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Giants try to continue building roster during stay-at-home winter meetings - San Francisco Chronicle

Long ago, the beauty and romance for a reporter covering baseball’s winter meetings involved sneaking behind a potted palm in the hotel lobby and overhearing a couple of general managers exchange names for an upcoming trade.

Those days went away when teams realized they simply could text each other from their hotel suites, but lobbies remained lively nonetheless with folks throughout the baseball industry — executives, scouts, agents, managers, reporters, job seekers — engaging in conversation deep into the night.

Now?

Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi will be home. Same with general manager Scott Harris. And their peers on other teams. The Giants will build their roster for 2021 but not while communicating face-to-face with agents or executives, because of the coronavirus pandemic.

This week’s winter meetings won’t be in Dallas, where they had been scheduled. They’ll be held virtually for anyone interested via texting and Zoom calls, maybe even an old-fashioned phone call or two. But no hotel. No lobby. No potted palm.

Unless Zaidi has one providing shade in his home office.

“We’re not going to get the reports from the lobby that fill up a lot of airtime and get people excited and talking,” Zaidi said on Zoom, naturally, in a Thursday conversation with Giants broadcasters, a “Chalk Talk” for season-ticket holders.

“We’ll miss the chance to see our friends and colleagues with other teams in person, to be able to spend time with the great people we have in our minor-league affiliates.”

To be clear, conversations don’t need to intensify this week. The entire offseason is a virtual experience, so there’s no traditional buildup to the winter meetings. Last month’s GM meetings were canceled, and teams have conducted business at their pace nonetheless. They can negotiate for players next week just as easily as this week.

The Giants’ wish list is set. A couple of starting pitchers. A couple of experienced relievers. A veteran catcher to complement Buster Posey as Joey Bart is further groomed in the minors. And a left-handed hitter to play multiple infield positions.

Pitcher Trevor Bauer, center fielder George Springer and catcher J.T. Realmuto are among the big free-agent prizes, but the Giants are expected to focus on lesser-priced players, including those looking for bounce-back seasons following a down year or an injury.

Starter Kevin Gausman was that type of player last winter and pitched well enough to receive an $18.9 million qualifying offer, which he accepted. Nearly five dozen players who were non-tendered Wednesday became free agents, flooding the market and giving the Giants more options.

When the Giants sign or trade for players, they won’t fly to San Francisco for introductory news conferences at Oracle Park. They’ll stay home and await word on reporting dates for spring training, which could come far later than the normal time frame of mid-February.

Major League Baseball experimented with a 60-game pandemic season and is further experimenting in the hot-stove season while trying to run the industry as normally as possible.

Last week was the non-tender deadline with teams deciding to tender or non-tender their arbitration-eligible players — the Giants let go of Tyler Anderson and Daniel Robertson — and this week is the Rule 5 draft, which could be a doozy as far as Rule 5 drafts go.

That’s because scouts finally got to see other teams’ young players in the recently completed instructional league in Arizona. Previously, scouts hadn’t been allowed into ballparks, but the information they accumulated during instructional league was given to their teams, which now can swipe other teams’ players.

“I think it’s going to be a pretty active Rule 5 draft because the looks that scouts got of these guys in instructional league are going to be fresh in everybody’s minds,” Zaidi said.

That’s a reason Zaidi placed three hard-throwing relievers on his 40-man roster, to protect them from the Rule 5 draft: Camilo Doval, Gregory Santos and Kervin Castro, along with outfielder Alexander Canario.

Minor-leaguers with a certain amount of experience who are left off 40-man rosters are exposed to the draft, and any draftee must stay on his new team’s big-league roster all season or be offered back to his original team.

“I guess in some sense, it was to our detriment that we had all these guys lighting up the radar guns in front of these scouts,” Zaidi said. “Guys who hadn’t pitched above A-ball suddenly were getting these scouts pretty excited, and we wound up having to add them to our roster, three guys that were touching 100 (mph) with good secondary stuff.

“Relievers can move really quickly, and that’s obviously a need of ours. So we’ll see if those guys can make an impact for us next year or the year after, but we’re really excited about some of those young arms that are going to fill out our bullpen.”

On Monday, MLB will announce the winner of the Roberto Clemente Award, which goes annually to a player for his philanthropy, community involvement and character. On Tuesday, the Hank Aaron awards, given to the best hitter in each league, will be announced. On Wednesday, the All-MLB teams will be announced, a first and second team.

John Shea covers the Giants for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: jshea@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnSheaHey

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Giants try to continue building roster during stay-at-home winter meetings - San Francisco Chronicle
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