Barber: After a busy spring, Mac Williamson could be Giants' odd man out

SAN FRANCISCO

Welcome to the baseball world of Farhan Zaidi. It’s an intriguing and hopeful place - and frequently an exasperating one.

Tuesday night at Oracle Park was a good example. It was the Giants’ (and the A’s) final tuneup before the Major League Baseball regular season, which begins in earnest Thursday. The team from Oakland more or less had one final item to cross off its list - starting pitcher Aaron Brooks threw a good game and locked up the fifth spot in the rotation. Meanwhile, Zaidi had his roster options assembled before him, moving pieces around like Winston Churchill before a naval battle.

It wasn’t until after the game that we discovered the fate of Alen Hanson and Connor Joe and Michael Reed and Tom Murphy and Trevor Gott and Travis Bergen. Oh, and Pablo Sandoval, the most valuable player of the 2012 World Series, who will indeed begin the 2019 season on the Giants roster. We think. Because you know Zaidi isn’t done dealing yet.

The Giants’ new GM is a ceaseless tinkerer, a man obsessed with incrementally improving the 40th spot on the 40-man roster. His process is fascinating to watch. Why would I call it “exasperating”? Look toward left field, a position that Barry Bonds cursed when he left the team more than a decade ago.

Can you name the last player to start the most games for the Giants in left field for two consecutive years? It was Fred Lewis, who did it immediately after replacing Bonds in 2008 and 2009. The years since have been a decade of transience in the shadow of the giant Coca-Cola bottle. It was Pat Burrell in 2010, Cody Ross in 2011, Melky Cabrera in 2012, Gregor Blanco in 2013, Michael Morse in 2014, Nori Aoki in 2015, Angel Pagan in 2016, Jarrod Parker in 2017 and Hunter Pence last year.

Since the start of 2009, just two players have started 100 games for the Giants in a given season. One of them was Cabrera, who made 101 starts there in ’12 and made the ?National League All-Star team. It looked like the Giants had finally found their left fielder. Then Cabrera failed a steroids test. The Curse of Bonds had claimed another victim.

Some years, left field has been a crazy revolving door in San Francisco. Like last season, when aging Hunter Pence started 37 games there, Gorkys Hernandez 25 and Mac Williamson 25. Or the year before, when Jarrod Parker started 42 games, Hernandez 31 and Austin Slater 29. This isn’t just left field by committee - it’s left field by lottery.

Many fans have been hoping Williamson will end the parade. He got a nice ovation from a somewhat deadened Oracle Park crowd when he made his first plate appearance Tuesday night in the sixth inning.

Williamson is 28 but a bit inexperienced, having spent mostly small portions of the past four seasons in San Francisco. He’s built like an outside linebacker at a solid 6-foot-4, 237 pounds. And for a brief moment in 2018, he was the biggest news in local sports. The Giants brought him up on Apr. 20, and he hit three home runs in his first five games. Crushed a couple of them. He was hitting .316 after those five games.

Then Williamson tripped over one of those anachronistic bullpen mounds at the Giants’ ballpark, hit the wall and suffered a concussion. He was never the same afterward in 2018. He sat out a month, returned to San Francisco and hit .187 in 23 games before the Giants sent him down to Triple-A. The organization wound up shutting him down in August.

The Giants really wanted Williamson to be their regular left fielder in 2019, it seemed. He played the position for 99? innings this spring. It wasn’t just the most innings logged by any SF player in left; it was the most by any Giant at any position. Williamson’s 59 at-bats also led the team.

But the exposure didn’t yield great results. Williamson hit .237 with one home run and just five RBIs in Arizona and during the Bay Bridge Series. He struck out 18 times, walked just twice and had a tepid OPS of .608.

Williamson didn’t play at all in Monday’s game at Oracle. By Tuesday, there was rampant speculation that Zaidi would either trade him or designate him for assignment. Asked that night whether Williamson would be his starter in left field, Bochy said, “I hadn’t had that set - Farhan and myself hadn’t had that set.”

This is the exasperating part. The Giants spent all of March grooming Williamson for a job, and might not give him the job after all. Zaidi isn’t a “stick to the plan” guy, because his plan is to constantly evaluate and churn the roster to make it better. No player is safe here. At least, they shouldn’t feel as though they are. The only constant in Zaidi’s tenure will be change, and it will be exhausting to follow.

As for left field … there may be a third option now for Williamson. In his only at-bat Tuesday, he caught a fastball from Oakland reliever Brian Schlitter on the right hand. Williamson immediately tossed his bat in the air, winced and held the hand flat against his butt to support it.

He stayed in the game, and Bochy said afterward that X-rays were negative. But the Giants could stall a decision by placing Williamson on the injured list.

So attention now falls to a couple of players who weren’t on the team in 2018 - Yangervis Solarte and Connor Joe. Heck, Joe wasn’t on the team a week ago. The Giants acquired him March 21 in a trade with the Reds. Bochy indicated Tuesday that Joe would join Solarte on the opening-day roster.

It’s a triumph for versatility, and for Zaidi’s piecemeal approach to building a team.

Solarte, in his five MLB seasons, has started 368 games at third base, 147 at second base, 31 at shortstop, another 31 at first base and four in left field. This spring he played second, third, left and shortstop for the Giants.

“The organization right now go with the sort of player, they can move him around the field,” Solarte told me Tuesday; his English is a lot better than my Spanish, but it’s limited. “Like, it’s more comfortable. If a manager want to win or something like that, they have some player that can play every position. It’s open mind. It’s different.”

Joe, meanwhile, has never played in the big leagues before. The 26-year-old San Diego-area native was a Pirates first-round draft pick in 2014, and also played in the Dodgers’ farm system. Like Solarte, he’s a man without a true position. During his time in the minors, Joe started 134 games at third base, 86 at first base and 45 in right field. He started in left field for the Giants on Tuesday, then moved to first in the sixth inning.

What a whirlwind it has been for Joe during a week with the Giants.

“I wouldn’t really say a specific time, an incident, an at-bat, a chance in the field helped solidify this,” he said in a mostly empty clubhouse Tuesday night. “My approach to this whole thing is competing for a job. This week has been a lot of moving parts.”

Joe said he was trying to get better as a ballplayer “while all this noise was happening around me.”

I’d bet anything that we haven’t heard the last of the noise - not this week, not this season, not as long as Zaidi is moving those toy ships around.

You can reach columnist Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Skinny_Post.