Stan Szeto-USA TODAY Sports
PHILADELPHIA — The most exciting day of a baseball fan’s season may be the most dreaded of a baseball player’s.
General managers hang over the action, cellphones in hand, fingers on their assets, sizing up what they have and what they need and how they reconcile the two. Fans refresh Twitter awaiting breaking news and announcements that swap prospects and players and stars and that elusive missing piece.
Of course — or perhaps not of course — there are people’s lives involved, too. The pieces breathe and bleed.
“You don’t just trade the player,” Kevin Pillar told KNBR on Tuesday, a day before the trade deadline, before the Giants lost 4-2 to the Phillies. “You trade their family, too. And that is something that a lot of people don’t think about — how difficult that transition is.”
For Pillar, that process began April 2 at about 10 a.m., when he got in an Uber to head somewhere he couldn’t remember.
“I got a call from our GM and I knew it wasn’t, ‘Good morning,’” said Pillar, who was dealt after playing five games with Toronto this season, an organization he had been with since 2011. “So I told my Uber driver to turn around, and [Blue Jays GM Ross Atkins] told me I got traded, where I was going, and he would see me at the field to answer any questions. … I went back up to my apartment in Toronto to tell my wife and kid. And we both kind of broke down a little bit.”
He was traded for baseball reasons; the Blue Jays were set to rebuild, the Giants already had an outfield problem and sought veteran stability. The baseball reasons didn’t much matter to a family that had “just paid first and last months’ rent” in their apartment, that had a 1-year-old with a routine, that were told to live their lives on the far coast of a different country. Farhan Zaidi called and told him the Giants could use him that night — in Los Angeles. He began talking with his agent about the moving process, heard from some players’ wives with advice on Bay Area homes, and got on a plane.
Trades can be as cruel as they are exciting. For Tyler Austin, who had yo-yo’d between the Yankees and their Triple-A affiliate, he thought he got pulled out of a July 31, 2018, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre game because the big-league Yankees “were about to play the Red Sox.” He had high hopes — and already had carved out a legacy in the rivalry — and asked his manager, Bobby Mitchell, what was up.
“I don’t know,” Mitchell responded, according to Austin. “I was just told to take you out.”
After the game, Yankees GM Brian Cashman informed Austin. Pillar had to travel 2,600 miles. Austin had to walk to the opposing clubhouse, as he had been dealt to Minnesota, whose Triple-A team was facing Scranton.
His trades have been easier than most, Austin said. With Minnesota’s Triple-A team in town, he had time to move out of his apartment. After the Twins DFA’d him in early April of this season, he was able to collect his things before the Giants traded for him.
“Figuring out a way to get all your things from one city to another — I think that’s the most difficult thing,” said the 27-year-old Austin. “Figuring out how to get your car to where you’re going. Getting your wife, if you have one, or family to another city.”
That city, by the way? Nearly foreign to Austin.
“When we played Oakland last year, we stayed in the city,” he said. “That’s about as much of San Francisco as I’d seen before I got traded here.”
Austin speaks with a shrug, following his life wherever it takes him rather than the other way around. Pillar carries his past with him.
He did not see the trade coming and still does not sound completely past it. Baseball’s a business, repeats any frustrated player or cold general manager. It’s not a fair one.
“It’s never easy. It’s never easy. lt still…” Pillar paused. “I don’t want to say hurts, or stings — it doesn’t really affect my daily life. But I still think about why it happened. Or why couldn’t I have stayed there. Why didn’t they extend me there? Why don’t they want me there?”
He wrestles internally, reminding himself that being deemed expendable in Toronto meant being deemed needed in San Francisco.
“Until it really happens to you, whether it’s being traded, whether it’s being designated,” Pillar said. “… You never really think about it too often. You see teammates or friends it happens to. You see the logistics that go into it and how difficult it could be.”