Photo Credit: Kim C | @CU_As
We’re now less than a week away from the looooooong anticipated scheduled beginning of the 2021 minor league season. And though there continues to be a low hum of rumors that another delay could happen at the last second, let’s just put the thought of that particular dagger blow out of our minds and start focussing on the season to come. We’ve spent the last three weeks at a granular level, going through the Giants’ system at an almost player by player pace, trying to piece together the organizational puzzle.
But now let’s leave the minutiae behind and take in the system from the eye of an eagle, floating majestically high above the fray and looking for grand, overarching themes. Today and Friday I’ll present the five questions I’m most interested in following as the 2021 season develops: first for the pitchers and then for the hitters. These are the storylines I’ll be tracking over the next 5-6 months.
1. How Will Workloads Be Handled?
“Pitching Experimentation, meet Unprecedented Times. Unprecedented Times, may I introduce you to Pitching Experimentation. I’m sure the two of you have much to discuss.”
Teams have been playing around with piggy-back starters, expanded rotations, openers, and all manner of different formats for developing minor league pitchers for several years now. Some of those franchises are considered cutting edge (e.g., Houston) and some….well, whatever it is that the Rockies are. Even the Giants have dipped their toe into the piggy-back starter waters before under certain circumstances. When Logan Webb and Mac Marshall were both rehabbing from elbow surgery, they formed a tandem starter team for San Jose, with Webb taking the first three innings of the game and Marshall the next three.
But, as with most things following the wreckage of 2020, there’s a huge unknown hanging over this year regarding pitcher workloads. We know that the Giants had pitchers keep a count of the “innings” they recorded during their live BP or simulated sessions from last summer. Some of them got up to the 120+ innings range. But what neither we nor the Giants know is what those innings totals — free of the stress and pulse of real game situations, shorn of crowds hollering, at bats tensing, and adrenaline pulsing — will really mean to arms climbing the hill of battle once again after a year away. Do “innings” thrown in a simulated environment really carry the same weight as innings that are hung on a scoreboard? That’s the big matzo ball hanging out there for 2021 (and yes, I know Seinfeld references aren’t exactly au courant; what can I say, my fingers type what they type — I’m just here to check the spelling).
Given the many potentially available starter arms on hand, I’d expect to see tandem starts at the least, as well as a good amount of other forms of “load management.” Will any pitcher see 100 innings this year? Should they?
2. Who Will Show Up With Huge Velocity Gains?
Sam Long is just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve been seeing it all over baseball for several years now — pitchers retire meekly for the winter and return looking like a Flag Smasher hopped up on Super Soldier serum. “Who’s throwing 100 now?” is the question du jour for the modern fan. Oh cool, Kirk Rueter’s blasting a 99 mph two-seamer with boring action? When did that happen?
There are pitchers we haven’t seen on a field in 18 months and I’d imagine all of them spent a bulk of that time working on their bodies. Kyle Harrison, according to Kyle Haines, put on 10-15 lbs of muscle this summer and showed up at Instrux suddenly humping 97-98. And I think we’re all on board having this new, wonderful über-Kyle! Matt Frisbee built his own weight studio last summer and likewise added a new layer of lean tissue. The newfound hop on his fastball was pronounced enough to gain him a major league invite — and this is a guy who already led San Jose in strikeouts in 2019 without a new, improved heater.
We know Joey Marciano has found a bionic arm. But who else? Aaron Phillips has long been an intriguing arm with a gorgeous curve and a fastball that was a little short. What if that fastball suddenly went long? That’s a different guy. Kai-Wei Teng’s plus feel for pitching becomes a different beast when the pitching he’s feeling includes a mid-90s fastball.
I don’t know who it’s going to be, you don’t know who it’s going to be. The point is — there will be dudes throwing hard this summer, harder than we’ve ever seen them chuck it before. Who those guys will be is the question. And question 2A follows it like a shadow — what difference will the new stuff make?
3. Will We Start Seeing Major Pitch-Use Changes?
One of the stories of the offseason involved the Giants free agent pitcher signings — Matt Wisler threw nothing but sliders, Jake McGee nothing but fastballs. It was modern pitching as performed by Jack Sprat and Wife. Behind the signings were insights into the advantages of pitch usage that we’ve seen play out in many other ways in the organization — they wanted Logan Webb to throw more changeups, they suggested Caleb Baragar hone his repertoire down nearly to a single pitch thrown to a single location. From the top down, the Giants have been putting the “specialty” back into “Specialty Pitches.”
And it seems likely that we’ll see the fruits of some of this at the minor league level this year as well. Will we see relievers in the system start to go exclusively with sliders or changeups? Will pitchers ditch ineffective breaking balls and just pour fastballs at hitters (with the proper pitch characteristics, of course)? We know about the Giants “pitch design” efforts to find the perfect grip/motion/finger pressure/whatever for each individual pitcher to allow them to throw the most effective offerings. But how will the Giants instill pitch mix into their wizard’s potion of development? Will Seth Corry’s changeup suddenly become his #1 pitch? Will Nick Swiney’s fastball be jettisoned to focus on his more effective secondaries (which would then become “primaries” I guess). Who will be the guy whose adjusting pitch mix causes him to metamorph from “Caleb Baragar: That Minor Leaguer We Don’t Think About Much” to “Caleb Baragar: Guy I Trust Most to Get the Giants Out of This Awful Predicament!”
4. Will the Giants Strike Gold Again with Minor League Transactions?
I almost titled this section “Is Sam Long a Stealth Top 50 prospect?” and I’m just receiving a note from my editor that, indeed, that would have been a much catchier title. I already dealt with this question of Long becoming the pitching version of Mike Yastrzemski earlier in the spring. But while I’m definitely over-infatuated with the twice-dumped Sacramento native suddenly turned major league camp phenom, the fact is that while we’re all staring at Sam, the breakout minor league FA could be lightning-armed Yunior (pronounce it “Junior”) Marte instead. Or one-time Top 100 prospect Anthony Banda. Or someone we haven’t even met yet — a couple of weeks ago “Waiting for” Ashton Goudeau could have been included here, but he’s worked his way through half of the rest of the division since then.
The point is …
…yes that’s right! The point is I CAN make even more outdated cultural references than Seinfeld!
NO ONE EXPECTS THE MIKE YASTRZEMSKI BREAKOUT! And, consequently, we never know where it might be coming from. But we are learning to be on high alert in anticipation of such “found gold” whenever Farhan trolls the waiver wire. Sam Long is being prepared for a rotation role. Sam Long throws in the mid-to-upper 90s with a hammer breaking ball and a solid changeup. Sam Long is left-handed. If you did a blind taste test with those three elements blended together it would sure taste like a top prospect to me! We still have to see him in game action and repeatedly over the course of a full season, but my official Sam Long status is set to “All Aflutter.”
The larger point, of course, is that if the Giants front office can find young, high impact pitchers at the local recycling factory the way they’ve shown they can for hitters, the path to a truly relevant contender is much easier to envision. Sam….Yunior…Unknown Dude we haven’t met yet….the floor is yours! Do with it what you will.
That’ll work!
5. Will We See Any Breakout Performances?
Return with me to those heady days of yesteryear, when we thought we had everything figured out: Memorial Day weekend of 2019. Seth Corry takes the mound against the Greenville Drive and takes a 4-1 loss, allowing 3 runs on 3 hits and 5 walks in just 3.1 IP. At that point, he’d walked 30 batters in 39 innings. “Ayup!” you might have nodded and said, “That’s our Seth!” After all, the kid had come into the season toting a career 4.17 ERA and having walked 6 batters for every 9 innings pitched. “Just who he is!” you (or I, for that matter) might have shrugged, comfy in your/my sense of certitude.
Oh, what a difference three months can make! Turn your head to pay attention to someone else for a moment and when you look back, there’s a whole new guy there! Suddenly that’s not at all who Seth Corry is — now he’s this monster!
Maybe — probably — hopefully, someone does that particular magic trick again this season. Maybe it’ll be someone who’s been around for years whose name we’ve skimmed over in a box score — Jasier Herrera, say, or Trent Toplikar. Someone who, as we noted back in question #2, is suddenly throwing harder or perhaps mixing up their pitches more effectively as in question #3. Someone whose body has matured. Someone who hit Driveline during the interregnum. Someone who played around with a new grip and was suddenly throwing the ball like Henry Rowengartner.
And then there are the kids we’ve hardly seen before! The Giants signed Esmerlin Vinicio to a million dollar deal two years ago. He’s mostly focused on nutrition, strength, and fitness since. Is this summer the unveiling of a fascinating amalgamation of his quick arm and modern training resources? What about his less-heralded J2 classmate Manuel Mercedes, who Ben Badler suggested could be a triple digit fastball dude when he’s grown up a bit?
If we’re very very lucky and very very good, it’ll be … somebody anyway. Somebody we’re overlooking today will be setting our imaginations on fire come August. Who will that somebody be? It’s spring and Opening Day is in the offing. Hope springs…