ACL Giants Team Preview

A refreshingly interesting short-season squad gets ready to go

The Arizona Complex season will begin play this weekend, opening up a new vein of talent for our daily Box Score watching — and pushing us dangerously close to Costco-sized Minor Lines territory! And, since the There R Giants’ Post Office is temporarily closed, today seems like a good day to take a look at the team that will be taking the field for the Giants out in the desert.

It’s been a rough few years for the Giants’ complex level team in Arizona. In the last two seasons, the club has been used primarily as a rehab center, with most of the innings coming from pitchers down from higher levels working themselves back into shape for assignments elsewhere. That trend has gotten so heavy that last season, the opening roster featured more outfielders than pitchers — a true rarity for any minor league staff. The rosters have also been a little light on position player talent recently. It’s true that last year’s squad did have two Top 10 talents in Rayner Arias and Walker Martin — but both missed a significant part of the first half with injury, and neither produced quite as expected once they took the field.

This year, however, though I’m sure we will continue to see plenty of rehabbers taking part in ACL games (the Giants’ current XST roster lists 23 separate players in the Rehab Group currently, and more will be coming in time), the club will also receive one of the biggest and most exciting waves of talent up from the DSL that we’ve seen in years. The Giants fielded the best DSL club in that league last year, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the ACL club is benefitting from having more players — and higher upside players — this year, than we’ve seen since the pandemic. Adding to that, the interest level doesn’t come only on one side of the ball. While the ACL Giants’ offense should be a strength of this club, there are also several real pitching talents making their stateside debut, ranking from potential top prospect arms to intriguing sleeper types.

Put it all together, and this ACL squad could well be the most interesting group in the system this summer.