Here’s a list that can make long time Giants prospect hounds shudder:
2012: Gary Brown
2013: Kyle Crick
2014: Kyle Crick
2015: Andrew Susac
2016: Christian Arroyo
2017: Tyler Beede
That, of course, is a list of the system’s top prospects for much of the last decade, going back the year after top prospect Brandon Belt graduated to the big leagues. The above group produced a total 0.7 fWAR in their careers with the Giants. Will Smith (obtained from the Brewers for Susac and 2015 1st round pick Phil Bickford) was a nifty consolation gift — and, of course, the fact that Joe Panik never quite climbed to the top of anybody’s prospect list allows me to neatly cheat and sidestep his exceptional contributions — still, on the whole, that’s a pretty lackluster return for more than a half decade’s worth of top prospects. And it points at deeper issues with player development throughout the last decade that ended up costing a lot of people their jobs when the organization hit rock bottom in 2018.
When a new regime came in to head the organization, one of the expectations was that the productivity of the farm system was going to get new life breathed into it and turn into a conveyor belt of talent to rival the Dodgers, pumping fresh waves of talent to the major league roster at a steady pace. Advanced technologies, beefed up R&D departments, and adherence to the benefits of data analysis as a development tool were expected to maximize returns from high and low round picks equally.
What we’ve seen instead, has been a weird sort of bifurcation. The organization has proved exceptionally gifted at identifying and acquiring unwanted players from the tops of other organizational ladders and polishing them into useful pieces (or even more than useful). But at the same time, with the one crucial exception of Logan Webb, the Giants haven’t seen the same sorts of success with the cream of their own crop. They aren’t putting a shine on their shiniest prospects in the finishing school of the majors, nor, so far, are they having much success at finding overlooked gems in their system the last couple of years (though Tyler Rogers certainly would stand as an example of that at the start of the new regime).
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