Wednesday BP, 3/6/19

Just wanted to take a moment to point out a new section on the site: ICYMI Chronicles. Since we’ll be posting quite a bit of material once the season begins, I wanted there to be a one-stop shop for stuff that’s too good to get bumped off the front page after only a day or two. Right now, we’ve got Kenny’s most optimistic forecast for 2019, Grant’s goodbye, Roger’s eulogy for Frank Robinson, and more.

If there’s something you remember reading and don’t see it on the front page anymore, let us know and we’ll consider adding it.

You know, I had started writing this BP all the way back on Monday night and so it seems a little weird to carry on with my originally planned discussion of Cameron Maybin and his chances of making the roster. If you hadn’t heard, he was arrested for DUI on Friday night, so that bumps my original plan to talk about how rooting for him is sort of the old scout and old baseball writer’s vestige of how covering baseball used to be. Or something. I really can’t remember now.

Instead, I’m relieved Cameron Maybin didn’t hurt anyone or even himself while driving intoxicated. I’m confused as to why he couldn’t just pay for a cab or something. I’m wondering why he was drinking alone, too, but that answer doesn’t actually matter... and I’m somewhere between annoyed and angry that this news is of a kind with the offseason.

On the other hand, it’s still a little bit worse than all that other stuff, at least on paper. This is the first time I can remember the police interacting with a Giants player since Chad Gaudin drunkenly groped a woman in a hospital. That was a month after the Giants signed him, though we didn’t hear about it until about six months later, right when he was putting up a nice 2013 season for them. And then... poof... he was out of baseball, basically, after his age-30 season. Yes, he bounced around in team’s camps, but he literally logged 0 major league innings after that.

This will be Maybin’s age-32 season and given his slow start and underwhelming all around numbers, it was more likely he was going to be cut anyway, but I have to think this all but cements that. The strength of the non-roster invite is that the risk to the team is minimal. Not only does a player need to perform, he needs to mind his Ps and Qs — really prove that he deserves to be on the team and in the organization.

Admittedly, the franchise doesn’t really have a strong moral look right now, but that shouldn’t excuse his terrible judgment. He drank five “pretty big” glasses of wine and then got in the car? Not good. There were over 10,000 drunk driving-related deaths in 2017, and Arizona had a higher rate of drunk driver-related crash deaths than the national average from 2003-2012. It feels like I shouldn’t have to stress the importance of not driving drunk, but I’m doing it anyway in case I wasn’t clear.

I’m not pitchforking the Giants to cut Cameron Maybin, I’m just expecting that’s what will happen. He had to make more than one bad choice that day to land himself in that exact situation and from a purely employee-employer bird’s eye view, carrying a player like that on the team, especially when you don’t have to, seems like it’s more trouble than it’s worth, particularly when there’s not a compelling business reason to carry on as though nothing happened.