Umm...Nick Tropeano?

We’re quite close to the end of our 2021 San Francisco Giants season reviews, but first we must touch on right-handed pitcher Nick Tropeano.

2021 review

4 games, 6 innings, 4 hits, 2 strikeouts, 2 walks, 1 earned run, 1.50 ERA, 3.50 FIP, 1.000 WHIP, +0.1 rWAR, 0.0 fWAR

Yesterday I wrote about how Chadwick Tromp was far more memorable for what he did with the Giants in 2020 than in 2021. I kind of felt similarly about Nick Tropeano.

So imagine my embarrassed surprise when I pulled up his Baseball-Reference page and was rudely informed that Tropeano had no involvement whatsoever with the 2020 Giants. Didn’t throw a single pitch for them. Wasn’t under contract with them. Just existed in the same league as them, not unlike a few hundred other players whom I do not associate with black and orange.

The purpose of this anecdote isn’t to highlight how I, person who pays his rent by following and writing about the Giants, has next to no concept of who plays for the Giants. Truthfully, I’m not sure what the point of this anecdote is. I think it’s to highlight that, while many players have walked through the Giants halls for a few games and a quick departure in recent years, Tropeano was one of the few who was actually quite good.

I’ll be honest, Tropeano’s entire Giants tenure was bizarre to me. After a brilliant 2020 (with the Pittsburgh Pirates, not the Giants, in case you’re still confused), in which Tropeano had a 1.15 ERA and 2.55 FIP, San Francisco signed him to a Minor League deal, and then optioned him on three separate occasions, which served as an amuse-bouche to the kicker of an entree: designating him for assignment, with no corresponding 40-man roster move, to make room on the active roster for Scott Kazmir.

Here’s what I wrote at the time:

Either way, “Giants DFA Nick Tropeano and reinstate Scott Kazmir” is certainly not a sentence you would have expected to read when the season began. But then again, nothing about the Giants 2021 season has been what you expected.

Tropeano did have an opt-out clause that would have allowed him to seek free agency had he not been on the roster a few days prior, so the only reason I could come up with was that the team was doing him a solid and honoring the spirit of his contract, even though they didn’t technically have to do so.

Either way, it proved no great loss, as Tropeano would only pitch two more innings in the season (for the New York Mets, a team that is also not the Giants), and the San Francisco bullpen was one of the best in baseball.

Still weird, though.

Role in 2022

Possibly playing, presumably elsewhere.

Grade: Confusing