If you’re not keeping track of the other 29 teams in baseball, you might not know who Tristan Peters is. The 26-year-old left-handed hitter plays center field for the Chicago White Sox, and he’s been having a very nice rookie season, hitting .286/.347/.439 with strong defense. The silly Tampa Bay Rays just sold him to the White Sox before the season, ha ha. Everyone point and laugh at the Rays.The Rays, of course, first acquired him from the Giants in 200 in exchange for Brett Wisely. However, before you point and laugh at the Giants, consider why Peters was with them at all: They acquired him in a trade-deadline deal from the Milwaukee Brewers for Trevor Rosenthal. If you don’t remember Rosenthal ever throwing a pitch for the Giants (or the Brewers, for that matter), don’t worry. He didn’t pitch an inning for either team. But high-leverage relievers were in such high demand at the deadline, the Brewers were willing to take a chance and trade a prospect for him while he was rehabbing from injury.The point of this anecdote isn’t to make fun of any of these teams for roster decisions from 2022. It’s evidence that when teams look for bullpen help at the trade deadline, they cast a wide net. A wide net. So even though you might think the Giants have the worst bullpen in baseball history, and you have googled “team fans bullpen class action lawsuit” at least more than once, you can be sure that teams are digging deep into the data, batted-ball metrics and biomechanics to see if, buried under all that mess, the Giants have someone who could help.If you don’t care about the trade deadline, let me transform it into something more spiteful for you. A less charitable way to describe a search like this is, “Could any of the Giants’ relievers even crack a contending bullpen?” Then sniff or snort or spit or whatever it is you’re supposed to do when you ask a question, all mad-like.If the answer is yes, they might be more popular than you think. Let’s look at the Giants’ bullpen, with the help of Baseball Savant, FanGraphs and our own Eno Sarris. Here are the currently healthy and active relievers, along with some ranks in key categories.Caleb KilianStatisticPercentileVelocity82Chase56Whiff63Hard-hit %60GB%46BB%17Stuff+102Location+99Pitching +100My dad reminds me occasionally that he doesn’t know any of the danged numbers I use, and he would like me to stop making him feel stupid. Also, I’m committing a grave chart sin by combining metrics on different scales (a 100th-percentile fastball the best in the land, while a 100 Stuff+ pitcher is perfectly average). So here’s a color-coded table. Red is good. Grey is average. Blue is bad. An orange might have snuck in there because my palette was limited.About two weeks ago, the Giants announced that Kilian was their closer. It was a relatively unexpected announcement. It’s not as if Killian had done anything differently than he had earlier in the season, and he hadn’t just come off a string of successful saves. It was more of a “by the way,” which didn’t make sense to me at the time.In retrospect, though, it was a marketing move. You know who gets traded at the deadline? Closers. They can fetch serious prospects. The Giants traded Camilo Doval for a package that might have them fondly remembering the deal in the 2030s. And it’s important to remember that for most of these pitchers, except for Ryan Walker and Erik Miller, they have at least one year before they reach arbitration and several before they’re free agents. (Walker and Miller will enter arbitration for the first time before next season.)Kilian has closer stuff, and the team is giving him a few more weeks to put up closer numbers. It was … going much better before Thursday. But the idea is that those kinds of disasters will be anomalous and calm, clean saves will be the norm. That’s the idea, anyway.