Posted By Jeff Fletcher on September 23, 2009 12:14 pm

It seems whenever things start to go badly for the Giants, someone brings up the idea of trading Matt Cain, and the question was posed by the Chronicle Live Tweeter this morning. I’ve weighed in on this in the past. About a year ago, when the Giants were finishing up a 72-win season, I felt like the Giants should trade him. In May, when I was still skeptical of how good the Giants were,  I still believed that, if the Giants were to trade him, it would be better to trade him for multiple players, not one big one, a la the Dan Haren trade, the Erik Bedard trade, the Cliff Lee trade, etc.

How do I feel about it now? Well, I started to write a post about how the Giants actually have a pretty fair amount of money coming off the books, so they ought to be able to find a bat or two on the free agent market, then I looked at the list of free agents.

Yuck. Is that the worst free-agent class ever? For hitters anyway. It’s Jason Bay, Matt Holliday and, uh, nobody that you’d want to spend a lot of money on. After that you start to get into the Vlad Guerreros, Chone Figgins, Adrian Beltres and Miguel Tejadas of the world.

So, that brings me back to the idea of trading Cain. Can’t say I have a really good answer, but my inclination would be to trade Madison Bumgarner (or even Jonathan Sanchez, who is now arbitration eligible) as part of a package to get a Prince Fielder-type bat before I’d trade Cain.

Essentially, I look at it this way. If your team has won 72 games, you need a lot of help, so you’re better off trading one established player for a lot of young guys. If your team has won 85-87 games, you are closer, so you’re better off trading prospects for an established player. The big one-for-one swap just doesn’t seem to make much sense. It’s a lateral move.