2025 Depth Charts: Shortstops

Let's start at the top!

Always make sure the pan is hot enough to hear a good sizzle go up when the food first touches it — that’s the advice that a master chef friend of mine once gave me in the kitchen. I’ve decided to apply the same logic to my annual Depth Charts series this year, and come out of the gates with a sizzle! I don’t want to spoil anything, but when we get to the Top 50 in a few weeks, there will be shortstops near the top! That’s shortstopS — Plural!

Yep, this position serves as something of an origin story for an improving Giants’ system — as it really should be in a strong organization. This is where the athletes live, and the talent that typically goes on to propagate a lot of your standard issue big league lineups, even if not everybody goes quite to the Padres’ “All shortstops, all the time” level of lineup construction.

The Giants have good reason to feel excited about this specific depth chart. They have poured their best resources into the shortstop position by almost every possible method of player acquisition. This is an organization that will, in just a few weeks’ time, spend somewhere in the range of $5 million dollars signing the top-ranked shortstop in this year’s international market — the second time in exactly 365 days that they will have paid top dollar for a shortstop who many consider the best player in his class. In between those two signings, they also inked a $5 million dollar deal with their top draft pick, a college shortstop. And, of course, all of that activity was preceded, by just a few weeks, by their agreeing to an all-time franchise high contract deal with, of course, a free agent shortstop. If they had somehow swung a trade for Bobby Witt, Jr. while they were at it, they would truly have covered every conceivable base of acquisition. Around here, we call that a productive year!

Of course, as much fun as it is to watch the money move around, that’s not the most important part of the Giants’ shortstop shop-a-thon! The international scouting and player development groups are on quite a roll these last two years. They’ve gotten truly best-case initial results from the past two years’ top signings, and their upcoming top dude just got named the top 16-year-old baseball prospect in… I don’t know… the world, I guess? Hopes for a threepeat are high and highly legitimate.

It really does seem like everything’s coming up Milhouse around the Giants’ shortstop position lately!

Let’s dive into what really should be — and needs to be — the crux of the rising fortunes of the Giants’ system.