It was about 5:20 in the morning when the West Coast began waking up to learn the natural order of things had been restored.
The Bad Guys won. The Little Guys came up small. The giants had triumphed again, which meant the Giants had failed once more.
Aaron Judge was returning to the Yankees on a nine-year, $360 million pact, the type of contract that only some teams are willing to pay and only some apparently can successfully dish out.
The San Francisco Giants have been here before. In Dec. 2014, they were reportedly the highest bidders on Jon Lester, who chose the Cubs instead. The Giants believed they were on the verge of landing Zack Greinke a year later, when the Diamondbacks added a sixth year to an offer that won the ace. Before the 2018 season, the Giants were a finalist for Shohei Ohtani, who wound up 400 miles south in Anaheim. They tried to pivot to Giancarlo Stanton, but the then-Marlins star used his no-trade clause to block his path to the Bay. An offseason later, it was Bryce Harper ignoring the Giants’ hundreds of millions of dollars and signing with the Phillies instead.
