Brett Pill is going to Korea. The 41-man roster is no more.
Andrew Baggarly had the scoop. Pill is negotiating a contract with the KIA Tigers of the Korean Baseball League, and the Giants already have a deal in place to sell Pill's contract. It's apparently done or close to it. It sure looks like the Giants "won" this deal, hahaha*.
*Currency joke. And a damned good one.
Thus endeth one of the more bizarre chapters of Giants history. Brett Pill never claimed to be anything he wasn't. He never made brash proclamations or whined about his playing time. He was just a guy thrust into a semi-prominent role by a team that didn't have a lot of right-handed options. And some people sure loved him. The money lies in the RsBI.
Other people, a lot of them around these parts, thought he was Desi Wilson without the upside. There were other opinions, most of them less polite.
What an odd player to polarize a fanbase. There was no mystery. Pill did what he was expected to do. He didn't even have one of those freaky Eugenio stretches where he was 50-for-49. Pill was supposed to provide a little power, a lack of contact and patience, and little else. That's what he did. Everyone ... everyone was expecting exactly that, right?
Apparently not. The polarizing Pill made it necessary to write an FAQ, describing why people were so grumbly when he started. It's like people arguing about Guillermo Mota. Do you not realize exactly what Mota is? Where's the argument?
Maybe it wasn't Bruce Bochy was so danged weird about Pill. Maybe it was us. Do you know how many games Pill started at first over the last three seasons? Take a guess. We're talking three full seasons, with Pill on the roster for a decent chunk of it. If he was Belt's de facto platoon mate, he must have started a ton of games, right?
He started 41 games in three seasons. That's just under 14 games a season. He kinda was the 25th man that he's suited to be. For some reason, though, he was propped up like he was the enemy of Brandon Belt, our freedoms, and sunlight.
Again, just weird. He wasn't a prospect. He wasn't a roadblock. He was just a guy who did cool things with less frequency than you'd like.
We'll always have Paris.
My hopes for Pill in Korea: .350/.410/.650 with every single last damned home run in the country. I like the guy. Best of luck to him, even if I'm not going to miss the daily peek-between-the-fingers at the lineup against left-handed pitchers.