Photo Credit: Kevin Cunningham | Giant Futures
It starts with a 1st round two-way player …. and ends with a 1st round two-way player. Symmetry, thy name is “San Jose wrap up!” Of course, Reggie Crawford and Bryce Eldridge only accounted for 87 PA and 11 innings pitched in total, so there’ s a lot of San Jose’s 2023 season that fits in between the two towering prodigies standing astride the open and the close. That’s the way of minor league seasons. The weft and the warp don’t always sync up precisely.
Buster Posey, Madison Bumgarner, and Brandon Crawford were long gone by the time the 2009 San Jose Giants won the Cal League title, but folks still talk about “the great Posey, Bumgarner, and Crawford championship team.” Of course, that team still rolled out a lineup in the playoffs that had nine future big leaguers in it. That’s pretty good, even if most of those careers were of the “now you seen them, now you don’t” variety, a la Thomas Neal, Roger Kieschnick, or Johnny Monell. In the championship clinching game, left-hander Eric Surkamp struck out 12 over eight strong innings, and some Giants’ fans perhaps dreamed of multiple dominant lefties coming off that squad.
There was a long stretch of the 2023 season in which San Jose was the league’s dominant team — even if they got to that dominance in a style that differed from recent San Jose squads. For the third consecutive season, San Jose nabbed a spot in the California League playoffs (though, for the second consecutive one, they had little fortune there). The 2023 version even did something that neither of the previous two (or many others, for that matter) had managed, winning the club’s first division title in a decade.
Our mission today is, first, to remember the journey along the way (because to bear witness is the first imperative), and, second, to see if we can spy out any future Nick Noonans or Darren Fords or, be still my heart, Madison Bumgarners amongst the cast of characters.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to There R Giants to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.