"Ch-Ch-Changes Have Come" Edition of the Free For All Mailbag

Photo Credit: Richmond Flying Squirrels

After weeks and weeks of fielding questions regarding potential promotions and shakeups, we got both this week, in a flurry of “It’s Go Time!” activity.

Which means that this week’s bag is focused primarily on how long it might take Bryce Eldridge’s XX-sized frame to tip over the next domino. Get ready for a whole lotta Bryce, and a little of other things as well. The mailbag is officially open, so let’s dig around inside it awhile and see what’s on your minds….as if we don’t all already know!

Henrique Goncalves

Thanks for answering my Marco Luciano question last week. Makes sense that, in the end of the day, he wasn’t becoming a gold glove LF anyway and he mostly needs to hit really well. Now my follow up is: with Luis Matos, Wade Meckler and Eldridge now in Sacramento, and this being his last option year, could a sad end of the road be nearing for Luci? Is it even nearer for Hunter Bishop?

It will hurt really bad if this is how both careers as Giants end…

The game is about failure management, and the end is rarely anything other than sad — ask LaMonte Wade, Jr., Travish Ishikawa, or Brian Johnson. For that matter, ask Willie Mays, or Mickey Mantle, or Juan Marichal. All ends hurt in their own way, and grief comes to us all.

I don’t know if Luci or Bish will ever provide the Giants with value. But, I have two bits of consolation for you, Henrique. One, as I wrote in last week’s mailbag, I think that there’s going to be enough reps to go around, even with a somewhat crowded roster. A look at the way San Jose has managed an even bigger crunch could be illustrative — rest days, and rotations through the DH can get most everyone into five games a week. I do think that Bishop is the one who stands to lose the most playing time in the current situation, but he can change that equation with a little more success.

As the stories of Daniel Johnson, Jerar Encarnacion, Mike Yastrzemski and so many others on every other MLB team tell us…if guys at the upper levels can find a way to produce, opportunities will come to them. Those opportunities may not ultimately be with the Giants for some of these guys we’re talking about — and yes, that does hurt in some very real ways for this org — but the way it is today isn’t always the way it’s going to be. Or, as the country saying would have it: the sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass every day. Hopefully, that perfect day in the sun is coming for all of these guys.

Which brings me to the other bit of consolation I have to offer: none of us can predict the future. Development takes players down strange paths. All we can do from our perspective is watch it play out.

Henrique Goncalves

A second question, in case no one else asks it: you have a crystal ball in front of you, when is Eldridge getting to SF?

July 25.

And, if I were you, I would absolutely put money on that scientifically derived and clearly accurate prediction.

David Jaulus

I was going to ask about Eldridge but I see that that question has already been covered. So, I will switch it up. What does he need to show in the minor leagues and AAA, specifically defensively, to demonstrate to the front office that he's ready for the call to the big leagues? This is coming from someone who would like to see Eldridge as the Giants every day DH right now. I think he could bring that much value to the lineup even at his young age, as the Giants continue to be in the deep-freeze offensively.

Also, do you think Carson Whisenhunt debuts for the Giants this year?

On Whisenhunt: Giants have used seven starters so far this year. There are four months left. Odds are pretty good!

As for Eldridge, I’m sure that guys like Ron Wotus and Will Clark have very specific lists of things they wants to see in terms of footwork, being in the right position for cut offs, and all the “inside game” details of playing the position. I know that coaches have been working with him on things like knowing how far to his right to go for a ground ball and when to turn back to 1b and leave it to the 2b. They’ve been working on his footwork, and on getting down into his legs and playing low to the ground, on getting his glove in the right position for throws, on attacking balls and cutting down the angle rather than playing balls like a basketball defender and trying to reach for balls laterally. There are a lot of little things that go into this process.

But, to make this simple, I’ll bottom line it: they want to see him keep up with the speed of the game — which increases significantly at every level. Eldridge definitely made progress on his scoops at 1b this year in Richmond — and that’s really important. But at every level you see guys with bigger arms trying to beat out faster runners. The ability of major league 1b to scoop up everything thrown their way is really remarkable — and they do it so consistently that when a scoop isn’t made, you notice it!

The same thing is true of picking grounders. While it was frustrating to watch Jose Iglesias keep picking off 110-mph grounders off Matt Chapman’s bat the other night, as Duane Kuiper would say, that’s the big leagues. Guys at that level glove balls hit at ridiculously hard Exit Velocities.

Without trying to get needlessly nitty gritty about things, that’s how I’d sum up what they’re looking for and at: they want to see him comfortable with the speed and power of play in Triple-A, and able to let his real athleticism flourish.

You can listen to Bryce discuss his defensive work himself in this interview I did with him before he left Richmond.

Jodi

In light of the excitement around Eldridge, what is it that separates him from other former top prospects that the Giants had high hopes for? I’m thinking of Chris Shaw and Mac Williamson in particular, both of whom had big power and were call ups to the big league team who for different reasons struggled at the major league level (albeit Mac’s concussion didn’t help matters). Eldridge seems different than those former prospects. I’d love to hear your take on those differences. Thank you!

I’d certainly agree with you that he’s different, and we have a lot of different markers of that difference — his outstanding international work with Team USA as a teenager, his draft position status (Eldridge was the 15th pick in the draft, Shaw was 31st in his year, and Williamson was a 3rd round pick), or prospect status (Eldridge is currently the 20th best prospect in baseball according to Baseball America, while neither Shaw nor Williamson was ever a Top 100 guy). All of these sort of industry markers are suggestive of the different ways that scouts see these guys.

You’re quite right that Shaw and Williamson both had tremendous power, but they also did both have fairly long swings, and Shaw’s power, in particular, was generated by a slower, longer swing that was somewhat exposed against better stuff. Williamson had a faster bat, but scouts were never too keen on his basic hit tool.

That’s not been true of Eldridge. Though his extreme height gives him a lot of strike zone to cover, which will almost certainly mean strikeouts, his feel for hitting has proven to be prodigious for his age. Despite very long levers, his swing is short and he gets the knob of the bat into the strike zone quickly and efficiently.

And, the proof is in what he’s achieved so far. As a high school draftee, Eldridge has been facing much older pitchers every step of the way and succeeding brilliantly against them. He was the only 20-year-old in the Eastern League when he was activated this year, and he’s one of just three 20-year-olds in Triple-A now. At the same age, Williamson was just starting his sophomore season at Wake Forest — where he had a lower OPS than Eldridge just put up in Double-A. Same with Shaw, who was coming off a freshman season at Boston College, where he hit just .165.

Eldridge’s ability to move this quickly while constantly facing off against older and more experienced players is the best indication that he’s going to succeed at that all-important — and incredibly difficult — level, where a lot of promising players do, indeed, fail to flourish and grow. That’s not a guarantee! But I think there’s plenty of reason to believe that this is a different kind of prospect.

PJ

I would like your take on this if you have insight into it, but it may be a better topic for when you get Michael Holmes or someone similar back on the podcast.

With the MLB draft coming up, I would love to hear how the Giants manage the draft process to balance the finances and picking the best player available. For example, in the NBA/NFL drafts it is generally just take the best player available. However, in the MLB draft contract demands often play heavily into the process. Say someone like Seth Hernandez falls to the Giants, but he is demanding top 5 money. How does this change the rest of the draft for the Giants? Do they have a list of guys who they think will sign below slot? Do they ask for signing demands as part of the evaluation process? We saw some of this with Dakota Jordan last year and it got me thinking about how they actually manage the process to maximize talent and make sure everybody actually signs.

Getting Michael Holmes on the podcast is a great idea, Kent. I’ll have to ask him about it the next time I see him — though my guess is he’d shy away from that. I will say that, each year, when Holmes has his post-draft media availability, this question does come up in various sorts of ways — usually multiple times. Holmes’ basic take on it — as you’d expect — is that the team always focuses on the talent they like best on the board, while looking for opportunities to get creative with the money.

Now look: this isn’t a question that is easy for Scouting Directors to answer plainly and honestly. There is no imaginable world in which the Astros would have said publicly back in 2012 that they sent out bonus inquiries to a group of about five players and selected the guy who returned the smallest number. They said that Carlos Correa was the best talent in the draft, of course. But there’s been pretty good reporting by highly respected baseball journalists in the years since then to believe that that is what happened (and that Mark Appel’s number was only higher by a pittance, and history could easily have been very different). As in most industries, there are many areas of transactions where full transparency is just never a possibility, and that surely goes here. Once a team has made a selection, they are in no position to suggest that their decision was motivated by anything other than a total commitment to that player. As I have often done in the past, I would recommend you read Kiley McDaniel and Eric Longenhagen’s excellent book, Future Value, for more insight into real-world draft stories.

I think one thing I will say is that not every situation is handled exactly the same. There are some situations that play out according to plan, and others where things get a little squirrelly on draft day (or even after). For instance, when the Giants were on the clock in the 1st round of 2021, I was told by someone in a very good position to know that the Giants were on the phone simultaneously with both Will Bednar and another player, trying to come to a general agreement on a mutually acceptable bonus figure. In the end, they felt better about their conversation with Bednar, obviously, and, instead of going overslot for a different player at the top, they ended up playing that draft pretty “straight” from a bonus perspective. (This isn’t a sliding doors scenario, the other player’s career hasn’t exactly gone smoothly since then.) In the 2023 draft, on the other hand, Keith Law reported that the team had a deal with Walker Martin for 1st round money a couple of days prior to the draft. Given the way events turned out, it seems likely that Law’s reporting was accurate, which means they went into that 1st round pick with a pretty good knowledge of where that top deal had to end up, in order to fit both players into their pool allotment (whether the same sort of pre-draft deal was true last year with Jordan, I don’t know).

Here’s a different situation: based on conversations I’ve had over the years, my impression is the Giants felt like they had a number they could meet to get Kyle Harrison signed, and they based some of their picks prior to him around the idea that they needed to claw back a certain amount of unused slot money. The very next year, they ended up signing high schooler Eric Silva to another fairly significant overslot deal, but I was told at the time that that negotiation went through some post-draft evolution, in part because Silva’s advisor could see there would be some unspent pool money (partly as a result of the conversations mentioned above) and pushed for it.

Another element of the process is something that you have hit on here. Every year there are players who sign for tiny, tiny amounts somewhere in the 6th to 10th round areas. Think Vaun Brown signing for $7,500 in the 10th round, Ryan Murphy for $22,000 in the final round of the 2020 draft, or Zane Zielinski and Cade Vernon taking $17,500 in the 9th and 10th rounds of 2024. And, yes, I think these all come from area scout reports of guys who might be willing to sign at lower dollar amounts. During the draft, the teams will call advisors and ask if their players would be willing to sign for X amount, based on how some of the higher negotiations have been going and how much money the team thinks it might need to claw back from other slots.

This is one of the places where area scouts really get a chance to shine in the War Room, and they all celebrate when one of their guys gets selected. Usually, these players are senior signs or somewhat older for whatever reason, come from small schools, and have other mitigating circumstances that put them on the fringes of draftability, and they just want a chance to get their foot in the door. But they all have something that intrigues the area scout, and their willingness to take bottom dollar helps the team make deals elsewhere — which is why you’ll sometimes see much smaller signings in that 6th-10th round area than either before or after it (up to the 10th round pick, any player that is unsigned costs the team that pick’s slot value from their pool; from the 11th round on, that isn’t true, however, any bonus above the standard $150,000 slot value for those picks costs against the bonus pool).

Andy

Quietly lost in the transaction shuffle was Brett Auerbach being released from Sacramento. Any thoughts on this? Good OPS, great positional versatility (the first four video defensive highlights on his MiLB page are from four different positions), great energy-- seems like he could have been a fan favorite. What do you think is in his baseball future?

Auerbach is definitely a fan favorite type. A grinder with a huge motor — I’ve literally seen him throw himself into walls and nets with abandon over the years — and a big smile, fans have always responded to his style of play with enthusiasm. But I think you could see the writing on the wall the last few weeks, as his playing time began to diminish — he played in just two games of each of his last two series with Sacramento.

Actually, the writing was probably on the wall last year when the Giants began to move away from him as a catcher. Auerbach was very much a Farhan Zaidi type of player — someone who could do a little catching while also filling in around the diamond. But Auerbach caught just four times last year after moving up to Sacramento, and was in the squat just twice this year. He also hadn’t seen much time this year at 2b — probably in deference to Osleivis Basabe and Brett Wisely being on the club. But I think you can see the issue here — Auerbach brought versatility, but wasn’t particularly plus at any of the positions he played. As organizational priorities shifted, his skillset probably lost a little luster in the eyes of the front office.

Beyond that, the power that Auerbach showed briefly in his first season with San Jose and Eugene never really reared its head at higher levels. Auerbach is a small guy, and I think the strength and power of today’s game was a little hard for him to match up to. As one pertinent indication of that, Auerbach didn’t have a hit all year this year on fastballs at 94 mph or more (the essential Baseball Savant minor league search page allows you look for this kind of detail at the Triple-A level). Last year, he did a bit better, but still only slugged .300 against such pitches. After getting off to a good start (he hit two home runs in the opening weekend), Auerbach had hit just .200 with a .282 SLG since April 1 this year.

What does his baseball future hold? He’ll try to hook on with another organization that has an opening on one of their upper-level teams, and if that doesn’t work, perhaps he’ll look towards Indy ball, as many of his old Richmond teammates have done before him. I’m sure he’ll keep chasing the dream as long as he can, trying to capture that same magic that we’ve seen Johnson latch onto this season, and get a magic run somewhere.

Kent Iverson

Hi Roger. Thank you for all the great coverage and interviews. It is great to see Landen Roupp, Hayden Birdsong, and Kyle Harrison, establishing themselves at the major league level and Whisenhunt, and to lesser degree, Carson Seymour and Trevor McDonald flashing potential in AAA. Assuming another one or two promotions this year, do you think there enough talent moving through the system to maintain a decent set of homegrown starters in Sacramento beyond this year?

Hi Kent. It’s my pleasure and my privilege to get to write for you folks! In answer to your question, I’d say we need to define our terms here — particularly “decent,” which is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in your question.

I should first say that, barring an unfortunate wave of injuries, I really wouldn’t anticipate multiple members of the current Sacramento rotation being called up to San Francisco for more than spot starts here and there, so I don’t know that the Giants will need to be making any long-term replacements to the River Cats’ current group.

But having said that, if your question is: will the Giants be able to backfill any further promotions with other homegrown starters who are capable of providing Triple-A depth? Then my answer would be “yes.” We’ve already seen John Michael Bertrand get in some work in the PCL, and others like Seth Lonsway or even Jack Choate could probably step up and take some workload.

But, if your question is: are there more Birdsongs and Roupps and Harrisons in the near-term future, then I would say my answer is little more guarded. To me, there are some pretty clear tiers here. The group currently in San Francisco plus Whisenhunt are one tier — those are guys that I think you can say have a very clear future as major league starters, and they’re all pretty much ready for that opportunity at this point.

Beyond those guys, the other 40-man pitchers — Seymour, McDonald, Mason Black, and Carson Ragsdale — constitute a pretty clear second tier. I think the club feels quite good having them there and available for spot starts, they’d feel fine about covering a short IL stint, but it’s a little more questionable where their ultimate major league role fits best. They might end up working best as middle relievers. They might find an opportunity with a rebuilding-type club and use it to make the strides they need to establish themselves. They might never get beyond the “up and down” area. But they’re good for Triple-A, 40-man depth.

After that Sacramento group, I do think it’s much more questionable who the next starting pitcher is in this organization. The best candidates above the San Jose group (which is still just getting started and hard to evaluate, though we’ve seen a lot of good things this year) are probably Choate, Joe Whitman, and Josh Bostick, but I wouldn’t say I get great conviction from scouts I speak with that any are slam-dunks to stay starters as their careers progress (though all three are well-liked). So, we’ll see. Pitchers are funny: their stuff picks up, it backs off, they learn new pitches or grips, they find that one weird trick — their stock can really bounce up and down with crazy irregularity.

But generally, I would say that I don’t see any more Birdsongs or Harrisons or Whisenhunts past this top group, and everybody from Richmond on down still needs to show some significant advances to get to that level (they might! That’s what development is all about). I should also say that I don’t think there’s any secret why this is: the Giants went very heavy on drafting pitchers from 2020-2022 and they developed a large stock of upper-round talents to develop on the mound (plus they hit the bullseye on a couple later rounds). In 2023-24, the tops of their drafts have been hitter heavy. That’s the type of change that drives the makeup of talent in an org.

So, maybe we’ll see somebody like Niko Mazza take a Roupp-esque leap forward. Or, maybe we’ll find that a young trade acquisition like Jacob Bresnahan turned out to be a savvy investment on a burgeoning talent. Or, maybe they’ll finally strike gold with an international pitcher like Gerelmi Maldonado or Argenis Cayama (who is starting to look to me like the highest upside non-Whisenhunt starting pitcher on the farm). But for now, to me there’s a pretty clear line to draw after Whisenhunt, where “these things are not like those things.”

totalfan62

Our Giants need another good, young bat in the middle of the lineup. Eldridge ASAP we hope, but we probably need him and another young and ascending player. Our best assets for trade are the young pitchers. I think everyone (including Team Buster) will agree that Birdsong, Harrison and Roupp are untouchable at this point.

Assuming that is true, who are the best candidates as trade pieces from the other MiLB pitchers? The "three Carsons" (Whisenhunt, Seymour, Ragsdale) seem to be at the top of that list. How would you rank them, and who would be the "next level" of starting pitching that could either ascend to SF in the next 2-3 seasons or be viable trade pieces to acquire that middle of the order bat?

Thanks again for all you do, Roger. Your content is well worth the price.

Thank you, John. I appreciate the trust and support!

I think I’ve answered most of your question in the one above, but I do want to tackle the part about a good, young bat in the middle of the lineup. Without any doubt, the Giants could certainly use such a hitter. I’d dare say that nearly every club could, and some teams other than the Giants — the Mariners or Guardians to take two pretty obvious examples — have spent years searching for such a thing.

I think there’s a general sense among fans that teams with young pitching and teams with young hitting can match up need for need, but I’ve always been a bit skeptical of that idea, because quality major league hitters are 1) so much harder to find, and 2) much less prone to attrition through injury. I just don’t think teams are willing to trade young hitters with proven major league track records very often without getting serious impact back — and certainly not for unproven pitchers.

The Giants, for instance, are not going to entertain notions of trading Heliot Ramos at this point — it took too much to get here! After all the time and investment and sweat and tears, teams don’t look at a successful hitter development story and think: “great, maybe we can flip him for something else.” No, they try to lock those guys up for as long as they can. Young proven hitters are building blocks, not trade chips, even for most rebuilding teams.

I think that there are three types of hitters who get traded: 1) young hitters who, for one reason or another, have not quite fit their team’s lineup or worn out their welcome in some way (think Jesse Winker, who was on the move a few times in his controllable years, or Teoscar Hernandez in his Toronto incarnation); 2) older proven hitters who are getting expensive or about to leave via FA (the typical trade deadline acquisition); and 3) occasionally teams, attempting to deal out of category #1, will instead send away a young “whoops, we didn’t realize you were this good” hitter (Kelvin Marte is probably the best recent example of this, though, for Giants fans, Jeff Kent is classic example, too).

When teams have a true, proven, impactful, controllable young hitter on their hands, it takes much more than the whisper of solid potential to pry them away. I’m thinking of the famous Alexis Rios for Tim Lincecum trade discussions once upon a time — and Rios was a really good young hitter at that time. As much as I like the young arms on the Giants right now, I’m not going to predict that any of them are likely to win the next two Cy Young Awards (though I sure would enjoy it if one of them did).

I really think that people should probably adjust their expectations accordingly. I’m just not convinced that the long-term answer to their offensive issues is likely to come from a trade out of the ranks of the Carsons. The much more likely route for adding a good young hitter to the Giants’ lineup is for Willy Adames to hit like his Baseball Reference page says he can (though, going forward, finding a $700 million check in the couch cushions and handing it over to Kyle Tucker might not be the worst idea ever).

MikeH

Hi Roger. Thanks as ever for the continued insights. Can you give a little more context for 'development list' and how it is used? I see Guillermo Williamson has just been placed there and I think Vaun Brown is too?

Brown has been on the development list at various times, but I believe he’s currently on the IL. But yes, you’re right, Williamson, Brown and others have popped on and off the development list the last few years. It’s a fairly new designation (it came in with the current CBA, if I’m not mistaken), that essentially gives teams a place to put a player who they think needs work outside the dictates of game action — to say, rebuild a swing or something like that. Essentially, it’s for players whose current state of development isn’t really ready for, or helped by, continuing to work on things in a game environment.

In practice, I think teams will sometimes use it as a temporary parking lot when there’s a roster crunch that can’t be resolved another way (if the team is at its roster maximum and another player gets sent their way, seeing somebody go on the development list, which doesn’t count against the active roster, is an easy fix).

But the purpose of it is to remove players from the failure management aspect that games put them through emotionally, while trying to improve various skills. Brown is a good case. He got to the point last year where he simply couldn’t make contact at all, and it got to the point where it really wasn’t helping him or the team to keep forcing the issue in games.

Another more recent situation can be seen with pitcher Josh Wolf, who was also just placed on the development list. Wolf has a live arm but has always struggled to throw strikes. The Giants tried using him in a starting role in Eugene, but he was struggling to throw more than two or three innings because of the huge volume of pitches outside the strike zone. After walking four batters in the 1st inning of a start two weeks ago (and throwing just 16 of 37 pitches for strikes), he was placed on the development list, where, presumably the Giants will continue to work with him on some repeatable mechanics that will better enable him to compete with hitters in the strike zone.

I guess a shorter answer is: when you’ve reached the definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results), it’s time for a stint on the development list to change things up.

Small Winged Yeti

I have a couple of questions about the OF in Sacramento. Grant McCray this season in AAA seems to be a bit worse than his last, and especially his power has dropped off some. Do you have insights in his struggles? Also, has Wade Meckler's defense gotten better this season?

If the offensive rate stats for Meckler and McCray stay at the current level, could Meckler overtake McCray as the first call-up if the big club needs it? Thanks!

Hi Yeti. I honestly don’t know that there’s all that much more going on with McCray’s performance than some random variation covering parts of two seasons. Neither sample size is huge (47 games last year, 61 this year), and they were played at different times of year. He came to the PCL last year at almost exactly this time of year (June 11 debut), which means he skipped the winter weather in the PCL last year, but he got it this year — snow on the ground in Reno when they were opening there, cold rainy weeks in Tacoma, etc.

There’s also the tricky issue of the ball. Triple-A uses the major league ball, and while there may be some lag in the inventory (I think they start the year using the leftovers from MLB’s previous season), this year’s MLB ball appears to have much greater drag than the 2024 version — have you noticed that power is down all over MLB this year? So, there are a lot of things potentially going on that don’t necessarily have to do with his development, per se.

As for Meckler, I don’t really believe he’ll ever have the true ballhawking instincts for me to want to put him in center field consistently in the majors — where conditions are crazy hard and the bar for performance incredibly high. I think his best role is always going to be as a left fielder where he could focus his efforts and his intensity on slapping line drives everywhere and creating havoc on offense, and not have to worry quite so much about bringing his defense up to Gold Glove standards. Of course, continual improvement is the goal of any minor leaguer, and I know he’s working hard on all aspects of his game.

I think the Daniel Johnson promotion — which really was the first call up, if you think about it — shows us that anybody who is performing could be the one called upon to try to provide a spark. But, beyond that, I think any call up is most likely to depend on what the specific roster need is.

Griffin

Hi Roger! I really liked the article you shared about how some stats like K% are "stickier" throughout the levels. What are some benchmarks that you personally like to see before a guy earns a promotion?

Piggybacking off this, Carlos Gutierrez has been great to watch in San Jose. What are some aspects of the game you'd like to see him improve upon in order to rise up prospect lists and levels?

Hi Griffin, I believe you’re referring to another great post from my friends at Down on the Farm (though I can’t lay my hands on the specific one right now — if anybody finds it, drop it in the comments).

The frustrating part about writing about player development in this particular point in time is that a lot of the numbers that teams really believe in — and that, as writers we have good reason to think are meaningful — are proprietary and hidden away from view for most levels. Basically, from a hitting perspective you want guys to do a few things well: 1) don’t chase outside the strike zone; 2) hit balls in the strike zone, especially velocity, and 3) hit the ball hard. And every team has in-depth, granular numbers to evaluate all of those things: chase rate, in zone contact rate, exit velocities (EV), all sub-divided into things like pitch types and hot zones, etc. Teams will look at things like EV specifically on balls in the air (since a lot of big EVs are wasted on the ground), or on pulled fly balls. They’ll look specifically at in-zone contact on fastballs (because if a hitter can’t hit those, nothing else is going to matter). There’s a rich treasure trove upon which to feast — if you can lay your hands on it.

At various points in the history of my writing There R Giants, I’ve had sources inside teams feed me info, but they all seem to disappear eventually (teams frown on such behavior with severity) and I’ve been sadly bereft in 2025 entirely. (Except in Triple-A, where all StatCast data is on Baseball Savant and easily discovered in all its complexity with this awesome minor league search tool).

Left to our own devices with public data, we still want to know the same basic things: but we have much noisier sources for them. Strikeout rate (for contact ability), walk rate (for avoiding chases), Isolated Slugging (for how hard players hit balls). None of these are perfect, but they do all tell us something. I also do greatly value batting average in the minors as a proxy for hit tool and hard-hit rate. It’s obviously very noisy, but, especially lower down, I do find it meaningful. Outfielders in the majors — not stars, not starters, but outfielders who have careers in MLB — hit .300 in the lower minors, for the perfectly understandable reason that there are a lot of bad pitchers down there to feast on. The Giants players in the Cal League and NWL are going up against pitchers who will never move on from that level multiple times a week, and the opportunities that provides to obtain two or three hit nights on the regular should be enough to push a good hitter’s numbers upwards. So, I always value that number too, especially low down.

And, yes, that does bring us to Gutierrez, who is currently leading the Cal League in batting average! Good job, Carlos! And he’s doing it having had virtually no experience between the DSL and full-season ball — that’s a huge leap. I don’t know that Gutierrez is ever going to be a big prospect darling — though he did enter Baseball America’s new Giants’ top 30 at the 29th spot. He’s not big, he’s not toolsy, he’s not super powerful. But he is smart. He has strong instincts for the game, and he seems to have pretty strong game skills.

In addition to his outstanding average (.350 currently), he’s doing a great job at controlling the strike zone with his low, low K rate (13.9%) and strong walk rate (13.1%) almost meeting exactly in the middle (for pure numbers, he has 31 walks and 33 strikeouts on the year). Again, those sorts of contact and swing decision numbers for a kid with this little experience is pretty remarkable (he’d played 25 games over two years, mostly in the Dominican). The one number that is lacking for him is his ISO (.110). Gutierrez doesn’t impact the ball that much, and that’s almost certainly his #1 growth area going forward. You gotta be jacked to survive in the powerful world of today’s MLB. Adding lean muscle and some wiry strength to his slender frame will be important to his chances.

What he has going for him — other than his clear bat to ball skills — is a real all-around skillset. He runs good routes in the outfield. He has a strong arm and makes accurate throws. He’s a good base runner (with 23 stolen bases on the year). If you wanted to close your eyes and dream of a best-case development scenario with Gutierrez, I would think that outcome would look a lot like a wonderful Giant, Grégor Blanco. A guy who shows up and contributes to wins in a variety of ways. (Blanco, by the way, hit .294 in the International League as a 22-year-old!).

And, with that, we’ll close up the mailbag for this week. Gotta get out to the ballyard. Hope to see you there!