San Francisco Giants: What’s the latest regarding Madison Bumgarner?

The San Francisco Giants may not be trading longtime ace Madison Bumgarner after all. Here is the latest regarding the future of their beloved pitcher.

The San Francisco Giants looked well on their way to another lackluster season in which they would sell who they could at the deadline. And with longtime ace Madison Bumgarner in the final year of his contract, the writing seemed to be on the wall.

And that writing hadn’t recently formed, it had been inscribed well before the start of the season.

In an overwhelmingly weak free-agent class of starting pitchers, Bumgarner was expected to be one of the prized jewels of the trade deadline. And for the first three months of the season, nothing changed.

The Giants played as expected and were among the worst teams in not only the National League, but the MLB as a whole.

But then something strange happened. The Giants started winning — and then they kept winning. They kept winning to a point where they had won 16 of 19 games.

Now sitting at the end of July, only one team has a better record in their last 30 contests than the Giants who have won an astonishing 21 of their last 30. That’s a stark contrast to how the team had been playing earlier in the year.

And while the plan basically since the beginning of the year has been to sell, the team’s recent hot streak has seemingly changed the minds of the front office.

Or has it?

Rumors have swirled over the past two weeks or so that the Giants would now opt to hold on to Bumgarner — among others — in the hope that they could make one final run at a championship with Bruce Bochy at the helm.

But on the contrary, there have also been rumors that plenty of teams are still inquiring about Bumgarner’s services. After all, the soon-to-be 30-year-old has a heap of postseason success under his belt and is still pitching at a relatively high level.

Even if the Giants aren’t searching, plenty of teams will still be asking.

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One of those teams is the Houston Astros who are reportedly “engaged” in talks with the Giants to acquire Bumgarner, per Tim Brown of Yahoo Sports. The Astros are in the market to acquire another starter at the deadline and Bumgarner would make a ton of sense.

At the same time, Henry Schulman of the San Francisco Chronicle has reported that the Giants “have not taken any trade proposals to Bumgarner yet.” Considering he will have to approve a deal to the eight teams on his no-trade clause, this is significant if true.

One would think that the Giants would need to approach Bumgarner sometime very soon if they were going to trade him — likely to one of the teams on his no-trade clause.

Other teams that have been tied to Bumgarner include the New York Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies, and even the crosstown Oakland Athletics.

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The Giants still seem likely to hold on to Bumgarner given all of the recent chatter about competing and even buying at the deadline, but they are no doubt fielding offers. And if one offer really blows them away, might they jump at an opportunity they can’t pass up?

Maybe, there’s really no clear answer at this moment.

However, one thing is clear at the time of writing. Nobody really knows what is going on.

The Giants could very well keep Bumgarner and try for one last playoff push or they could ultimately trade him away and do exactly what everyone a month ago thought they would do.

The next 24 hours should very interesting as the trade deadline approaches and the Giants ultimately make their decision.