The Giants are open to offers for their three highest-paid position players — Rafael Devers, Willy Adames, Matt Chapman — among other obvious trade candidates, like Luis Arraez and Robbie Ray.

I demand you play Alika over McNeil. There’s still time to change the lineup at Mark Kotsay.

Boarding back to front feels efficient and it's the reason you're still standing on the jet bridge. It loads an A320 in 31 minutes. The fastest known method does it in 11. Boarding speed is a luggage problem. A plane fills only as fast as people can lift bags into bins, and just a few can do that at once without standing in each other's swing space. Walking to your seat is a rounding error. Load the last rows first and twenty people pack into the back of the cabin reaching for the same bins, each one blocking the person behind, while the front half sits empty. Back to front nails the variable that barely matters and wrecks the one that decides everything. That's how the tidiest looking method becomes the slowest. The fix came from Jason Steffen, an astrophysicist who measures planets orbiting other stars. He got stuck in a jet bridge in Seattle in 2005, went home annoyed, and pointed his exoplanet optimizer at the problem. The answer: seat everyone in line exactly two rows apart. 12A, 10A, 8A, 6A. Now nobody is ever stowing a bag in front of the next person, so the maximum number of bags go up at once and the aisle never clogs. A 2011 test with real volunteers and real carry-ons confirmed it. Even random boarding (17:59) beats back to front, by pure accident. Scatter people and they spread out, so more bags go up at once. No airline runs Steffen for the same reason it works. It means splitting up families and boarding strangers one at a time in a fixed order, and a gate full of people won't comply. So the math sits on a shelf and we keep boarding the slowest way because it looks the most organized.