Monday BP, 12/17/18

• Hunter Pence joined the Toros del Este in the Dominican Winter League just a couple of weeks before their season ended and helped them sneak into the playoffs.

Their 25-24 record makes them his first winning team since 2016, so here’s hoping their bullpen lets them make a deep run in the round robin-style tournament.

• The Giants were reported to have interest in pitcher Mike Fiers, presumably on a one or two-year deal, which follows along the line proposed in Friday’s article about how this will be a boring offseason and Kerry Crowley’s article yesterday about how the Giants are looking for stop-gap options to get through 2019 in preparation for an actually competitive 2020.
• Chase d’Arnaud signed a minor league deal with an invite to the Texas Rangers’ Spring Training, defying my prediction that he would become a studio analyst or TV host or just focus solely on his music career.
• Yusei Kikuchi is in Los Angeles this week to meet with interested teams. Landing him would be a very important move for the Giants as they look to compete in 2020. It would generate a little bit of excitement for this year and help the team rebound more quickly from a potential loss of Madison Bumgarner this trade deadline or the next offseason. Not that he’d be an ace, but Cueto, Kikuchi, and either Suarez or Rodriguez or both of them would be a solid core for a starting rotation that they can add to if they feel they’ll actually be competitive.