The first two weeks of the Giants’ season provided a window into how club president Farhan Zaidi will tend the garden of a 25-man roster.
He uprooted two-thirds of the Opening Day outfield. He made a pair of surprising trades. He trusted that the backup catcher he acquired would learn a new set of teammates on the fly. It might have appeared chaotic, but the Giants are undoubtedly a better team with Kevin Pillar and Tyler Austin than they were when the season began.
On Thursday, we might have learned something else about how the Zaidi-era Giants will be run in 2019. Because this was the day the Giants could have transitioned from peak outfield weirdness to peak pitching weirdness.
This was the day when the roster manipulation could have begun, the day when the opener could have been embraced, the day when the conventional approach could have bit the dust.