Giants Swing for the Moon with Reggie Crawford in 1st Round
SF Giants Minor Lines, July 16-17, 2022
Welcome to the All Star Break!
I would say it’s a time to catch our breath — as nearly all of the players will be doing over the next three days as games pause for the game’s premier showcase — but the way MLB has loaded up this date on the calendar, no breath-catching can take place today. We’ve got a new 1st rounder in the organization, a Futures Game appearance to discuss, a ton of video from my trip to the desert, and, oh yeah, the potential that a generational talent is going to get traded in the next two weeks.
Good lawd! Let’s get to it. We’ve got a lot to cover today.
Draft’s First Night
Let’s take a quick check back to my 100% Guaranteed Accurate draft preview and see what I had to say about ….um hm….. ah hah…..yes, here it is:
As I look into my crystal ball, I’m mostly eliminating that pool of injured college pitchers. There are some very good ones that you’ll hear called on Sunday night in the first round — and more who will be selected on Monday night. But I’m skeptical that the Giants will go that direction, especially after their bumper crop of pitchers taken in the 2021 draft.
And so what did the Giants do on Day 1 of the draft — they took an injured college pitcher…. and backed it up with a suspended college pitcher! That’s right, they drafted two college players who didn’t take part in a single game all year! Hey, I’ll be here all week folks!
But the Giants did much more than zig when I was expecting a zag, in a draft that was mostly about depth (beyond the group of high school hitters taken at the top of the 1st round), they took a high-risk swing at maybe the biggest wild card of the draft in pursuit of upside, UConn’s left-handed Reggie Crawford. And to make the swing truly monumental, they specifically announced him as a two-way player. Wow!
Let’s break it down! Crawford is a big, athletic left-hander, who started to pop as a potential Top 5 pick in the summer of 2021 when he hit 100 mph in a brief Cape Cod League appearance. He spent the rest of the summer pitching with Team USA, sitting in the high 90s with his fastball. Before he could build on that momentum, however, he snapped his UCL and underwent Tommy John surgery last fall, missing out on his entire Junior year. Crawford’s career on the mound barely exists outside of that standout summer, however, as he’s thrown just 8.2 IP in his entire three-year college experience. If you add the Cape, it gets up to 10.2!
What’s he been doing with the rest of his time, you might ask? Well, he’s been filling it very nicely as the Huskies starting 1b — a slugger with well above average power who hit .309/.362/.546 in his first two seasons, albeit with a hefty strikeout rate. And this gets us to the fascinating “two-way player” announcement. While most everyone in the industry assumes Crawford is a pitcher going forward — because, lefty who touches 100 ….duh, they end up on the mound — the Giants appear to have taken a “Build Your Own Ohtani” approach to the intriguing Crawford. It looks like they’re going to give Crawford at least some time with a bat in his hand while continuing to rehab the elbow and see where it goes?
The second part of that tweet is important, as Crawford had announced shortly before the draft that he had entered the transfer portal and was headed to SEC power University of Tennessee — a move which figured to give him a bit more negotiating leverage than your typical college junior.
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