@redsoxstats on twitter, our own SoxScout, posted a
list of recent midseason reliever trades to help gauge the market. With a few exceptions (Francisco Mejia for Brand Hand and Adam Cimber), the prices are not exorbitant. It feels like Ockimey could probably be the centerpiece of such a deal, or one of the lesser of our portfolio of power hitting A ball third basemen. So the Giants match up well with us, mostly because they should be interested in high-ceiling prospects who are two or three years out, and that's the strength of our system.
(SF isn't going to manage a quick retool. They have some bad contracts to work through: They have ~$120m committed
in 2020 to Posey, Cueto, Samardzija, Belt, Crawford, Longoria, and Melancon, who have collectively been worth 2.3 WAR so far this season. Some of those guys start to leave their books in 2021, and most are off by 2022.)
The other possibility in a deal with SF, because they have a deep bullpen on a team otherwise led by Pablo Sandoval in WAR, is giving them a better prospect for *two* good relievers: e.g. two from among the group of Will Smith ($4.23m AAV, FA), Tony Watson ($3.5m AAV
I think — it's a complicated deal with incentives — including a player option for 2020), or Sam Dyson ($5m AAV, Arb3 in 2020). Those salaries would be prorated, so we're getting to the point in the season where somebody like Smith fits into our tiny amount of room before the highest CBT threshold even before shedding any money. (You could also imagine SF taking Núñez back to help balance the money and get a better prospect.)
They also have interesting younger relievers with lower salaries and more control left in Reyes Moronta and Trevor Gott, but those players will presumably have more value to them.
(I checked, and Evan Longoria has now passed Sandoval in 2019 bWAR.)