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Robert Edwards-Imagn Images<\/p>\n\t\t\t\tRobert Edwards-Imagn Images<\/p>\n
As I was scrolling The Website Formerly Known As Twitter on Sunday, perusing for articles to read and news to get caught up on, I stopped dead in my tracks at this post from Giants reporter Alex Pavlovic:<\/p>\n
The Giants now have 16 players on the 60-day IL, which will make for an insane series of roster moves at the start of the offseason. When Scott Bandura<\/a> takes his first at-bat tonight, they’ll set a franchise record by using 67 different players.<\/p>\n \u2014 Alex Pavlovic (@PavlovicNBCS) September 13, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n If you\u2019re a normal baseball fan, that\u2019s not the most interesting piece of news Pavlovic reported around that same time; that would, of course, be the bombshell that Rafael Devers<\/a> was undergoing core muscle surgery, ending his season and making him that 16th player on the 60-day. The lefty slugger finished his season scorching hot before it came to its abrupt end. He ultimately finished with 3.4 WAR and 37 home runs, just one off his career high set back in 2021. Had he remained healthy and clubbed three more, he would\u2019ve become the first Giants player since Barry Bonds<\/a> in 2004 to reach the 40-homer threshold.<\/p>\n But from my purview as a roster freak, my wheels immediately started turning and thinking about how the Giants were going to clean up their 40-man roster at the start of the offseason. Our RosterResource data goes back to 2021, and for only one other stretch has a team had 16 players on the 60-day IL: The 2021 Rangers from August 27-30. But that late-August timing afforded the Rangers some in-season wiggle room to work through the 40-man shuffle, a luxury the Giants won\u2019t have. Nobody on San Francisco\u2019s 60-day is expected back this season, the 60-day IL can\u2019t be used again until the onset of spring training, and the Giants have just one pending free agent in JT Brubaker<\/a>. Needless to say, Buster Posey<\/a>, Zack Minasian, and the rest of the team\u2019s decision makers have their work ahead of them, with 55 names to sort through all at once and no intermediate moves in the offing. <\/p>\n I began where I tend to start my rabbit hole of research: tabbing back and forth from RosterResource<\/a> and a spreadsheet of categorizing players into various buckets. I settled on 24 players for the initial 40-man who should be in no danger of getting cut. This includes all the usual suspects and big contracts, plus some nice mini-breakouts representing silver linings of a lost season.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll Eat 16 Pounds of Garlic Fries if They\u2019re Not on the 40-Man<\/p>\n A special shoutout is in order for Trent Harris, who may singlehandedly be keeping the rainbow curveball<\/a> alive. The bullpen hasn\u2019t had a set closer all season (Caleb Kilian<\/a>, currently on the Phillies\u2019 IL, leads San Francisco with eight saves), but Harris and 2025 All-Star Rodr\u00edguez (on the IL all year after undergoing Tommy John surgery) could make for an interesting one-two punch next year. Hey, there has to be something positive about the future of the club.<\/p>\n That leaves 31 players for 16 spots, which for many teams would be a gargantuan task. Imagine if the Rays or Dodgers had to sort through that many names with how deep their rosters always are. But not for the Giants, because there is, shall we say\u2026 a lot of slop here.<\/p>\n The most puzzling situation here is Bader, whom the Giants signed to a two-year, $20.5 million contract this past offseason. While it\u2019s smaller scale than the contracts of Adames and Chapman, which have been a mixed bag so far, the Bader deal is probably the single biggest disaster of Posey\u2019s tenure. He\u2019s gotten into just 30 games this year, been placed on the IL twice, and the Giants are currently suspending payment<\/a> to the 32-year-old following a scooter accident, which he suffered while already on the injured list, that ruled out a 2026 return. When able to play, he\u2019s been 51% worse than league average by wRC+ and merely scratch in center field by FRV. Whether the Giants have to pay Bader or not, it\u2019s hard to envision a significant role for him on the roster in 2027, the final year of his contract, especially with the emergences of Schmitt, Gilbert, Cox, and Hill.<\/p>\n Where the Giants go with the rest is anyone\u2019s guess, though some of these players\u2019 jobs are certainly safer than others. For example, they traded Patrick Bailey<\/a> in part to accommodate Susac, meaning his spot is likely secured. However, I\u2019ll be the first to admit there are plenty of easy cuts here, even if there isn\u2019t consensus on who those easy cuts are. When I teased I was writing<\/a> this article, a few Giants fans came into my mentions with their ostensible obvious cuts, but their cut lists didn\u2019t even match each other\u2019s, and the Giants\u2019 own list is impossible to nail perfectly without being inside the room with them. (Buster, if you\u2019re reading this, call me.)<\/p>\n The above lists, which feature a combined 55 names, don\u2019t even account for the players who need to be added to the 40-man roster to protect them from the Rule 5 draft. At a minimum, the Giants will add Henry Lalane<\/a> and Bo Davidson<\/a>, but the club has other Rule-5 eligible 40-man candidates, including Marty Gair<\/a>, Luis De La Torre<\/a>, Joe Whitman<\/a>, Reggie Crawford<\/a>, and Sabin Ceballos<\/a>. The deadline to protect players is a bit later, though (it was November 18 this past offseason), affording the front office more time to shuffle the furniture and make further cuts.<\/p>\n \n You Aren’t a FanGraphs Member\n <\/p>\n \n It looks like you aren’t yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren’t logged in). We aren’t mad, just disappointed.\n <\/p>\n \n We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we’d like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.\n <\/p>\n 1. Ad Free viewing! We won’t bug you with this ad, or any other.<\/p>\n 2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.<\/p>\n 3. Dark mode and Classic mode!<\/p>\n 4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.<\/p>\n 5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.<\/p>\n 6. Remove the photos on the home page! 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We didn’t want to overdo it.\n <\/p>\n Most of these roster cuts won\u2019t garner major headlines when they happen, but they are decisions that teams don\u2019t make lightly because they could end up biting them later on. This initial roster culling won\u2019t determine the overall trajectory of the 2027 Giants, whether they are a good or bad team, but these moves could make the difference of a few wins \u2014\u00a0which could be crucial if they are to have any hope of claiming a wild card berth next season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Robert Edwards-Imagn Images As I was scrolling The Website Formerly Known As Twitter on Sunday, perusing for articles…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":469240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-469239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/469240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}