There is, I think, some sense among the Diamond Faithful, that Richmond has just a touch of the Cinderella nature about it. Not the part of Cinderella where the glass shoe is slipped onto her foot and she lives fabulously in a fairy tale castle forever after. No, the beginning of Cinderella, the part where Ella is hanging around in the cinders all day, getting bossed around by her step-sisters and step-mother.
Richmond is the affiliate that’s far away and relatively unvisited by the brass. It’s rarely been seen as the “prospect” hot-spot. It’s the place Buster Posey was skipped over completely. The after-thought.
But in 2023, the long-predicted reckoning finally took place. Maybe we never quite got that moment when the lineup that took the field was a vision of Prospect Avengers: Assembled! The Brown-Matos-Meckler outfield that one might imagine by skimming the team page on Baseball-Reference never actually happened. Still, for one summer, the road to the big leagues went through Richmond. Five of the 12 players who made their major league debuts for the Giants this year did so after having appeared in Richmond — a franchise record. Half of the There R Giants’ Top 10 AND Top 20 put on a Squirrels’ jersey this year. If we never quite got a vision of what all of that talent might do together on the Double-A stage, the season brought us closer and closer to seeing what they might all do on the big league stage together … and that might well be the legacy of the 2023 Richmond Flying Squirrels, a team that pushed a massive amount of talent upwards …. and then seized a playoff spot with the talent that was left over after the stars were gone.
Here’s one way to think about what happened in Richmond this year: back on Media Day, in the first week of April, I asked Patrick Bailey if he had received the physical trophy for his Minor League Gold Glove yet (he hadn’t). On the day I sit down to write this recap, this was announced:
And in between those moments? That was quite an eventful six months!
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