And in the second week of May, the San Francisco Giants shook things up.
Patrick Bailey is gone, traded to the Cleveland Guardians for a competitive-balance pick (29th overall) in the 2026 MLB Draft and Matt Wilkinson, a 6-foot-1, 250-pound left-handed Canadian nicknamed “Tugboat.” It reads like Baseball Trade Mad Libs, but it’s much more than that — it’s a dramatic reimagining of the roster in response to an all-time lousy start.
There’s so much to unpack that it’s best to break it up into a couple of segments. Let’s start with the biggest question you might have.
Why the Giants were willing to trade Patrick Bailey
Bailey is a baseball Rorschach test, an inkblot that reveals how much time you spend thinking about defense. Some of you read the header of this section and muttered the words “because he can’t hit” out loud. And that’s a valid way to consume baseball. You don’t have to think about pitch framing if you don’t want to, and in the era of the universal DH, it felt like the Giants were the only team still letting their pitcher hit. That reads like hyperbole, but Bailey’s .396 OPS this season is an exact match for Kevin Gausman’s OPS with the Giants in 2021.
Still, Bailey is an all-time defensive catcher, at least according to both the eyeballs and modern metrics. He controls the running game and has improved greatly at plate blocking, but he’s the face of the modern fascination with pitch framing. He’s a wizard at stealing strikes, and if there was any question about the value of framing in the ABS era, there’s an argument to be made that it’s even more valuable. Catchers aren’t just trying to fool the umpire now, but the batter himself. They’re hoping to stuff a little doubt in the brain of the hitter, who has to decide if he really wants to be the jerk who wastes one of his team’s precious challenges.
If you’re skeptical, consider that it’s the Guardians who are acquiring Bailey. Their entire organization seems built around the premise that defense behind the plate is twice as valuable as any other team thinks. It’s like they have a secret dossier buried underneath Progressive Field that explains how a Gold Glove catcher is worth as much as a 60-homer hitter, and they’re not sharing it with the rest of the league. They targeted Bailey because he’s the apotheosis of this idea.
The Guardians might end up thrilled with this trade. This might be exactly what they need. If Bailey goes there and fields as well as ever, while hitting about 20 percent worse than the league average, similar to his career line, the Guardians would be delighted.
The Giants just couldn’t have a pitcher in the lineup anymore. Even if the rest of the lineup is going well, it’s a burden, but it’s been devastating while the middle of the order has struggled so mightily. Bailey’s a boutique player — the kind of specialty player that fits best on a team without many holes — and the Giants are overstuffed with boutique players right now.
Take Matt Chapman, for example. In a normal year, he has a .700-something OPS and a fantastically high WAR because of his defense and baserunning. It makes him a valuable player, but there are only so many of these players you can stack together in a lineup before the lineup gets prone to … well, whatever it is that you’ve watched this season.
This is also a rough description of Willy Adames — OPS in the .700s while doing a lot of other things well. Oh, and it’s a shorthand description of what the Giants are hoping for from Jung Hoo Lee, as well as what they’re getting out of Luis Arraez. Heliot Ramos doesn’t quite fit with these players in terms of defense, but he’s a .700-something guy who contributes in other ways.
A .600-something OPS — or even lower during the worst slumps — brought this modestly paced train to a halt far too often. The Giants have too many players who need a “30,000-foot view” approach to appreciate them. They need more players who can whomp the ball with their whomping sticks. And there were only so many places to put them.
Daniel Susac can’t possibly be expected to keep up his hot start from the beginning of the season, but his preseason ZiPS projection of .247/.293/.378 definitely seems beatable now. He’ll give the Giants more offense than Bailey, if only because anybody would. Jesus Rodriguez’s work behind the plate will forever carry a work-in-progress label, but his bat-to-ball skills seem both legitimate and thrilling. Between the two of them, they should get more offense out of the position.
It will come at the expense of the pitchers, in theory, but one of their biggest problems is throwing strikes to steal in the first place. The walk rate for Giants pitchers is worse than the league average, so maybe there’s some galaxy-brained advantage to removing the training wheels of Bailey’s pitch-framing and making them bite off more of the strike zone. Maybe. But there’s a reason why the nerd stats say that his defense is a net positive: because it probably has been. There’s no way around it. The Giants’ defense will take a hit, and a substantial one.
It’s not something that you’re going to notice every second you’re watching, from pitch to pitch, though. It’s something that will build and accumulate over time. If you’re like me, though, you can’t remember last week. What you’ll notice is that the Giants’ catchers aren’t killing as many rallies at the plate. They might be starting some of them. Heck, they might even be finishing some of them.
With nothing more than a promising Rule 5 pick behind the plate, it’s hard to imagine the Giants making this trade. With nothing more than a rookie catcher/outfielder/infielder, it’s hard to imagine them making this trade. Both of them together, with an offense that’s desperate for runs? That’s just enough of a backup plan (with Erik Haase as a solid backup plan behind the backup plan) to take the shot.
Why the Giants like what they’re getting back
If you really don’t care about defense behind the plate, this is a great time to drop one of those “great trade/who’d they get?” jokes, but Bailey clearly had value. The Guardians are giving up a first-round pick and a prospect named Tugboat. Teams typically aren’t in the business of giving that stuff away.
According to FanGraphs, though, Bailey was one of the more valuable players in baseball over the last two seasons. If you believe in those numbers or others like them, the Giants might be making a blunder. Bailey was only starting the arbitration process after this season, and he’s under team control for another three. By this math, they’ll get one of the more valuable players in baseball at owner-friendly prices, and all they’ll have to give up is speculative future value that might never bear fruit. So don’t think of it as a steal for either team. They both knew what they were doing, and they might both share fond memories of the deal in a later recounting.
Still, considering the Giants’ place in the baseball world — the bottom, at the moment — it’s not a bad idea to hoard as many first-round picks as the rules allow. They were already picking fourth, and the industry scuttlebutt is that it’s a deep and talented first round. The high pick gave the Giants a larger bonus pool to work with, so they’ll have a variety of options, from playing it straight and taking the best player available both times to picking an under-slot player with the No. 4 pick and using the savings to buy out a college commitment at the back of the first round.
There should be a more immediate fix of baseball fun than a draft pick coming back in this deal, though, which brings us to ol’ Tugboat Wilkinson. The 23-year-old lefty currently has a 1.59 ERA in six starts in Double A, with 36 strikeouts and nine walks in 28 innings. He racks those strikeouts up with a fastball that sits in the low-90s. Just look at all the called third strikes here:
He’s a high-energy pitcher, and while he doesn’t shout “TOOT TOOT” as he paces around the mound, he’s clearly thinking it. Or, at least, he should be. You can even imagine a crowd doing it loudly and often, possibly while wearing Tugboat-shaped hats, assuming it all works out.
Which it might not. Wilkinson’s velocity can get in the mid-90s, but it can also sit in the high-80s, so he’s a classic tweener prospect. That’s the kind of pitcher who is good enough to dominate everyone except for the best 300 hitters in the world, which is both a remarkable achievement and not nearly enough to thrive in the majors. He can’t just paint and succeed; he has to be Rembrandt. Or Tibor Gergely, at least.
As a fan of pitchers like Sergio Romo and Tyler Rogers, funk maestros of the highest order and athletes who should not belong in the same sport as Paul Skenes, it is your moral imperative to root for Tugboat. And while the handedness isn’t a match, there’s a command-and-conquer specialist with a similar profile who had some great years with the Giants. Yusmeiro Petit’s minor-league stats are always a fun visit, and his scouting report came with the same rap before he beat the odds.
Petit was the exception, not the rule, however, and you can probably rattle off a half-dozen soft-tossing Giants pitchers who didn’t come close to their minor-league success because location and deception alone aren’t enough in the majors. There is a ceiling to hit. Most pitchers will hit it.
Until he stops getting outs, though, the Giants will be happy to have Wilkinson. He should be in Sacramento soon, and even if his ceiling is as a reliever or fifth starter, he definitely has a feel for pitching that the rest of the team is lacking right now.
Something to watch
The Yankees just promoted Marco Luciano to Triple A after a 1.123 OPS in Double A. James Tibbs III has a 1.017 OPS in the Dodgers’ system. Kyle Harrison has a 2.12 ERA in six starts for the Brewers.
If Bailey starts to hit — even a little bit — you would be correct in asking why the Giants aren’t the ones making these players better. This is cherry-picking, and it leaves out examples like Camilo Doval, as well as ignoring the talent they’ve brought in with trades, like Rodriguez, Jacob Bresnahan, Parks Harber and Nate Furman, so be careful that you don’t read too much into who’s excelling where.
Just keep an eye on it.
Don’t forget about the good times
Bailey had serious, sometimes historical, offensive slumps that the Giants couldn’t tolerate anymore. Still, do your best to appreciate how fun and fascinating it was to watch someone, night after night, who was the best at something. It wasn’t the flashiest or most valuable baseball skill, but it was a valuable one, and Bailey was the best at it. It might be something only the nerdiest of baseball observers can appreciate, but, well, guilty as charged. It was another layer to the game to appreciate, even in the crappy games. Of which there have been many.
He also had plenty of big individual moments, leaving the Giants with more career walk-off home runs than Posey, Jeff Kent or Matt Williams, and more than J.T. Snow, Chili Davis and Darrell Evans combined. One of them was the goofiest (and) best kind of walk-off homer:
That’s an all-time franchise moment, regardless of context, regardless of era. A walk-off inside-the-parker — while trailing, no less — is a perfect baseball event. Bailey was good at the perfect baseball events.
They were just too few and far between for this specific roster. The last time the Giants traded their starting catcher in an unexpected midseason deal, it worked out. Will either Susac or Rodriguez win Rookie of the Year, MVP and three championships before eventually running the team and owning a piece of it? Guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Maybe both of them together could do that. That seems like a reasonable enough compromise.
A few more hits in the meantime, however, will do plenty. The Giants had youth they liked at a position they weren’t getting production from. It wasn’t more complicated than that, even if the trade itself will be endlessly fascinating and studied for a long, long time.