You must hand it to the Giants. This week, they traded for no players who have since been exposed as members of baseball’s increasingly non-confidential 2003 steroid list.
Good gravy. Who is in charge of keeping that list “secret,” anyway? The Homer Simpson/Three Stooges Security Corporation?

Instead, of course, Giants General Manager Brian Sabean made a couple of sensible deals for Ryan Garko and Freddy Sanchez, two apparently clean professional hitters who will immediately improve the Giants’ offensive production by at least one run per three games. That’s according to a new statistical projection that I just made up totally out of thin air. But it sounds about right.
It also permits me to go on a brief rant. What is troubling to me, in today’s baseball climate with so many stats and deep-data analysis, is how we have lost track of what really should matter at trade-deadline time:
Romance.
Am I so wrong and wimpy to bring up that word? The Giants, particularly with Wednesday’s trade for Sanchez, have given their fans a little fresh hope that the team won’t turn to mush during the hard-grinding playoff push of the next 10 weeks.
Sanchez, who won the 2006 National League batting title, did not play Thursday night at AT&T Park because he’s nursing a sore knee. But he should be in the lineup soon. Which means this season’s Hey-You-Never-Know ride should continue a while longer.
And that’s what we love about baseball, isn’t it? The way it can distract us from the real world? The way it can make us grin and believe that day by day, between those white lines, anything remains possible?
We have not had that feeling in the Bay Area for quite some time. We had the Barry Bonds sideshow to distract us for a while. But that was show biz, not romance. What’s happening with the Giants right now is an unexpected summer fling that you don’t want to see end. After this week’s moves, it shouldn’t.
Of course, you might think otherwise, for all of the discussion about whether the Giants “gave up too much” for Sanchez. To obtain him, Sabean sent Tim Alderson, a talented 20-year-old minor league pitcher, to the Pirates. Alderson is obviously unproven, but in 2008 he had the best ERA in the Class A California League.
We are talking about the classic debate, of course. Whenever a baseball team makes this sort of deal — with a veteran player being exchanged for a hot young prospect — there are always some Mopey Mopersons who say the team that gave up the prospect is “mortgaging its future.”
Phooey on that. I’ve got news for the Mopey Mopersons. Baseball’s mortgage market is almost always weighted against the prospects. Yes, it is true that Sabean once traded away a young Joe Nathan, who became a fabulous pitcher elsewhere. But it is also true that most of the pitchers Sabean has dealt away who were supposedly going to be the team’s salvation — Kurt Ainsworth, Boof Bonser, Jesse Foppert — did not come close to working miracles for their new teams.
In the second place, the Giants are currently selling tickets for the rest of the 2009 season. They are not selling tickets for the 2012 season — which is probably the soonest Alderson would be ready to help them in a significant way.
And in the third place, there are no guarantees that Alderson will pan out as a great pitcher at the MLB level or that in 2012 the Giants will be in position to make a World Series push. Sure, you can speculate that in a few years, Alderson might have teamed up with Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain and other hot prospect Madison Bumgarner to form an amazing rotation of young arms.
However, it is also possible that by 2011, Cain or Lincecum could develop a bum arm or injure himself in a freak Segway scooter accident with the Octomom. The future is never certain. This, we know for sure: Cain and Lincecum are healthy and great this season. They, too, deserve the sweetness of 2009 to continue.
The Giants, even with Sanchez and Garko, probably remain just a 50-50 shot to make the postseason. But the team is unquestionably facing its most interesting August since 2004. Let’s have a show of hands, please. Anyone want to go back to the old Giants’ way of doing business in late summer, with Moises Alou plodding back to home plate after striking out on a meaningless gloomy afternoon?
Didn’t think so. Hail to romance.