Giants add Kris Bryant and Tony Watson

    The San Francisco Giants had to have seen the moves that the Los Angeles Dodgers had made in acquiring Max Scherzer and Trea Turner and felt they had to do something to level the playing field.

San Francisco's three-game lead didn't feel secure enough to stand pat and the Giants grabbed a huge bat for their lineup along with a familiar arm for their bullpen and will now hope that they have enough muscle to hold off the West Coast version of Steinbrenner U.

Kris Bryant's power bat will serve the Giants' needs perfectly into a lineup that has been productive even without names that would only be recognizable by the hardest of minor league followers, but where the intrigue with Bryant begins goes beyond the postseason run.

Bryant is a free agent at the end of the season, but Bryant is from Las Vegas (the Bay Area is the closest MLB market to Vegas) and the Giants may have more money to spend in next years free-agent market, so this not only helps the stretch run for the Giants, but it also gives Bryant and the Giants a chance to kick the tires and see if the player, organization, and ballpark are a good fit for one another.

Bryant was hitting .265 with 18 homers with 51 RBI for the rebuilding Cubs and had problems with the organization going back to his rookie season over the team manipulating his service time for arbitration eligibility, so he was almost certainly not going to return to Wrigley Field.

The righthanded hitting Bryant would seem to be a perfect fit for a Giants team that lost Evan Longoria to a shoulder sprain in early June and have been running out various options to third base since then, but the Giants could also use Bryant at first until Brandon Belt returns from his injury (Belt is on a rehab assignment as of this writing) or even the outfield in a possible scenario that includes Belt and Longoria.

The cost was not cheap as toolsy outfielder Alexander Canario was so highly prized by the Giants that the team placed him on the 40 man roster despite Canario only playing 49 games for the now-defunct short-season Salem-Keizer Volcanoes in 2019, due to fear that a crummy team could take him and stash him away from the Rule V draft.

Canario was hitting .235 with nine homers for Low A San Jose this season with fifteen steals, but at 21 is highly thought of as a prospect.

San Francisco also included pitcher Caleb Killian as the second player in the trade and Killian has been the breakout pitching prospect for the Giants this season at two different levels.

Killian was drafted in the ninth round from Texas Tech in 2019 and has been excellent for High A Eugene (3-0 1.25 ERA 32 strikeouts in four starts) and AA Richmond (3-2 2.43 ERA 64 strikeouts in eleven starts).

Killian was considered as a possibility for the Giants rotation next season, so he is certainly a prospect that the Giants hate to lose.

One can never have too many arms for the bullpen and the Giants brought back an arm from the past as they obtained lefthander Tony Watson from the Anaheim Angels.

Watson was 3-3 and 4.64 ERA in 36 appearances for the Angels and could fill into the lefty specialist role in the late innings.

San Francisco sent three minor league pitchers to the Angels- Sam Selman, Jose Marte, and Ivan Armstrong.

The thirty-year-old Selman appeared in seven games for the Giants (0-0 4.50 ERA) but has spent most of the season with AAA Sacramento (1-0 1 save and 4.03 ERA)

Marte spent most of the season with AA Richmond ( 2-0 3.57 ERA 36 strikeouts in 22 innings) in their bullpen and has been reported to have been clocked near 100 MPH at times this season.

At twenty-five, Marte is a bit old for the level, but those types of arms from the bullpen will receive many opportunities to show a power arm.

Armstrong is the most interesting prospect to me at 21 with low A San Jose, the 6'5 righthander was 4-1 with a 1.88 ERA in twenty appearances.

The San Francisco Giants are a team that is exceeding expectations, but in a division with two free-spending teams in Los Angeles and San Diego, the Giants needed to do something to try to upgrade and at least make those teams deadline deals a wash in the overall picture.

Players like Kris Bryant come at a high price, even as a rental, but the Giants needed to do something to show that the effort is there to make a run in the homestretch.

Next writing will look at the various deals by the Cleveland IndiGuardians and whatever their deals brought in or rather what the hell is going on in Cleveland?