MLB trade deadline deals we’d like to see: Scherzer, Arenado and Ohtani on the move?

  • Sports reporter, Kansas City Star, 2002-09
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  • Member, Professional Basketball Writers Association

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We’re less than a week from the MLB trade deadline and still in search of our first summer blockbuster deal.

While we wait for the trades that will define this deadline to occur, we asked ESPN MLB experts Bradford Doolittle and David Schoenfield to share the deals they most want to see.

Where do Shohei Ohtani, Max Scherzer, Nolan Arenado and other stars land in their proposals? It’s time to find out.

Deals that would rock this deadline

The Los Angeles Angels should trade Shohei Ohtani (DH) and Shohei Ohtani (RHP) to the …

San Francisco Giants

Doolittle: The conceit with this annual bit is very much trades we’d like to see as opposed to trades we’ve heard might happen or trades that might well happen in this version of the multiverse. While I would love to see what this Giants team would do with an infusion of Ohtani-level star power, it just doesn’t seem like the kind of deal Farhan Zaidi would do. Will the Giants pursue Ohtani over the winter? I think so. But I just don’t see Zaidi blasting away the in-season market for a mere two months (plus October) of the game’s biggest star.

Among baseball’s current set of lead execs, Zaidi is the Heraclitus of the bunch — nothing is permanent, change is constant, everything is in motion. To lock down a single roster spot (albeit for a two-way great) for two months in exchange for all kinds of future value and flexibility seems like an impediment to the Giants’ embrace of the incessant flux. Could he swing a deal built around, say Kyle Harrison? Maybe, if that’s what it takes to get the Angels’ attention. That’s also why it probably won’t happen.

Yet I’d love to see it happen. The Giants are in great shape to get into the postseason and let’s not forget that getting in last season is what mattered in a circuit that featured the No. 5 and 6 seeds in its National League Championship Series. But the Giants, as constructed, would be big underdogs in a series against either the Atlanta Braves or Los Angeles Dodgers. And there is little to differentiate them from other NL contenders, like the Milwaukee Brewers, Philadelphia Phillies, Cincinnati Reds and Arizona Diamondbacks.

Ohtani is a differentiator, perhaps the game’s biggest, and landing him would give the Giants a head start on an offseason pursuit. Let’s do this and turn the Bay Area on its head from now until autumn. Having Ohtani in a Giants uniform as a prelude to the winter league would make the Giants’ encounters with the Dodgers that much spicier.

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