Happy New Year Mailbag, Vol. II
Unlike Santa, I couldn’t manage to empty my bag in one night. It took two parts to work through all the goodies on my sleigh. After a lot of big picture questions in part one, today we’re going to talk much more about individual players, including the large group of post-prospects who are on the fringes of the big league roster, but who haven’t quite established themselves as clear members of the team just yet.
Before I get to those, however, I’ll go ahead and note that we’ve got a lot of exciting stuff coming up in the next few weeks leading to 2025 season. We’re only about a week away from the opening of this year’s international free agent signing period, and I hope to once again have the Giants’ Senior International Director, Joe Salermo, as my guest on the pod soon to talk over the new class of talent. Once I finish up with this year’s Depth Chart series in the next week or so, I’ll start rolling out this year’s There R Giants’ Top 50 — everybody’s favorite rack-and-stack exercise. That should just about get us to my annual spring training visit, when I’ll have plenty of video and first-hand observations coming your way in my annual Camp Notes.
Which is all to say, it’s a great time to become a There R Giants’ subscriber. Nobody covers the Giants’ farm system with as much depth and first-hand information as There R Giants!
And now to your questions:
Who has better stuff in the long run, Bryce Eldridge or Dakota Jordan?
Eldridge is a very clear winner in this race to me, based on the far superior hit tool. If Jordan finds a way to make sufficient contact, he has the potential to be a very good player. But “if” is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence, while Eldridge has shown already that he can get to his game-changing power with a solid bat-to-ball skills for a player who has to cover so much zone. If I were ball-parking outcomes, I’d say that Jordan has to hit something like an 80th percentile outcome to measure up to Eldridge’s 50th percentile outcome. That’s pulling numbers out of my butt, but you get the idea. Certainty is on Eldridge’s side in a big way, which is fitting for a big kid!
Deborah Petersen
Do you think Eldridge will be up this season. I watched him a lot throughout 2024 and it seemed like every level he played at it took a minute before he adjusted to that level. But what I saw the most was he needs work at 1st base.
It’s really up to him. I will say that I think the Giants under Buster Posey will be far more diligent about making sure guys really dominate their levels before promoting them, rather than the helter skelter promotions that seemed to end the Zaidi years (at least, I believe that’s the plan — but you know what they say about battle plans and first contact with the enemy). They want to see Eldridge go to Sacramento or Richmond and put up the kind of performance that got everyone so excited about him last year in Eugene.
I will say that I disagree with your idea of Eldridge’s adjustment to new levels. I thought one of the most impressive aspects of his first year was how quickly he took to new levels. The experience in San Jose gives the appearance of a slow start, but really, he was off to a very fast start (continuing a roll he had going in spring camp) until a slight hamstring pull took him out of the lineup for about two weeks. As he told me later in the summer, he just needed a few reps to get his timing back after that missed time before he exploded again. The only other time in the year where he had anything like a slump was again following some missed time around his trip to the Futures Game. Otherwise, when he moved up, he did so with authority! His time in Double-A and Triple-A was really too short to make any kind of informed observations, but he certainly looked like he belonged at the level when he came to Richmond.
However, I do agree that getting up to speed on defense will probably be the last box the Giants’ want to see him check before he gets his promotion. As Kyle Haines said to The Athletic’s Andy Baggarly last fall,
“The one thing I’m certain of: He’s going to have to develop in the big leagues in some areas. But when players put on a Giants uniform at Oracle Park, we don’t want them to have big-league skills in some areas and playing at an A-ball level in others.”
So: will he debut in 2025? I’d guess he will at some point, though that point might be later than many fans are hoping, and it’s not out of the question that the big moment won’t come until 2026. But the answer is in Eldridge’s hands, and, as he said to me last summer, he’s pretty good at accomplishing things he sets his mind to.
I think one of the most effective ways to flip a talent deficit, and also one of the hardest and riskiest things to do for a front office, is to determine which prospect breakouts are sustainable and which are not, so as to sell high on the prospect to bring more proven, and expensive, major league talent into an org. Sabean was very good at this, where Evans was not (or maybe unlucky in a small sample) and Zaidi was seemingly too timid to try it for anything less than an obv superstar (and thus never did it). Do you think Buster’s FO will try to move any of the ML ready youngsters to less wealthy clubs for more proven talent?
It does seem like the club made inquiries with Houston on Kyle Tucker, and such a deal would certainly have involved their MLB-ready youngsters of some form or another (and I’m still befuddled about the fact that Chicago was able to spin replacement-level Christopher Morel into superstar Tucker in two easy moves; that really doesn’t seem like it should be possible). The problem with that deal would seem to be that none of the young players whom the Giants might be willing to move have truly broken out yet at the big league level, so teams might still be looking at them as question marks or worse.
I may be mis-reading your email, JB, as I’m thinking that you’re talking about players like Hayden Birdsong, Kyle Harrison, Landen Roupp, or even Heliot Ramos and Tyler Fitzgerald, rather than players like Bryce Eldridge (who is probably the only real “prospect” who could be considered a breakout from last year). If I’ve missed your intentions, I apologize.
But, if I’m reading you correctly, I do think you’re quite right that this is the type of player who can be used in trade talks during the winter. If you look at the trades that we’ve seen so far this winter, even the outright salary dump of Cody Bellinger, all of them involve mostly big league talent going in both directions, rather than one team trying to acquire prospects. That’s the nature of winter deals, when clubs are focused on getting their big league roster into shape for the coming year. And I do think there are players in that group whom the Giants could use for trade value — I was beating a drum the last couple of months for a Josh Naylor trade, and, seeing what he was ultimately acquired for, it’s hard to believe that something involving Tristan Beck or Keaton Winn, and maybe a Randy Rodriguez type wouldn’t have put the Giants in a pretty good position for such a deal.
But, of course, that’s an outside looking in comment, and there’s no real way of judging from our perspective of ignorance, how Cleveland would have felt about that comparative fit. Trades, as all front offices executives will tell you, are very difficult to pull off, because the two sides have to have similar view on the value being exchanged, have needs that complement one another, and evaluate the players being talked about more or less equivalently. That’s tough, and it’s a lot harder than it looks to pull off.
I definitely think you’re on to something, but, as with almost everything in this new Buster-led era, the answer is surely: “Reply hazy. Ask again later.”
What is your take on them looking at The Polar Bear? To me, it seems like a good play. He is everything they need, it would allow them to let Eldridge to not have a ton of pressure to perform. It would also allow for them to platoon, if Eldridge has issues with lefties. Then, if it’s a 2-3 year contract, Alonso could DH. The only issue I see is, I believe there was a qualifying offer, and not sure of that is something they would want to give up for him.
Well, I certainly think the team is a couple of bats shy, and Pete Alonso certainly can hit dingers. He also showed last Fall that he can make an impact in the post-season. Whether that makes it worthwhile to sign a big money deal with a player who is really limited to one skill, and the inevitable questions regarding Eldridge’s future, is a difficult call. I’d probably try to land an outfielder instead, personally, but they certainly do need more middle of the lineup presence.
However, I would say my biggest take on this story is: don’t believe everything that gets put out there by Scott Boras looking to create bigger markets for his players. The massively disparate rumors and reports on the Corbin Burnes saga should remind us all of that.
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Anything interesting from Giants players playing in the various winter leagues? (the only thing I saw is that it looks like Matos is doing pretty well) Do these winter leagues correlate to their future performance in the majors at all?
Among things that seem to stand out in the Giants' player development process (have SPs throw <50 pitches per game, heavy reliance on K/BB metric for hitters, etc.), would you know which ones were mandated (might be too strong a word) by Zaidi? And would you expect these to go away now?
It’s been a couple of weeks since I updated my weekly Off-season player boards, so let me do that here. Generally, the achievers were Matos (who seems likely to be named the Venezuelan League’s Rookie of the Year), Victor Bericoto, and, in the Dominican, Jerar Encarnacion and recently signed LIDOM vet, Sergio Alcántara. As the leagues now transition into Caribbean Series action, most of the younger players have shut it down for the winter and started preparing for next year. I know that Matos and Bericoto both left their teams just prior to Christmas.
As for your second question, let me answer it this way: there is a reason why Zaidi is gone, but the directors of amateur scouting (Michael Holmes) and player development (Kyle Haines) are still here. Philosophically, everything that happened in the Giants’ organization the last few years went through, and came directly from, Zaidi’s office. Would I expect standards and philosophies to change? I think definitively so. Posey has talked at length several times about finding the right benchmarks for the type of players they want to develop and we’ll see over time what he and Randy Winn and Kyle Haines come up with on that score. But Zaidi set the benchmarks for the org while he was running baseball ops (and I would say had his fingerprints on most of the major assignments and promotions as well).
Dennis Touros
Your interview with Katie Woo was terrific. Do we know at this point if the Giants have made the proper investment in coordinators?
Thanks Dennis! I appreciate the comment. I assume that Katie was responsible for most of the terrific-ness on that pod, as she’s really an impressive reporter and communicator. I suspect she’s going to be one of those beat writers who transitions into one of the top national writers in the game in time.
To your question: No, we sadly don’t know PD staffing for the upcoming year. Not yet. Most teams announce their player development and minor league coaching staff sometime in January or early February (in St. Louis’ case, they had made a couple high level hirings during the winter meetings which they announced individually to their assembled reporters like Katie). I will note that the Giants have not been great at communicating their organizational staff changes in the late Zaidi years. The last couple of seasons they didn’t make the standard official announcement at all, and we had to await the dissemination of the media guide after spring training started to see the full staff list. I should also say that I can continue to hear talk of budget pressures on the PD staff coming from the top of the organization, so I don’t have my hopes up that we’ll see staff levels increasing, rather than decreasing, in the coming year. But we’ll see!
One potentially odd aspect of the coming year is that Zaidi did set the budget for baseball ops just before he was let go (the baseball calendar flips to the new year just after the World Series, so budgets tend to be set late in the regular season). It’s not entirely clear what leeway Posey and Minasian might have to make changes to that budget once set and approved, or whether that’s on top of what has to be a pretty stacked priority list at the moment.
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Shortstop doubleplay:
1) Walker Martin: apart from K rate trouble, how are the tools looking in pro ball?
2) What are you seeing in the anticipated/heralded international signing SS?
Martin shows real present strength, and gets good loft into his swing. He has power to all fields — that’s definitely the tool that has been most impressive in my views of him so far. On defense, when I saw him both in the spring and later in the year, he seemed a bit tentative to me. I know scouts I’ve talked to who saw a lot of him this summer felt he was pressing on both sides of the ball. But the consensus from industry folks I been in contact with is that most don’t believe in him as a shortstop long term. As he’s filled out and gained strength, there’s been some corresponding heavyness and lack of range in his movements. I can see him being a strong defender at 3b, however. In general, there are a lot of tools to like, and he certainly struck me as a serious and dedicated young man who will work hard to improve his overall game. The K-rate was obviously an issue and has to come down significantly for him to move up. We’ll see how he does with that after an off-season of work.
As for the anticipated signing of Joshuar de Jesus Gonzalez, I haven’t seen much of him as of yet (though interestingly, I have seen some recent video of some of their second-tier signings in this class like Yulian Barreto and Djean Macares). I’m hoping that the Giants will send him to Papago Park in March for spring camp, as they did with Rayner Arias and Ryan Reckley just after their signings, and I’ll get some good looks at him there before he heads back to the Dominican Republic for the summer.
If I do, my subscribers will get first hand report and plenty of video in my Camp Notes posts which will be coming in late March. That’s a plug, by the way!
For Craig, “top” is, of course, subjective. Neither Gonzalez, nor Luis Hernandez, who they are strongly connected to for the 2026 signing period, is likely to be receiving the highest bonus of their class. Even putting Roki Sasaki aside, the top bonuses for this year, according to the expert, Ben Badler, will go to shortstop Elian Peña (Mets) and Ethan’s little brother Andrew Salas (Marlins). Badler expects Gonzalez to get the 5th highest bonus this year, depending on how the Sasaki situation plays out.
That said, Gonzalez is in the conversation for the top player in this class (non-Sasaki division), and the same will be true of Hernandez next year. Is that due to a philosophical change? Arias was pretty highly considered in his class as well, and the Giants have played at the top end of the international market talent before (e.g., Marco Luciano, Lucius Fox, Angel Villalona, or the late, and sadly ill-fated Gustavo Cabrera). I will definitely ask International Scouting Director Joe Salermo if anything is changed when I (hopefully) get him back on the podcast this month. But I suspect he will say that the team is always looking to sign the best talent, but so are all the other teams.
Relationships with trainers is a huge driver in that market, as is, of course, dollars. My guess is that Joe will say that these are just two occasions when the Giants were able to land the fish they really wanted, and they’ll keep trying to do that going forward, though they know they won’t always be successful.
While the Giants are "oversteering," it doesn't look to be into oncoming traffic. I believe that vibes, though unquantifiable, do have an impact on performance. Do you suspect that this is the area Posey has zoned in on? That he believes changing the vibes / altering the rhythm of the club to something that's more like a player's rhythm/routine -- as opposed to an algorithm's (or panicked professor-type scrambling to keep his job) -- is the key to getting the franchise over the hump (not just at the major league level but in the minors/PD, too)?
My take on this, as I believe I’ve talked about in various KROG podcasts, is that Posey, a former player, wants to create a more player-centric organization, where all of the modern resources that clubs have available to them (in terms of technology, big data, biomechanics, etc) are put at the service of player needs, rather than having players responding to the priorities coming from the R&D department. And that, I think, can pay dividends at both the major and minor league level — though I think the value that can come from leaders in the clubhouse setting expectations and creating a culture of winning is specifically a major league value.
That makes sense to me, and I can certainly see why that would be the direction that a former player would take things. But I will repeat something that I heard The Athletic’s Andy McCullough say recently: teams that spend a lot of time talking about “balancing data and scouting,” or any other sort of framing of the “old school/new school” divide in baseball, are really just saying that they haven’t created an effective culture of communication and collaboration in their organization. There are a lot of clubs that integrate all the aspects of modern baseball well and don’t have to expend a lot of energy talking about or defending one element against another. The Dodgers have the largest analytics staff in the game, and have devoted huge parts of the understory of Dodgers’ stadium to that staff — and you don’t hear players complaining about it, because they know that those guys are helping them do their job more effectively. From interactions I’ve had with staff of that club, analysts and scouts have a decently harmonious relationship and understand that they are there to compliment each other and fill each other’s blind spots. The Dodgers do the communication and collaboration parts well, and employees of all types have a strong sense of working towards a common goal (which isn’t to say that everybody is perfectly happy — it is a large collection of human beings, after all).
That should be what Posey and Minasian are working towards. We’ll know in time if they get there.
Looks like we might not sign another impact free agent. Also appears the biggest need is an upgrade at 1B, OF depth and maybe another starter. Assuming Eldridge arrives in 2026 (maybe last two months of 2025?), who do you see from the system as best options for 1B, OF and pitching (both starter and bullpen depth)?
In your opinion, which of the following men could or should make the opening-day roster: Casey Schmitt (IF UT); Brett Wisely (IF UT); David Villar (IF UT); Luis Matos; (LF); Marco Luciano (DH-OF); and Wade Meckler (OF). Of those not ready on opening day, which might be ready by mid-season? (Throw Max Stassi and Grant McCray into that question.)
Do you think Casey Schmitt could be the Giants utility IF this year? As in, could he fill in for Willy Adames in the 5-10 games he may take off during the season? Or do we need a specialized backup SS, which would really reduce the path for Schmitt?
We’ll end with three questions looking forward to the 2025 roster. I will say that my opinion is that the Giants should bulk up by a couple of bats over the remainder the winter, and I wouldn’t expect that they are done with upgrades just yet. The entire 1b/DH/COF group is far too slender and under-developed for my liking.
But if we’re going to assume that the group we have today is the group that comes to camp, then certainly a lot of young players will be competing for very realistic jobs during spring training.
I think I’ve always been pretty consistent that I don’t really like Schmitt in the middle infield positions, where I think his lack of range makes his other truly exceptional skills (hands, arm, instincts, body control) play down. I think Fitzgerald is a superior option at shortstop and….well, there’s a reason why they wanted to fix the shortstop position first and foremost this winter (check!).
That said, there are enough positions that need upgrading on this roster that I don’t see them putting in a ton of work to find a backup shortstop. I imagine Schmitt and Fitzgerald share the 2b/UT duties between them, depending on who is performing, unless there’s an unexpected NRI who makes some noise in spring. Wisely, who has the benefit of being left-handed, will be in the mix as well, but he’s not a strong left-side defender, and two straight years of underwhelming performance at the majors might be starting to weigh his prospects down.
As for 1b and the OF, Villar (I know you like him, Eric!) and Encarnacion are both out of the options, which tends to matter at the end of spring training, as clubs almost always prioritize preserving inventory in deciding final roster spots. Of course, additions over the next six weeks could push one of these guys off the roster, but if they’re both still there and putting up strong springs with little obvious competition around them, there is certainly a path to an opening day assignment for either or both.
Beyond that pair, I would guess that Matos is the most likely player to make the opening day roster. McCray absolutely has to work on his in-zone contact before he’s in the big leagues again. Luciano has both defensive and offensive questions that are better answered in Sacramento. Meckler is something of a wild card here coming off of an injury-ravaged 2024, and if he shows improved ability to handle center field defensively, he could put himself in position for a spot. My guess is that he’s a bit lower on the OF depth chart than Matos, however, and possibly below Luciano as well, due to his limitations on the power side. As for Stassi, I have no real idea of what his health status is at this point. He had surgery on his left hip last June, and has basically missed two full seasons now. He’s an interesting depth player, but I’d imagine the club will want to see him healthy and getting some game reps in Sacramento before they seriously consider him for a big league role (though he definitely has a track record that suggests he could be a good backup if/once healthy).
This all leads me to yet another plug! This would seem like a great place to point out my ongoing Depth Charts series, which looks at every position in the organization top to bottom, covering almost literally every player in the organization. Here’s the most recent edition from just before Christmas on 3b, and you can look forward to a big post on right-handed starting pitchers coming Monday.
And with that, we’ll close up the mailbag until February. Here’s wishing you all a healthy and productive 2025 that brings you all love, satisfaction, things to learn, things to care for, and a few new experiences.
For folks who were wondering about missing questions (and anything that seemed generally hard to understand), some of the questions apparently got garbled in publication somehow and vanished from the post. I have now put them back in.
From The Athletic there is a nice article on Randy Winn, the Giants VP of Player Development. The anecdote that stood out for me was: "The goal isn’t to steal 100 percent of your bases. The goal was that when I got to the big leagues, that I’d understand how to steal bases." E.G. they gave him a goal of ATTEMPTING 100 base steals at a level where failure was OK. Kinda like my own personal philosophy (useful in raising teenagers, too) where it is OK to make a mistake, as long as you learn from it.