It looks like Giancarlo Stanton doesn’t want to be traded to the Giants

I’d like to think Giancarlo Stanton was close to approving a trade to the Giants. Real close. And then he stumbled across the sports section from an old USA Today in the recycling bin, and he discovered the Giants were terrible. “Gadzooks!”, he probably said. “This baseball team is abominable!”

Regardless of how it happened, it looks like none of the updates are favorable to the Giants. According to Ken Rosenthal, Stanton is unlikely to approve a trade to the Giants. Though he says that Stanton’s thinking “is fluid” and could change over the course of the offseason — if they get Shohei Ohtani, for example — the reason for the hold up is that he isn’t comfortable going to a 98-loss team.

The other update comes from Craig Mish, which suggests that Stanton would approve a trade to the Cubs, Astros, Dodgers, and Yankees. Ah, yes, the classic West Coast quartet. Mish has been responsible for a lot of these updates, and because of his location, they’re almost certainly coming from a Marlins source, and it would sure be nice for the Marlins if there were three more teams involved in the Stanton derby.

Still, you can see the pattern, right? Those are four stacked baseball teams. They have youth. They have a future. They have money. If Stanton wants to win, those are the four obvious teams to pick. And if he wants to win, it would make sense that Henry Schulman is reporting this:

The Chronicle heard Thursday afternoon that Stanton has told friends that the Giants are not his first choice and might be his last.

No, the Giants can’t compete with those four teams, and they also can’t compete with the Cardinals, which means it’s time to get ready for Jay Bruce! Cough. Or maybe the Giants can trade for, I don’t know, Khris Davis, who can’t really through, or ... look, I have no idea how to salvage this offseason with a move as immediate and transformative as Stanton.

[reminder: photoshop obi-wan saying “that was our only hope” and yoda correcting him as giancarlo stanton flies away, which means that ohtani is his baseball twin, this is canon now, insert before publishing]

I guess the good news is that it isn’t just the Dodgers who are on the list? It would be rad if he went to the Yankees and started fighting crime with Aaron Judge, even as I’m pretty sure we would get tired of them in five seconds. All we know is that the Giants are mostly out of the running, if not entirely out of the running.

It was sure fun while it lasted, though?