Team Hoses Player. Standing Headline.

But hey, they used a real rule

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The San Francisco Giants cut a player this week. This happens virtually every day at this time of year in baseball. So the fact that they’re being roasted for it sort of suggests that there’s a VH1 Behind the Music-style story that goes along with the transaction.

And there is! We got lucky.

On paper, here’s how it went: The Giants asked for waivers on third baseman J.D. Davis, who was a productive player for them last year but became a bit redundant after the team signed Gold Glover Matt Chapman to play third. So far, so normal.

But wait. Also on paper, Davis was waived (and released) barely a month after beating the Giants in arbitration, a process through which two MLB parties that cannot agree on a contract value plead their cases to a three-person panel. The team and the player each submit the salary they believe to be correct. The parties are free to settle their differences right up until the moment of judgment, but failing that, the panel chooses either the figure submitted by the team or the one submitted by the player (through his agent).

Davis won at $6.9 million. The Giants’ figure was $6.55 million.

Hmm. Now that we think about it, those two figures are quite close, aren’t they? In fact, if any of us had covered MLB for the past, oh, 30 years or so, some of us might suggest that historically, when the parties are that close in their submitted figures, a quick contract resolution that avoids the messy and often pejorative arbitration hearing almost always gets done.

And in this case, we’d be wrong.

Because the Giants decided to screw J.D. Davis.

And they used a perfectly legal route to do it.

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This can get arcane, so let me keep it simple. Players go through the arbitration process all the time; they just don’t often wind up at an actual hearing. Usually, the two sides agree on a deal before the moment arrives when they have to submit figures.

The Giants did exactly that with every other player they had this winter who was arbitration eligible. There was only one exception. And I want to suggest to you why that might have been.

There’s a weird wrinkle in the arbitration rules, and it has to do with, you guessed it, money. When the team and a player agree to a deal during the pre-hearing process and thus avoid arbitration itself, the agreed-upon salary becomes guaranteed, locked in. It’s got to be paid, whether that player winds up on the big league roster all year, spends his time in Triple-A or later gets hurt or cut altogether. That’s the case for almost every contract in MLB, by the way.

Ah, but when the two sides have to ask an arbitration panel to decide the salary, the resulting figure is not guaranteed. So instead taking the full financial hit for their roster decision, the Giants owed Davis only a pro-rated fraction of the salary that they just agreed to pay — and even that fraction was subject to calendar manipulation. If San Francisco had waived Davis within 15 days of the season opener, they’d have owed him $1.66 million. So they released with him 17 days before the opener, which lowered their obligation to $1.1 million.

Now: Why would a team carry a player through the entire winter, negotiate on a contract, agree to go to arbitration, and only after the result cut the player — even though the two sides were barely $350,000 apart to begin with?

Conspiracy theories, unite!

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Here’s what happened, and I feel pretty settled about this.

The Giants were going to bring Davis back this season. After all, he hit 18 homers, had 69 RBI and by metrics was rated an above-average player both offensively and overall last year. But San Francisco’s baseball boss, Farhan Zaidi, also wanted to shop around in case somebody better came along.

Chapman, represented by Scott Boras, languished on the free-agent market for months as Boras sought a long-term deal for huge money. That deal never materialized. In the meantime, spring training neared and J.D. Davis got ready to report for third-base duty with the Giants, who were hoping to snag Chapman at a (relatively) lowball price.

What to do? Well, a crafty baseball executive might suggest that you do what the Giants did, which was conspicuously fail to agree on a contract with Davis. Again, the Giants reached agreements with all five of their other arbitration-eligible players, including outfielder Mike Yastrzemski at $7.9 million.

According to Davis’s agent, Matt Hannaford, the Giants made one single contract offer, and that offer landed one hour before the deadline to go to arbitration. The offer was well below the $6.55 million figure that the Giants later submitted in arbitration.

Hmm.

“In my 22 years in the business, I’ve never seen a club in arbitration make their one and only offer less than an hour before the exchange deadline that ended up hundreds of thousands of dollars below their filing number,” Hannaford later told reporters covering the team. “The way the Giants negotiated gave J.D. no choice but to go to a hearing, which he did, and which we won.”

Won.

Ohh-kay.

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If I were into such theories, I might guess that the Giants wanted very much to see how the whole Matt Chapman market was going to play out so that they could gauge his interest in playing for his former manager in Oakland, Bob Melvin, who is the new skipper of the Giants. By refusing to agree to a contract with J.D. Davis, rendering his subsequent arbitration award non-guaranteed, the team bought itself an insurance policy in case the Chapman thing didn’t work out. Once the Chapman deal went through, the Giants could dump Davis at a huge savings. Which they did.

Spoiler: I am into such theories. At least in this case.

In the end, Boras and Chapman, finding the market wanting, took a three-year deal from the Giants at well below the value they’d expected. Chapman can leave after the first or second season, so he retains some control.

J.D. Davis, meanwhile, will receive $1.1 million instead of $6.9 million, and also got cut loose a couple of weeks before the season begins, long after most teams have spent their free-agent money. He’ll sign with somebody, but this late in camp he won’t be getting the value that an arbitration panel one month ago declared he was worth. Winning the case cost him millions.

And the Giants? They went through a side window that didn’t even exist before the 2022 collective bargaining agreement with the players. Prior to ‘22, no arbitration contract of any kind, hearing or no hearing, was guaranteed. Believe it or not, the fact that pre-hearing contracts are now guaranteed constitutes progress. But the fact that panel-determined awards are not guaranteed gave them the wiggle room they wanted.

Zaidi says the Giants did nothing wrong. Of course, this is the same organization that had virtually no conversation with face of the franchise Brandon Crawford this winter after Crawford expressed a willingness to stay as a backup infielder and mentor, a role he’s now playing in St. Louis. For that matter, the front office never spoke with Crawford before signing Carlos Correa in late 2022 to take over his shortstop position (the deal later fell through).

The Giants executive also notes that San Francisco has joined other teams recently in refusing to negotiate once arbitration figures have been submitted — the so called “file and trial” approach. That’s another way of telling players to shut up and settle up. But at a mere $350,000 difference, an almost perfect meet-me-in-the-middle sort of territory?

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I’m saying that this is a little bit about the rules and a little bit about being human. It’s fair to argue that J.D. Davis’s agent should have seen this possibility coming, but again, according to him, the Giants barely made a pre-arbitration offer to consider. Davis himself said he’d have gladly signed for the $6.55 million figure the Giants submitted, had they ever communicated such an offer beforehand.

Based upon the available reporting, agents and players around the league have taken sharp notice of what the Giants did. There’s a suggestion that the team’s ham-handed actions may affect its ability to attract talent in the future. We’ll see. Either way, this is all very far removed from San Francisco’s reputation, built over decades, as a franchise that takes care of its players, current and former.

The Giants didn’t break any tenets, no. Did they do right by their own franchise? That depends almost completely upon how you define the term. But what happened this week almost never happens, anywhere in baseball, with any team.

There’s a reason for that.