So Long Tranquilo; Goodbye Yaz

SF Giants Minor Lines, July 31, 2025

As the hours ticked down to the trade deadline and things started moving at a feverish pace (with A.J. Preller, naturally, applying much of the heat and pace of things), for a while, it seemed as if the Giants would not partake. That didn’t end up being the case, of course, as they made two moves of modest significance near the end. After getting a return that was considered to be large and advantageous for two months of Tyler Rogers, the front office ended up accepting an offer for Camilo Doval that seemed oddly light in yesterday’s super-heated environment. Indeed, on a day when a Top 5 prospect in baseball was moved for a constantly injured closer and back-end starter (Leodalis de Vries for Mason Miller and J.P. Sears), and two Top 100 players went to Minnesota for their hard throwing closer, Jhoan Duran, the return value for two and a half years of Doval was unexceptional enough to make The Athletic’s Keith Law openly wonder if the Giants were simply motivated to get rid of Doval “at any cost.”

Whether that was the case or not, it’s easy enough to believe that this was where Doval’s market was at this point, and, with declining Stuff+ metrics, declining K rates, and some bad looks in terms of focus and effort lately, the Giants could well believe this was as good as his market was ever going to be, in spite of his sometimes dazzling talent. The team did well in finding a taker for the old pro, Mike Yastrzemski, but other pieces that one might have figured could be dealt stayed put, indicating the level of interest around the league in the team’s players.

Nonetheless, the Giants did bolster a somewhat thin organization with a variety of pieces that could help, possibly in the very near future. They kept an eye on managing the 40-man, and they continued to show the focus on contact ability that we’ve seen from this Posey-led front office all year.

We’ll take a look at the new Giants in a minute, but let’s first truly appreciate the players leaving. Doval went from a late-age international signing who was throwing barely 90 mph at 18, to a prospect who was described a couple years later as “one of the weirder pitchers in all the minors.” In fact, that entire early scouting report from Fangraphs is worth revisiting:

This is one of the weirder pitchers in all of the minors. At times, Doval will sit in the upper-90s with cutting action; at others, he’s living in the low-90s with no movement. Scouts think the cause is that he doesn’t grip the baseball in a consistent manner. Doval also has a delivery totally unique to him. It’s a long, swooping, side-winding look that creates cut/rise on the ball. He also throws a hard, horizontal slider.

It turned out that inconsistency and weirdness would always be part of the Doval experience. That was 2018, when he was in Low-A Augusta. Just three years later, he was saving games in the crucible of the incredible 2021 NL West division chase, and he’d be an All Star two years later. It’s been a frustrating and inconsistent ride with Doval since then for the Giants, but getting an All-Star closer out of a kid who initially went unsigned in his age-groups international class is obviously a tremendous scouting and development story. And folks in Sacramento are going to talk forever about the time the scoreboard flashed “104” after one of his fastballs — the hardest pitch ever recorded in the Giants’ organization (if I’m not entirely crazy, one of my subscribers was at that game and actually sent me a photo of the scoreboard with the 104 velo on it).

As for Yaz, what more is there to say? I was at a series in Bowie many years ago, and spent two or three full days sitting next to his mom, and listening to her recount his baseball journey. This must have been 2017 or 2018 (I remember Austin Hays was in center field, and the Orioles were very excited about his progress at the time), and Yaz was already looking like a player who had topped out at Double-A, where he’d been for three or four years at that point. While his mom was positive and optimistic, I could hear that motherly concern in her voice that was anticipating having to support her child through bad news and the loss of his dream at some point in the future.

Instead, he went on to have maybe one of the most shockingly delightful careers in San Francisco history, ranking improbably high on all sorts of career lists — home runs, walk offs, splash hits — while also playing arguably the best defensive right field Oracle Park has ever seen. Farhan Zaidi picked Yaz up in one of the most minor minor-league deals imaginable, and he went on to be the archetype of the Zaidi method. It’s possible that there has never been a better marriage of player and manager than Yaz — who made a diligent prep routine the key to his success — and Gabe Kapler, who thrived on preparation and never let the tiniest detail escape his exacting mind. Somehow, the oddball marriage lit a spark that ignited one of the most improbable careers in recent baseball history.

I sincerely hope that all three of these Very Good Giants™ will get their moments in October, and show the baseball world what they’re made of.

With that, let’s get to the new Giants: