Photo Credit: BRIAN HAYES | STATESMAN JOURNAL
Do you like pitchers? I mean, really like like them? The Giants like pitchers! They really do! The Giants like almost nothing BUT pitchers!
So get ready to play some Day 2 Bingo, featuring a plethora of “relief profile,” “arm strength guy,” “big data pick,” and “good development project.” Don’t make it a drinking game — it’s too early in the morning to get tanked.
I jest, of course! The Giants once again drafted a rash of pitchers this year — eight in the first 10 rounds. And Giants’ Scouting Director Michael Holmes knows that people want to see a grand design at work and parse each pick for subtext or pick up traces of whatever ninth dimensional chess the organization might be playing at. “I know people don’t believe me when they ask that question: it’s really just best player available. It was not by design this year,” though Holmes acknowledges “it might have been by design a little last year.” With the last selection in every round, Holmes and his team focused on their preparation, ran scenarios, worked their board, avoided getting too obsessed over any specific targets, trying to mental telepathy them into falling, and let the rounds come to them. What resulted was a raft of power arms.
What kind of arms, you ask? Well, another thing Holmes doesn’t have a great deal of patience with is the kind of snap judgement and pigeonholing that often goes on at this time of year, predetermining roles for players before their journey has even begun. In Holmes’ mind, everyone’s a starter until they prove they aren’t, and college guys who have done it in the past should have the opportunity to prove they can keep on doing it into the future. “I think the first thing we want to do is exhaust the option of sending them out as a starter,” Holmes says. “I tell every guy that we meet with: ‘you determine your role. The success you have will determine what role you slot into.’”
The 2021 draft offers plenty of cases in point. Landen Roupp didn’t begin the year starting games, but he’s starting them now — at a higher level than he began the season — and starting them effectively enough that he went seven innings in his last outing. Trevor McDonald worked his way from being a “bridge guy” who came in and cleaned up the messy innings to taking on a full-time starter’s turn in San Jose’s rotation. Matt Mikulski’s season has trended in the other direction, as he’s moved into more of a piggyback role after having some struggles through the first half. As Alex Wood said on a recent Giants’ game, when asked what advice he’d give to new draftees: “don’t give them a choice.” The more a player succeeds, the more they determine their role and their progress.
In that spirit, there will be no “reliever risk” snipes here. Every pitcher has reliever risk — and risks worse than that, frankly. But every pitcher also has opportunity. The future is unwritten and they’ll make it what they can.
With that preamble behind us, let’s meet the new Giants!
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