been for weeks, if not months.<\/p>\n<p>Going into Wednesday\u2019s rubber match with the Brewers, the Giants are 17 games under .500 \u2014 so much for that Never Sixteen trope \u2014 and going nowhere fast.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s the cold reality for the San Francisco Giants: They\u2019re careening into irrelevance and proving that a decade of corporate pomposity will always lose to reality.<\/p>\n<p>This Giants team can\u2019t pitch and can only occasionally hit. Watching their defense should earn me hazard pay.<\/p>\n<p>I won\u2019t say this team is cursed, but I\u2019m not sure what else to call a squad that finished off a nice win on Monday and hours later announced that their breakout player of the year has a knee injury, a promising young starting pitcher needs UCL surgery, and one of their most expensive free agent hitter from this past offseason further injured his bad foot \u2014 one that has limited him to 30 games \u2014 in a late-night scooter accident.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a lost season, sure, but it\u2019s far more indicative of an organization that\u2019s lost because it never had an actual direction to begin with.<\/p>\n<p>Yet inside this disaster of a campaign lies a shimmering, undeniable silver lining.<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>The Giants have finally bottomed out.<\/p>\n<p>After a decade of being held together by pomposity and average players, the bill has come due.<\/p>\n<p>This franchise spent 10 years terrified of the bottom, clinging to designed mediocrity like a lifeguard holding onto a lead weight.<\/p>\n<p>They eschewed the terrifying risk of chasing true greatness for the cozy, warm cash bath of being just good enough to charge premium prices in the richest market in America \u2014 one they now have all to themselves.<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Well, despite their best efforts to hold up the floor, they found a way to crash through anyway.<\/p>\n<p>And guess what? The sky didn\u2019t fall, and the Bay didn\u2019t swallow the stadium.<\/p>\n<p>Fans are still showing up at Oracle Park, and they aren\u2019t even bothering to boo.<\/p>\n<p>Most of the angst about this collapse is coming from the media, and in this market, that isn\u2019t exactly a deafening drumbeat.<\/p>\n<p>Which means that the Giants can take this opportunity to stop pretending, set up shop at the bottom for a moment and construct something that actually lasts.<\/p>\n<p>Is a complete organizational reset going to be a painful process? Absolutely.<\/p>\n<p>But it\u2019s nowhere near as agonizing as expecting to be competitive and coming nowhere close. And it beats being 81-81, too.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=5762\">CHP officer, AAA share pointers on how to handle road rage<\/a><\/p>\n<p>San Francisco\u2019s brass can keep looking down its nose and treating this wreck as a one-off fluke, or it can embrace reality and take the win that comes with losing.<\/p>\n<p>That means doing far more than just unloading the obvious trade-deadline rentals before Monday\u2019s 3 p.m. Pacific deadline.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, trade Luis Arraez and Robbie Ray to the highest bidder before the ink on this column dries.<\/p>\n<p>It also means doing more than just casually shopping Heliot Ramos, who\u2019s quickly becoming the odd man out in a cluttered outfield and designated-hitter rotation anyway.<\/p>\n<p>Strip the entire operation down to the chassis, scrap every piece of worth for real prospect capital, and kill off this franchise\u2019s addiction to fly-by-night decision-making.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s time to create a genuine, long-term Buster Posey Plan.<\/p>\n<p>Because let\u2019s face facts: Posey isn\u2019t going anywhere anytime soon.<\/p>\n<p>He\u2019s a franchise icon turned part-owner who was handed the keys to baseball operations without a second of front-office experience or a proper interview process.<\/p>\n<p>He holds absolute job security, despite doing, to this point, a poor job.<\/p>\n<p>One trade deadline won\u2019t be enough to do all the demolition work this franchise desperately needs, but it\u2019s a hell of a start for one of baseball\u2019s few dyed-in-the-wool sellers. If ever there were a time to strip this thing down to the studs, this is it. The coming days should be the start of that process.<\/p>\n<p>Jung Hoo Lee? Who cares about what marketing says? Sell him.<\/p>\n<p>High-priced veterans with long-term albatross contracts? Pay someone else to take them.<\/p>\n<p>Literally any starting pitcher \u2014 including Logan Webb? Jettison them when someone makes a quality offer.<\/p>\n<p>This store is already doomed to go out of business, but the owners seem to be the last people to realize that. And this is a seller\u2019s market.<\/p>\n<p>Cash in and use the proceeds to build something true.<\/p>\n<p>Doing just that just takes some real internal stones and a heavy dose of public relations zeal to make it happen.<\/p>\n<p>Does Posey have the appetite as chief executive to take a bite that big?<\/p>\n<p>Does ownership even possess the vision to see the golden opportunity staring them in the face?<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s simply zero indication to this point that anyone in the building gets it.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=5760\">Simone Biles: \u2018Avril Lavigne stole my sunglasses\u2019 at Taylor Swift\u2019s MSG wedding<\/a><\/p>\n<p>But these 2026 Giants keep finding new ways to shock us.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps by Monday afternoon, they\u2019ll finally surprise us in a good way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>San Francisco Giants: The Giants need a real Buster Posey Plan. But that starts with stripping this big-league roster down to the stud(s).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Kurtenbach: The bottomed-out SF Giants have a golden opportunity at the MLB trade deadline - Next City Digest<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=5766\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Kurtenbach: The bottomed-out SF Giants have a golden opportunity at the MLB trade deadline - Next City Digest\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"San Francisco Giants: The Giants need a real Buster Posey Plan. 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