Today (Friday) is the deadline for the Giants to offer a contract to their arbitration-eligible players: Sam Dyson, Hunter Strickland, Will Smith, Gorkys Hernandez, and Joe Panik. All that has to happen is the team must offer a contract with no terms. This will allow them to try to work out a deal before a would-be arbitration hearing before Spring Training.
Last month, I took a look at these five players and MLB Trade Rumors’ accompanying projected arbitration salaries and tried to figure out who’d be hanging around and who’d be going. We don’t know what’s going on with Farhan Zaidi exactly, in terms of what direction he might go in this offseason. Any player tendered a contract could be traded, of course, but any non-tenders might also tell us something about the new direction of the team. Maybe.
On that note, there’s a nonzero chance that Joe Panik is not tendered a contract, in which case we’ll get a really strong idea of Zaidi’s sentimental attachment to the roster or, better yet, his sober view of the talent already on it. The pool of free agent second basemen is already rather large, so there might not be a deal out there in which to include Joe Panik.
If he’s non-tendered, though, I want to say that’s a bigger sign of the changing times than anything else. Sweet, innocent, used-to-be-young Joe Panik a casualty of a roster transaction just feels... too soon? Even though it’s not, of course, and he had a terrible 2018, but it just feels like we were going to get a few more years out of that Panik-Crawford infield.
We still might, of course, but even if he is tendered a contract, change is coming whether we like it or not.
Meanwhile...
Hunter Pence did end up finding a Winter Ball home. He's going to the Dominican Republic in a week to test his swing changes in games.
— Alex Pavlovic (@PavlovicNBCS) November 30, 2018
Good luck, Hunter.