Here’s the funniest trade idea you’ll see today

While desperately scrambling to find something to write about, I clicked on MLB.com’s “10 trade candidates becoming more interesting” article featured on their front page, just to see if any Giants popped up on the list.

Sure enough, Mark Feinsand included at the very bottom of the page The Ballot Bros’ own Derek Holland as a possible trade candidate. Feinsand mentions:

He has a 3.07 ERA in his past nine outings (seven starts), striking out seven or more batters five times during that stretch. Holland is owed less than $1 million for the rest of the year, making him a good bargain candidate.

Okay, yeah, fine. I’m right there with you. Maybe some team could use him at the back end of the rotation or even as a bit of a swing man like how the Giants seem to want to use him going forward. But what teams could use such an arm and in such a role? Feinsand lists two teams as “potential fits”:

Mariners

Yeah. Okay, I can sort of see this. Jerry DiPoto will surely be itching to make a move or 12 by the end of the month and Holland’s minimal contract coupled with the season performance would be attractive and seem to fit the CBT space available to them. A modest upgrade with very little cost. It’s not entirely clear who he’d replace in the bullpen as lefties Roenis Elias and James Pazos seem to be holding it down and Wade LeBlanc is at the back of their rotation already but you can never have enough pitching, I suppose. Fine. This is all clearly idle speculation on Feinsand’s part, so I won’t begrudge him this.

Dodgers

But now I will ask, “Mark, my dude, what the hell are you thinking?” He wrote a book called The New York Yankees’ Fan Bucket List, which I won’t link to here because this New Yorker through and through doesn’t deserve the free link press. He has basically consigned the west coast to an unused corner of his brain and opted out of considering what it would mean if the Giants and Dodgers traded with each other. This is a national writer on THE FRONT PAGE OF MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL’S WEBSITE suggesting that the Giants and Dodgers could come together for a trade.

Feinsand could be suggesting in a haphazard way that the Giants could get involved in a three-team deal with the other team sending Holland to the Dodgers, but that demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge about the Giants. When have they ever done a three-team deal? When would they ever do something that has the potential to help out the Dodgers? Do I think that Mark Feinsand doesn’t have any insider knowledge about the Giants or anything outside of the Eastern Time Zone? Well... I certainly do now.

Derek Holland deserves a fate better than the Dodgers and it just goes to show that there are rumors and idle speculation out there that’s far more frustrating and infuriating than our scope from earlier this week.