It’s a lot like politics – the media always wants a horse race, so they push the story that is most beneficial to creating a horse race. The reason is to get the attention of the low-information person, and get them to pay attention to the network, newspaper, magazine, etc. The more eyeballs looking, the higher the ad rate.

Woah, they still haven’t paid him?!?!?

There’s NO way the Giants would trade him to the Dodgers unless they’re sure that he’s broken and will never get it back.

Brian Sabean isn’t really stupid enough to trade Timmy when his trade value is down, right? I mean, obviously trades happen when guys’ value is down all the time — Heath Bell just got traded yesterday. To cite another example, consider that the Yankees traded AJ Burnett to the Pirates for a proverbial bag of peanuts (my apologies to those two prospects whose names I don’t remember but yeah) and ate millions of dollars just because they don’t want to look at his damn face anymore and watch him dig his team into a hole most every time he pitches. In that case, the Pirates lucked out because Burnett had a much better year than anyone could have anticipated; meanwhile, the prospects the Yankees got will probably never amount to anything, but I really didn’t want to look at AJ’s damn face anymore either. He became so frustrating that it was probably worth eating millions of dollars just to make him go away.

But I just don’t see Lincecum as being that kind of case. It would be stupid to potentially pay him millions of dollars to pitch for someone else and not even care that whatever the Giants get in return won’t be worth half of what Timmy’s value after a good year would be. I knew as soon as Bumgarner and Cain got big extensions that they probably couldn’t keep everyone long-term and that I would have to make peace with that at some point. But I sure hope Sabean doesn’t do anything impulsive when his team really doesn’t have enough starting pitching depth to make this work.