Photo Credit: Trey Wilson | Richmond Flying Squirrels
This is the fourth in a series of roster previews for 2023. So far, we’ve covered:
It’s been a long time coming, but the worm appears to be turning. For years, when faced with trying to predict a roster for the Triple A Sacramento River Cats, I’ve looked through the ranks of upper minors talent in the system, cast a wayward eye on the outward flow of minor league free agents and released players, and come up with something like this:
Come April, and the start of a new season, Sacramento has predictably been filled up with large quantities of flotsam and jetsam picked up off the waiver wire or grabbed in the minor league free agent market. That’s not to say that the occasional top prospect hasn’t come through — Joey Bart spent most of 2021 in Sacramento and Heliot Ramos all of 2022 — but the overall skew of the Sacramento roster has been “older” and “highly replaceable.” That latter concept was pushed to its logical extreme in 2022, when the team rostered nearly 100 players over the course of the season.
Let me return to something I wrote earlier this year, on the occasion of the River Cats being swept in a trip to Oklahoma City:
It’s probably inevitable that every matchup of Dodgers and Giants affiliates becomes something of a litmus test for the two rival organizations. How does the talent stack up? How close are the Giants to catching up to the division’s bellwether? In the case of these two Triple A squads, it’s hard to avoid the obvious: not very close. While Sacramento has done an admirable job of providing fresh arms and mix and match upgrades at the margins over the past couple of years, the Giants’ highly transactional approach to business naturally fills up their Triple A ranks with a lot waiver wire pickups and older players looking to hang on.
Heliot Ramos and Arquimedes Gamboa were the only players in Sacramento’s lineup this weekend who were younger than 26. Not even counting rehabbing Tommy La Stella (who seems likely to switch places with Evan Longoria in their Injury Ballet), the River Cats had six players in the lineup on Sunday who were 28 or older.
The Oklahoma City roster, on the other hand, is once again chalk full of top prospects. The 2 and 3 hitters in their lineup every game were the Dodgers 3rd and 4th best prospect, Miguel Vargas and Michael Busch — both Top 100 prospects in the game, both expected to stick in the dirt, and both considered near major league-ready hitters. Starting pitcher Ryan Pepiot, who has already made several excellent major league starts, anchors the rotation. He’s the Dodgers’ #5 prospect. In all, six of the top 14 prospects in the Dodgers’ system are on this OKC team and four of them are in the starting lineup daily (that includes OF James Outman, who did not live up to his name on Sunday, falling a single short of a cycle).
This Sacramento roster is nothing like this Oklahoma City roster, and it’s hard to avoid the implications that carries for the future of these two organizations. The Dodgers, sad to say, have more conveyor belt talent coming soon.
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