The Emeralds entered the 2023 season as the dominant force in the High-A Northwest League, having won back-to-back championships in the circuit’s first two years as a full-season league. And with a team that was anchored by two of There R Giants’ Top 5 prospects in the system going into the year, there was plenty of excitement that this might be another year of beating up on the small, six-team league.
But, for the second consecutive season, a trip to Eugene proved to be a challenging assignment, and as the team suffered an almost total wipeout of starting pitchers in the second half, a playoff spot turned into a chimera, constantly retreating into the distance before them.
Competitively, the end result of a middling offense and a depleted pitching staff was a .500 record — a line they rarely strayed from. In the first half, they were two games above that line, and in the second half they were two games below it. Spot-checking randomly through the calendar, the narrative extends: on Thursday, May 25, the team was 22-19. On Saturday, June 18, they were 32-30. On Sunday, July 16, they were 41-43. On Tuesday, August 8, they were 52-51. It feels like the squad, in whatever connotation, was magnetically attached to that .500 mark, never stray much more than three games from it in either direction. They split 14 of 22 six-game series over the course of the season. They were the Little Free Library of baseball teams — take a book, share a book.
From a player development perspective, there were some corollaries to the start/stop nature of the team. Grant McCray and Aeverson Arteaga, the two primary prospects for the team on the position player side, both whiplashed through a series of high- and low-performance months. McCray went from a disastrous .554 OPS in April, to a scorching .910 OPS in May, before falling back to .675 in June. Arteaga’s peaks and valleys weren’t quite so dramatic, but his OPS over the first four months went from .607>.771>.596>.886.
That’s not to say that Eugene didn’t see some clear breakout performances — Wade Meckler hit his way out of the league in the blink of an eye, starting a stunning ascendancy that reached the big leagues before the year was through. Victor Bericoto blossomed into one of the most powerful bats in the system. Guys repeating the level, like Logan Wyatt and Jimmy Glowenke, showed the kind of improvements in their batting lines that the Giants’ hoped to see when they sent them back. And, of course, a couple of shooting stars whom we’ve already covered in the San Jose wrap up, blazed a trail through Eugene for some of the summer before heading onwards and upwards.
It wasn’t everything that was hoped for, but, as is almost often the case, there were treasures to be gathered in the quotidian rhythms of the season.
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