BOSTON -- Billy Beane headed home without Jason Giambi. The Phillies delegation headed home without a new third baseman. The Dodgers and Pirates made notable deals Thursday. But what was just as noteworthy was what they didn't do -- at least not yet.

Those were the highlights of the fourth full day of the winter meetings. Here's a look at all of them:

Phillies don't trade Rolen
They were on. They were off. They were off. They were on. They had a deal. They didn't have a deal.

For three days, the Phillies and Orioles met and met and met some more, trying to figure out some combination of players that could make Scott Rolen an Oriole and keep the Phillies from taking a giant step backward in the NL East.

Thursday morning, the two sides briefly thought they had themselves a deal: The Phillies were to get Sidney Ponson, Jeff Conine, Buddy Groom and two highly regarded young pitchers -- believed to be Sean Douglass and Josh Towers. The Orioles were getting Rolen, a prospect and two players the Phillies were trying to unload -- infielder Kevin Jordan and pitcher Chris Brock.

But the deal apparently was contingent on Orioles owner Peter Angelos approving it. And Angelos reportedly decided his team was giving up too much talent and that it couldn't afford Rolen in the first place.

So after all that talk and all that work for three days, the only deal the teams wound up making was exchanging Brock for John Wasdin in a mutual dump of pariahs.

The big news, though, is that Rolen is still a Phillie. And all indications now are that he will still be a Phillie when spring training opens in two months.

Asked where he thought he was on this front as he paced toward his cab to the airport, Phillies GM Ed Wade replied, tautly: "On the way home."

"At this point," he said, "it's fairly apparent that Scott will be our third baseman, which is not the worst thing that can happen."

He took two more steps toward his taxi, then said over his shoulder: "At the same time, I don't think the teams we talked to threw our telephone number away."

True. But the Orioles could turn around and trade Ponson elsewhere (such as Texas). Seattle appears to be heading in a different direction (Jeff Cirillo). And the Cardinals and Reds had peeled back earlier in the week, anyway.

So unless one of those deals revives, Rolen has to refocus on playing out his free-agent year as a Phillie, after making it clear he didn't want to sign a long-term deal with the Phillies. For the Phillies, that might not be as bad a thing as it seemed Thursday afternoon.

A's move on without Giambi
A few hundred miles away in The Bronx, Jason Giambi was standing at a podium in Yankee Stadium, talking about becoming a Yankee. In the lobby of the Sheraton Boston, Oakland GM Billy Beane was checking out of the winter meetings.

He could throw a credit card down to pay for his incidentals -- but not for his favorite first baseman.

Only loyalty could have kept Giambi in an A's uniform after the club stood on its six-year, $91-million offer from spring training. But Beane knows that 120 million bucks has never lost an arm-wrestling match with loyalty yet.

"He got what -- seven years, $120 million?" Beane ruminated. "I'd say $30 million is a pretty significant gap. Loyalty could have been a factor. But that is almost a difference of my entire payroll."

The $15 million a year the A's offered was approximately 40 percent of the entire Oakland payroll, Beane said. So "if you're wrong with that commitment, your entire franchise is at risk. If you don't sign the player, you can recover."

But can Beane and his franchise recover from the reverberations of losing their MVP, their leader of men and, oh by the way, their best player? They'll try. And with Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito still holding down the top of the rotation, they have a better chance than they'll probably be given credit for.

"This is the first of many talented young players," Beane said. "(Eric) Chavez, (Miguel) Tejada, Hudson, Zito, Mulder. Those guys are not even in the prime of their careers."

But they can't play first base. And they can't replace everything Giambi was, on and off the field. Still, the A's won't disband the franchise. They've explored numerous fascinating names, from Gary Sheffield to Cliff Floyd to Tino Martinez, if he hasn't signed with the Cardinals first.

"There are a lot of options right now for this club," Beane said. "And we're considering them all. One major move might be all we can do. So we have to be calculating."

They didn't get to the playoffs with a payroll under $40 million without being as calculating and creative as any franchise on the planet. But replacing this man will take more calculations than the Federal Reserve Board.

Dodgers trade a starter
Let's see now. The Dodgers have three starting pitchers who are free agents (Chan Ho Park, Terry Adams, James Baldwin). They have three more starting pitchers coming off serious injuries (Kevin Brown, Andy Ashby, Darren Dreifort).

So what did the Dodgers do Thursday? They traded away yet another starting pitcher (Luke Prokopec) -- to the Blue Jays, for All-Star reliever Paul Quantrill and dazzling young shortstop Cesar Izturis.

That might seem risky. But new Dodgers GM Dan Evans is the ultimate man with a plan.

"We're not done yet," Evans said. "We're still exploring a lot of different things. It's still Dec. 13. There's a lot of time to go, and my staff doesn't sleep much. To us, sleep is the enemy."

The Dodgers still have the option of re-signing Park, to whom they offered arbitration. But they have yet to make any effort to negotiate with his agent, Scott Boras. Other than that, they have Eric Gagne, Omar Daal, reasonably encouraging medical reports on Brown and Ashby, an insurance policy in do-anything left-hander Terry Mulholland and a bunch of deals roasting on the fire.

In the meantime, Evans is trying to get this team focused on the big picture after years of patching for short-term runs that went nowhere. And no one around him can possibly forget those big-picture goals -- because they've been reading them in Evans' suite all week.

"I've got an easel in my room with our offseason goals on it," Evans said. "I want it written down because I want to make sure we adhere to our plan all the time. Otherwise, you can get emotional and get excited about making a deal, and you do something that takes you in the wrong direction."

Two of the big items on that plan are: Get better and more athletic up the middle, and assemble the best and deepest bullpen possible to assemble. So Izturis, who was blocked by the more offensively skilled Felipe Lopez in Toronto, arrives with a chance to be the opening-day shortstop. And Quantrill joins Matt Herges as the primary set-up men.

Superscout Don Welke spent August watching a group of young middle infielders the Dodgers thought they could trade for, and he came back with glowing reports on Izturis' hands, athleticism and knack for "making the big play."

And Quantrill, a ground-ball machine who walked 12 hitters all season, is signed for three more years, and was a pitcher "we liked better than all the free agents out there," Evans said.

The next step is to find the closer who can cement that bullpen together. The Dodgers have stayed after Billy Koch and Troy Percival. Evans says they have other options. And, he said, this deal doesn't affect any other trade the Dodgers are working on (i.e., Gary Sheffield for Koch and Jermaine Dye, among other things), even though Prokopec once was a part of those talks.

So Evans' Chavez Ravine reclamation project is far from finished. But at least there's a blueprint now for the project.

Pirates don't trade Giles
The Pirates and White Sox made a trade Thursday -- but not the one many people were expecting.

They'd been talking about a huge swap that would have sent Brian Giles and their opening-day starter, Todd Ritchie, to Chicago. Instead, the Pirates simply dealt Ritchie to the White Sox for pitchers Kip Wells, Sean Lowe and Josh Fogg.

White Sox GM Kenny Williams talked about Ritchie (who rebounded from an 0-8 start to win 11 of his next 17 starts) as a potential 15-game winner. New Pirates GM Dave Littlefield talked about needing to add pitching depth.

But it was the deal they didn't make that hung over this entire transaction. And that was the version that would have included Giles, who is 30 years old and coming off three straight seasons of 35 homers or more.

It's believed the clubs talked about a trade similar in structure to the one the White Sox had agreed to Wednesday with the Angels on Darin Erstad (for a number of high-profile young players), only to have the Angels back out. But Littlefield made clear that to trade Giles, he'd almost need an offer he can't refuse.

"I'm not looking to trade Brian Giles," he said. "I've got people who have shown interest in him, but I'm in no rush to trade him. If you look at his numbers, it's hard to see the gaps in his game. He's a good defender. He's a gamer. He's aggressive on the bases. Offensively, he does a lot. He hits home runs. He gives you slugging percentage, doubles, on-base percentage, RBI. And his numbers would even be better if we had a club that scored more runs.

"So teams have shown interest in him for all the right reasons. But I'm not looking to trade a guy like that. When you've got these kinds of guys, you want to keep them. I'm looking for more of them."

But does that mean Giles isn't going anywhere ever? Uh, that's not quite what his GM said.

"Similar to the Ritchie situation, I have an open mind," Littlefield said. "I can't just say 'no' and walk away. So I have talked to people and I'm interested in listening. But what would you need to get back in return for a guy like Brian Giles? If you keep him, you know you'll get exactly the kind of numbers out of him that you've gotten the last couple of years. And there are not a lot of guys like that out there."

So if the White Sox, A's, Mets or Mariners want to call, Littlefield will answer the phone. But the moral of this story seemed to be that, for now at least, Brian Giles is just what he was a week ago -- the Pirates' best player.

Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com.