It's the "Pitchers and Catchers Report" Free for All Mailbag
We’re on the verge of opening up another season of SF Giants baseball, as camp opens in just a few days, and the familiar sounds of balls popping against leather will echo around the Scottsdale desert.
It’s “Hope springs eternal” time of year! But, I gotta be honest with you, as I rummaged through this month’s questions, I did not get a warm fuzzy feeling from you all! A decided pessimism seems to have its claws in the hearts of Giants’ fans. And I get it, despondency certainly seems to be the feeling of the moment. Watching a team that is supposed to be a financial giant give away real major league assets to save a couple mil is a pretty depressing sight!
But it’s nearly spring, and the sun is starting to warm my flesh when I go outside, and flowers will be peeking through my still-frozen yard soon. I’ve decided that I find no pleasure in being angry or doom spiraling. I am pledging to do my best to find joy and respite in this crazy game we have chosen to care about. So, let’s get a happy spirit in our hearts and a smile on our faces for the next few weeks at least. If the harsh glare of summer wipes them away yet again, we won’t have lost anything important, just a few days of lightened spirits. With all that said, I’ll do my best to answer your queries — but I might push back on a little of the negativity here and there!
It’s baseball in the spring, when everyone is in the best shape of their lives and hope really does spring eternal. Let’s get to the bag…
There's been a lot of bad news in the recent weeks, what are some positive or exciting Giants related stories you're looking forward to this year?
Hey, there’s the hopeful attitude I was looking for! Thanks, Griffin! You really did make me smile with this question.
Let’s see, things that I am really looking forward to in the coming weeks and months:
Jung-Hoo Lee pushing the reset button on his MLB career;
Watching Matt Chapman’s throws from third (and dingers!);
Willy Adames’ energy (and dingers!);
Heliot Ramos and Tyler Fitzgerald showing their first years weren’t a fluke;
I want to see Kyle Harrison and/or Hayden Birdsong shoving against big leaguers the way I saw them do in the minors;
Getting to really watch a legend like Justin Verlander do his thing and try to push back Father Time, even if the Father will have his way;
Hoping some young kids like Luis Matos, Marco Luciano, or Grant McCray can make the adjustments necessary to become real big leaguers;
We’ll have to wait until June, but Josuar de Jesus Gonzalez’s pro debut certainly qualifies;
And, of course, what does Bryce Eldridge do for a second act?
With the recent trade of Taylor Rogers, Erik Miller seems to be the only left handed reliever on the 26-man roster. I imagine and hope that they will swing a trade for another lefty before spring training begins. Still, it begs the question, what other lefties do the Giants have in their system who might make that step forward for a relief role on the big league roster this season? Joey Lucchesi & Carson Whisenhunt both come to mind, although they're both considered starters. Who else is close to winning a spot in the bullpen? Thanks!
Hi Jodi. Yes, the Giants are a bit light on the left side of the pen — a situation that isn’t helped out any by both Reggie Crawford and Juan Sanchez going under the knife last summer (Crawford is likely out until next year; Sanchez should be making rehab appearances in the second half of 2025).
It seems like the competitors for a second lefty are likely to come from the group of Non-Roster Invitations. That definitely will include Lucchesi, who has been a starter throughout his career, but probably only has a path to a roster spot in the pen. But it also should include recently signed MiLB FA like: former Tampa Bay Ray, Enny Romero, who has spent the last few years in Asia, and is coming off a terrific Dominican Winter League performance; Ethan Small, the former Brewers’ 1st round pick who was a member of the Giants’ 40-man for much of last year while rehabbing from injury; Raymond Burgos, who made his big league debut last year with the Giants only to be almost immediately DFA’d; and Antonio Jimenez, who worked his way up to Triple-A in the Rays’ organization before hitting free agency. It’s even possible that longtime Giants’ farmhand, Chris Wright, who missed all of last year with an unspecified injury, might be healthy and read to insert himself into the mix as well.
I’d guess there will be more NRI who we haven’t yet heard about when pitchers and catchers report next week as well. However, I wouldn’t expect Whisenhunt to be part of the mix — the Giants aren’t likely to be interested in moving him away from his starter role so quickly. That’s where his value is likely to come.
But you never know what anonymous NRI is going to capture the attention of fans. Remember when Sam Long thrilled us all with his brilliant camp back in 2021? He ultimately didn’t last with the Giants, but Sam was pretty darned good as a member of the Royals’ bullpen last season.
In reading about "reliever risk" in the most recent top-50 installment I was wondering: is that risk higher for the international kids compared to those who arrive via the draft? And for those drafted, is that risk higher for a high-school draftee vs a college arm?
So, about the term “reliever risk.” Obviously, there is a point in a pitcher’s career where the opposing hitters might let them know that they are not a capable starter. That’s true for guys who just arrived in the majors (like Sean Hjelle, for instance, or perhaps Tristan Beck), and it’s true for guys who have been successful starters in MLB for years (Michael Kopech was moved to the pen last year, and the latest rumors have Lance Lynn looking to sign a deal as a reliever).
But that specific term — “reliever risk” — when applied to pitching prospects, is usually pointing at some specific aspect of a pitcher that heightens the probability that they will be pointed to the relief path at some point — other than the fact that the highest level is just really hard.
Usually, that “something” fits in one of these categories:
Max-Effort Delivery: when a pitcher’s mechanics cause their arms to practically lose contact with their body in order to reach top velocity, their sustainability as a starter becomes dubious;
Low Velos: maybe going all out for 20 pitches would help tick it up?
Poor Command: it’s one thing to crank up the pitch count trying to get three outs; it’s another thing entirely to try to navigate through 18 or 21 that way;
Body Type issues: a lot of evaluators thought Tim Lincecum was destined for the pen because they didn’t believe he’d hold up to the demands of starting at his diminutive size, the Giants thought he could do it. Turned out both sides were kinda right (but the Giants were more right).
Narrow Repertoire: there’s a reason why bullpens from time immemorial have been loaded with “sinker/slider types.” Because the fastball and slider both tend to have significant platoon splits, this common sort of two-pitch pitcher lacks a weapon to get opposite-side hitters out, making it more difficult to navigate a lineup and turn it over.
Now, to jazz’s question, I don’t believe there is anything specific to national origin that would make a pitcher more or less likely to fall into one of those categories. However, for many years, young Latin pitchers signed on the international market have worked at a disadvantage that very often tends to push them towards the bullpen — and that is the way that their Rule 5 clock works. Essentially, young IFA pitchers have always been folded in with high school draftees for the purpose of Rule 5 protection. The dividing line for how many years a player gets has always been signing at age 19. College kids get one less year than high school and international players who sign at 18 or younger.
But this has always ignored the crucial distinction between being an 18-year-old pitcher beginning your pro career and being a 16-year-old pitcher beginning your pro career. Where most high school draftees can manage to get into the upper minors by the time they need to be protected (Kyle Harrison, for instance, had already made his major league debut by that point), it is not all that uncommon for a player who starts in the DSL to have only made it up to Low-A by that point in time. Once a pitcher is added to the 40-man (as happened with, say Randy Rodriguez, or, back in the day, Edwin Escobar), the options clock begins ticking. As there are still a lot of refinements and improvements (and simple maturation) for a pitcher to go through between Low-A and MLB, at some point, the need to get them to the majors before they run out of options will pressure teams to move an unfinished product to the pen to get a look at their arm before they run out of time.
This small administrative regulation has had, in my opinion, a fairly significant influence in the relative paucity of IFA players who start regularly in MLB. The Giants are probably the most extreme example of this. Other than Osvaldo Fernandez, who defected out of Cuba and signed with the Giants at the age of 29, they have not had a player that they signed to an international free agent contract start a game for them since the ill-fated Salomon Torres, way back in 1994. THAT is a long, long time! (For those wondering, Jonathan Sánchez is from Puerto Rico, and was drafted by the Giants out of Ohio Dominican University.
But, as I’ve written a few times, the pandemic has unwittingly helped this by moving the IFA signing date from July to January, which has effectively given all players signed on that market an extra year of development before Rule 5 protection comes calling for them. We’ll see in time if this helps keep more young pitchers from Hispanic countries on a starter track in the future.
As a Giants fan, I have tunnel vision on the organization. What do you think other organizations that are doing a better job of developing talent are doing that the Giants are not?
Hi Wayne, I think we all know that tunnel-vision feeling. I guess I’d want to point out that, for the most part, a lot of this is cyclical, and talent comes in waves sporadically for one team and then another. The Braves produced the core of a perennial contender within a few short years, but have had a farm system considered to be on the short list of worst in baseball for the last couple of years. Houston used their farm system to build a team that has gone to the playoffs eight straight years, and won two World Series titles in that time (bang, bang). Now they have the worst system in baseball, and I think there’s a decent gap between 30 and 29. The Orioles were the toast of the industry a couple of years ago, but the well is starting to run dry, as most of that group has ascended to the majors. Now, it’s the Red Sox turn, but who knows if this is something that will continue on into the future.
Even the Dodgers, that scion of player development success, has been running a little over their skis for a few years now, I think. While the rest of MLB is always eager to trade for their prospects, they really haven’t come up with a starting major leaguer since Will Smith back in 2019, and in a matter of a couple of weeks last month, they rid themselves of the two players who had topped their system rankings in the last few years (Diego Cartaya, DFA’d, and Gavin Lux, sent to Cincinnati).
So, it’s always good to start from an understanding that this is really hard, and nobody has broken the code. Nobody should know that better than Giants’ fans, who watched an extraordinary run of homegrown talent in the 00s run dry with the suddenness of an arroyo.
But to get back to your question, I think there are a couple things to point to, and I wrote about some of these things in a recent post on the state of the system.
First, I think they could be spending more in player development. It feels like ever since the pandemic, the organization has been squeezing the budgets a bit on this side of the organization. If my sense of that is true, it’s definitely short sighted, as the best clubs throw real money into the PD departments. Even getting the best tech and the largest staff is something of a drop in the bucket compared to signing a premium free agent like Adames, and the benefits can be huge, so it’s a self-inflicted wound to skimp on investment here even when times are tight.
Second, I’m not sure the Giants have always kept up with the cutting edge of technology in player development. One thing that Farhan Zaidi did well was bring the club up to speed on pitch shape work, and that has paid dividends with some of the real success the Giants have shown in moving pitching talent towards their big league club the last few years. But at the same time, the team has been late to jump on the bat speed training techniques that have helped clubs like Baltimore and Boston see real success at hitter development. I should say here, that there is some growing evidence that bat speed training isn’t necessarily “sticky,” and once players stop using the training, some of the gains go away quickly, which lessens its value (which may be another example of the cyclical nature of things).
And then lastly, as I think my guest Joe Doyle put it well on a recent podcast episode, I don’t know that the Giants have really honed in on a thing they do particularly well. I don’t think they have really had an organizational identity — “this is what we value and this is the kind of player we do a good job of developing.” That’s not entirely true, as, again, the pitching side has had more coherence, I think, than the hitting side. It’s something of an irony that the best hitters the team developed in the Zaidi years — Ramos and Fitzgerald — were both very different from the type of hitter that Zaidi often talked about valuing. The fact that he couldn’t see success with the type of player he valued most suggests that something was out of sync.
It takes a lot of smart and dedicated people all rowing their oars in the same direction to make this process work.
You have previously made an excellent case that our development system (particularly on the hitting side) lacks a unified vision and blueprint for implementation. Looking at the current state of the system, it is hard to argue that the Zaidi era was a success in terms of transforming our system into a credible strength. It's a bit underwhelming to see our affiliates running back the exact same staffs as last year. What signs will you look for as evidence that our new regime understands the primacy of transforming our farm system into a strong one? What hires? What visible training methods? What on field metrics will give you rays of hope in this regard?
What's your view on the "brain drain' that the organization has seen post 2021. Feels like they have lost a lot of highly respected - if not the most respected names in the industry, Bannister Bailey etc. Feels like a lot of organization roles have been left empty after the person occupying them found a new job.
Also, is JDJG going to start the year in the ACL or the DSL?
Before I get into my answer here, I do feel the need to point out that we have one reader concerned about too many people leaving the organization, and another concerned that not enough have! This is probably as good a comment on the complications that tend to result from regime change as any.
For at least a couple of years, when asked whether I believed that the team should move on from Farhan Zaidi’s leadership, my answer was pretty consistently that this was a thing not to be desired, because organizational change is a naturally fragile period which often results in a lot of lost human resources for one reason or another. People are tied to old leadership and feel they no longer fit, people get nervous about their place in the new structure, people are misevaluated, or change simply provides the push that many need to look elsewhere. There are opportunities that obviously come with change, but there are also lurking dangers. It is, frankly, shocking, and a bit unnerving to see long-time member of the front office, Yeshayah Goldfarb, leaving the org (Yashayah is someone I’ve really enjoyed chatting with the last few years when I’ve seen him around Papago or in Richmond, and I’ve gained real insights from him).
Understanding that some of this is simply the natural result of change management, I do think the Giants will need to keep an eye on — and take seriously — the issue of brain drain. There have been a lot of people leaving the org the last couple of years. Some have been replaced, but many others have not (which is connected to the steady under current regarding the club’s financial situation — the downsizing of staff definitely feels like something deriving from ownership levels).
There have been some external hires this winter, but we’re not seeing the Giants pluck young up and coming minds out of “hot” organizations, the way the Cardinals did in naming their new overlord of Player Development — although I wouldn’t want to understate how positive most reviews I’ve heard have been for new Director of Pro Scouting, Hadi Raad. In the coming years, it would be nice to see some PD hires coming out of other organizations, because intellectual cross-fertilization is, I think, generally a positive thing. It’s good to know what approaches other orgs are taking to make sure you don’t develop blind spots and fall behind in crucial areas.
That said, I have to disagree with Alexi’s view that it’s disconcerting to see the stability of the affiliate coaching staffs as they’ve been announced this week. I think that Buster Posey has taken a very logical approach with the organization in his first year. He’s not throwing out the baby with the bath water, as the old saying goes. He needs time to evaluate performances up and down the org and that should take at least a year. He said when he took over, that he believes there are a lot of dedicated, talented, smart and hard-working people in the organization and he wants to help them do their jobs as effectively and efficiently as possible.
I think that makes sense — it’s certainly the approach I would take if coming in to a new organizational structure. Give people expectations and goals and watch to see how they fulfill them, rather than just come in with a hatchet hacking away at everything that moves. Simply from a logistical perspective, it doesn’t make sense to draw Posey’s attention away from the big league squad to oversee some major turnover of affiliates coaches — especially given the relative paucity of candidates who might be out looking for new orgs in any given winter.
My general sense is that there are a lot of good people on the coaching staffs who do a good job of creating good work environments where players can learn and grow and develop. If you listened to yesterday’s podcast with Dennis Pelfrey, I think you can get a sense of why he’s been highly regarded by players and coaching staff alike. And, I think the work of coaches like Damon Minor and Garvin Alston (both since rewarded with big league assignments) has been instrumental to improvements by players like Heliot Ramos, Tyler Fitzgerald, Ryan Walker, and others.
The big question is going to be this issue of benchmarks and metrics — and that, I think is going to be one of the really fascinating story lines of the next year or two. Both Posey and Randy Winn have talked about trying to figure out what benchmarks they want to establish for this system, and I can’t wait to try to read the tea leaves of what the new Giants value and how they evaluate progress. I don’t think there is any doubt that they “understand the primacy of transforming” the farm system — it seems pretty clear that ownership is not interested in paying market rates for big league talent beyond a certain point.
But the question will be: what strides will they take to try to accomplish this? There is no one path to the destination, and it seems that this club is going to try to chart their own unique one, which will certainly be a fascinating subplot to watch this year.
Oh, and Joe: look for Gonzalez to start and spend the summer in the DSL.
Wonder if you have any insights on how some of the smaller market teams (Guardians, Brewers, etc.) are able to identify and develop players better than the Giants can? Are there a small number of top guys that are just really good, those teams are willing to spend more on PD, or something else?
Hi Yeti, thanks for the question! So, this is similar to Wayne’s question above — in fact, I thought about combining them. But, at the risk of appearing hopelessly Pollyannish, can I suggest that I’m not 100% sure that the Guardians and Brewers really are better at developing players than the Giants? Identifying gets us into the trade area, and there is no doubt that those two clubs have been great at trade acquisitions, so I won’t take us into that area, but I have spent most of the last four years watching the Cleveland system’s Double-A team, and I’ve seen a lot of highly touted players from that club falter and fall short.
The Guardians have been one of the clubs considered state of the art at developing pitching — though those efforts have been on the wane a bit lately, and their starting rotation was sneakily the club’s biggest weakness last year. On offense, they had one homegrown player under 30 who was worth more than 2 WAR last year, Steven Kwan, who was a 5th round pick in 2018. Every team wants to succeed with a mid-round pick, and Kwan’s unique route to success is motivational, but let’s also keep in mind that the Guardians have gotten little to no value out of the top two rounds of their drafts going back for a decade now. Starter Gavin Williams (1.7 career WAR) and catcher Bo Naylor (2.0) are the modest successes they’ve had over a nine-year period.
Now all Cleveland teams have a great head start, because they did manage to land and develop a HOF level talent some 15 years ago in Jose Ramirez (an incredible development success story, because he was a big contact, zero power guy as a tiny kid prospect). Once you’ve hit the mother lode in a single superstar, more modest successes around the periphery of the roster tend to add up quickly. But I don’t know that Ramirez’s existence is any more evidence that Cleveland is great at identifying and developing “Ramirez-type” players than Buster Posey’s existence a decade and a half ago proved that the Giants were great at identifying and developing catchers.
Milwaukee might well be coming into a superstar of their own, with Jackson Chourio’s quick rise to early and impressive major league success. Their international department has really been doing a great job lately, and there are some exciting young talents in the system. So, it is quite possible that in a few years the narrative around their development will be significantly different (and better!). But outside of Chourio, is there actual evidence that the Brewers are particularly good at developing hitters?
The best homegrown position player on the team other than Chourio last year was Brice Turang, who is basically the 2b equivalent of Patrick Bailey — a truly gifted defender (Turang was also, at one time, considered a likely 1-1 pick in his draft, before he fell down the 1st round over what have turned out to be pretty justified concerns about his ability to impact the ball offensively). Once again, if you look at the top of their drafts over the last decade, you see a lot of misses piling up (Corey Ray, Keston Hiura, Tristan Lutz, the Giants’ Ethan Small, even Lucas Erceg, whom they drafted as a 3b and is now finding success having reinvented himself as a pitcher). Their major league team is always starved for offense — and nearly every year, they take a bat or two at the top of their drafts whom they hope will be part of the solution.
Milwaukee and Cleveland deserve tons of credit for the way they have maintained success year after year. To accomplish something like that, an organization needs to be fully integrated top to bottom and department to department. They need to collaborate well and share a vision throughout their efforts. Both organizations have come out on the positive side of plenty of trades, big and small. The Brewers seem to be outstanding at game preparation and planning (reminding me that I really do miss Kai Correa’s presence). They’ve both gotten a lot of the right kind of people into their locker room (the Giants, of course, hope to steal some of the Brewers’ winning mojo with Willy Adames’ talent). And, yes, they’ve both had some real hits on the player development side on occasion.
But it’s not like these clubs — or any others to be honest — have, in my friend Grant Brisbee’s favorite term, a conveyor belt to the top. Conveyor belts don’t exist in this game. You hope to get the big hit that makes a difference now and again, and from there, a club has to be good at filling in around the edges and looking for competitive advantages at the top level. But every club struggles with this. Every club has misses that hurt. And every club is constantly trying to figure out how to do it better.
The Giants have had some real wins in player development this decade — Logan Webb, Bailey, maybe Heliot Ramos and Tyler Fitzgerald — heck the entire back end of the bullpen — and hopefully Bryce Eldridge will join that group. I would also say that players like Mike Yastrzemski, LaMonte Wade, Jr., and Thairo Estrada really have been player development successes as well. I saw a lot of Yaz in Bowie, and the guy who has been in San Francisco the last six years is a very different player.
Look, I get that I’m kind of arguing both sides of this point — something I’ll admit I have a proclivity for. The burden of proof is on the Giants. They haven’t found their next generation of stars — they’ve struggled even to find solid starters (though that worm has maybe started to turn). Until they do that, they’ll deserve skepticism that they can. But I push against the idea that anybody else has player development all figured out. Everybody has disappointments, and luck is a big part of the story for every club.
It’s true, the Giants haven’t made it all come together yet. And they haven’t produced a star of the Ramirez caliber (not many have, which is why he’s Cooperstown bound). If you get a Ramirez or a Posey or a Mookie Betts, things have a way of turning in your favor (unless, of course, you decide to be huge flaming morons and give the guy away to the Dodgers for a bag of highly non-magical beans). Hopefully, Eldridge, or Gonzalez or Rayner Arias will turn out to be those types of players for the Giants. In the meantime, piling up the small wins isn’t bad either.
First, thanks for all you do and can’t wait for another full season of your coverage!
We all know the Giants are short on bats and quite long on young, close to ML-ready arms. Do you still see any trades in that sense being made before the season starts to boost the lineup? Or is this what we go into the season with and figure it out from there?
If Luis Arraez is available, would he make sense for the Giants? He has a very specific skill set that fits Oracle, can take pressure off playing Fitzgerald at 2B, can spell at 1B, and slots in second in the order as a contact guy behind Lee. Or is that not high enough of a priority for the club, at this point?
I really did believe at the beginning of the winter that trying to hook up with Cleveland on a trade for Josh Naylor made sense. And, given the return on Cleveland’s eventual deal — a depth starter who looks ok in Stuff+ models but hasn’t had much success in the big leagues yet — it really is kind of hard to believe the Giants couldn’t have found a match there. Sigh.
That said, I feel like commentators around baseball are always trying to make up trade fits between teams that produce a lot of pitching and teams that produce a lot of hitting (I listen to a fantasy baseball podcast that has been trying to concoct arms for bats deals for the Marlins for most of the last decade). It strikes me that teams don’t really like those deals all that much, because the risk and attrition rates for young pitchers are so much higher than those for hitters, so if you’re dealing in the relative “unknown” factor of a player who hasn’t yet produced solid big league value, teams with hitters will want to keep those guys in house. That’s not to say that no such deals ever happen (Jazz Chisholm for Zac Gallen!), but it does seem to me that teams that move a young hitter for a young pitcher can come to regret things in the end (Randy Arozarena for Matthew Liberatore still lingers in the trade winds).
Which is a long-winded way of saying that I’m really not sure that there are any obvious deals out there for them to make. We know that they checked in on both Kyle Tucker and Luis Robert, Jr. this winter (Garrett Crochet, too, I think?), but without much success. Andy Baggarly reported earlier this winter that Posey and GM Zack Minasian have been burning up the phone lines looking for potential trade partners, but, as of yet, teams are trying to leverage the inexperience of the Giants’ brain trust to try and scam them on an overpay. I do like the idea of picking up Arraez — the club clearly needs another bat, I think — but it does seem like an open question whether ownership is willing to add even that limited amount of money at this time (or whether AJ Preller would want to salary dump a useful player onto a division rival).
Until some of the Giants’ young players go from “promising” to “established,” they might continue to have trouble finding trade matchups in an industry that does seem to be somewhat skeptical of their player development system. I just don’t think they’re going to get a lot of benefit of the doubt on “promise” or “potential” right now. It’s a tough loop to be stuck in.
Do you think the league may be at the beginning of a change in ownership structure? It’s my understanding the Guggenheim group allows the Dodgers to spend like it does. Is this the future for baseball or pro sports in general?
That’s a good question, Travis. I will say that simply in the way that business evolves, it would make sense for more financial groups or venture capitalists to buy into sports ownership — having a lot of capital is always a great place to start from.
That said, I don’t know that I believe that the Guggenheim group is pouring a lot of a capital from other areas of their portfolio into the Dodgers’ operation. I think the Dodgers naturally have a ton of revenue sources. They attract FAR more attendance than any other team — not just finishing first in attendance every year, but most years finishing first by more than a half a million paying customers over the second-best club — and all of those fans pay to park in the lot and buy their Dodger Dogs. Their TV distribution deal is now the envy of baseball (and maybe all American sports). And, of course, the presence of Shohei Ohtani is a game-changer in terms of revenue sources, as he brings all sorts of vendor deals and sponsorships, as well as distribution to Japan (where all Dodger games are now televised live, I believe).
The Dodgers definitely have gained possession of the Golden Goose at this point, and what’s more, they have the willingness to put it to use, where it seems virtually every other ownership group is looking for ways to whittle down costs.
How do you see the Giants stocking the cupboard with high end prospect talent while maintaining an on-field team people will pay to see? Keith Law just ranked the Giants’ farm system 26th. Others have similar views. Posey inherited a nightmare IMHO, but at least ownership is willing to spend more than most. But without a farm system that adds depth to back up the major league team, we are looking at another mediocre season at best. I can see a lot of deadline trades in the Giants’ future but in all reality, what Giants’ players are even going to be on some other team’s wish list to make a trade for high end prospects possible?
Easy to say, hard to do: they have to not miss on their top guys as often. In Keith Law’s blurb on the Giants in his org ranking, he points one simple finger of blame:
The Giants have had a lot of first-round draft misses … and it’s killed the system, to be completely candid.
I don’t know if I’d use the word “killed” personally, but I think he’s pointing at the right issue. Law only went back through the 1st round picks of the Zaidi years, but consider this stretch of drafts:
It’s not all bad news! Patrick Bailey is polishing the first of many Gold Gloves and Heliot Ramos could conceivably end the 30 HR drought (and the left fielder drought as well). Joe Panik was a solid player who might have been more had the injury bug left him alone. But you simply can’t get this little value from the top of drafts over this long a time and not feel the sting of it eventually (not without really stumbling into an Albert Pujols-in-the-13th-round-level victory lower down). If we continue the above list into the decade immediately preceding it, the comparison couldn’t be more stark:
One decade building up, one building down. I know that I was told one time by somebody formerly in the Giants’ front office, that that drought coincided with the Giants’ implementing a draft model some 15 years ago. That’s not to say that models are bad or good — every team uses them now — but it does suggest that maybe the inputs in the models the Giants have used could stand some tweaking.
To make matters worse, the Giants went through a nearly two-decades’ long drought on the international market at the same time — between Pablo Sandoval’s signing in 2003 and Camilo Doval’s in 2017, that area of acquisition was a true wasteland. Whenever they spent big (Angel Villalona, Rafael Rodriguez, Gustavo Cabrera, Lucius Fox), the results tended towards catastrophe. And when they spent small, they tended to get small results (or, predictably, none at all). For years, I’ve been writing about the IFA Class of 2018 (Marco Luciano, Luis Matos) as a moment in franchise history that could come to equal the draft of 2008 (Posey, Brandon Crawford). But so far, that hasn’t come to fruition, and if they fail to get even adequate big leaguers from that pair, the pain of missed opportunity will continue to be felt throughout the organization. Those million dollar signings are their own type of 1st round pick, and, once again, it’s a long list of misses.
In the end, it’s really about nailing the evaluations — from all perspectives, talent, tools, desire, makeup — and then providing the resources to nurture these young talents. In other words, my answer is that I don’t think the Giants have been constrained by access to talent over the last 12-15 years. It’s not a result of whether they are winning or not on the big league level. There is nothing structural or systematic driving their poor track record. They just haven’t called the right names often enough — or haven’t had the right fortune with the names they have called (which is another necessary element in the process). This is a results-based industry, and nothing excuses away a lack of results. On the other hand, a couple of positive results will burnish reputations in a hurry. Let us hope that’s the direction things go. Because the team has already endured one of its longest stretches of prolonged failure in franchise history. The guys who are potential stars in this system — Eldridge and Gonzalez — need to hit that level of impact. And they need to be followed by more good players after that.
I will say that Kiley McDaniel’s org rankings at ESPN added an important caveat to all of this. While ranking the Giants’ 29th, he ended by noting: “This is a down cycle after graduating so many young players; I'd bet the Giants rank a good bit higher at this time next year.” From your lips to God’s ears, Kiley, and let’s hope that Harrison and Birdsong and Luciano and others all find another gear in their post-prospect development as well.
As always, loving all the insights we’re privileged to get from you Roger! Saw some unsubstantiated social media chatter that Mason Black was trying out the “kick change” grip. Anything you can confirm or deny about that?
Tangentially, I find it interesting and curious how many of the Giants’ pitchers have found different roads to a particular kind of movement profile on their changeup. At least from what I can tell, Logan Webb, Hayden Birdsong, Landen Roupp, and Spencer Bivens all now throw some version of a power change that has more velocity and drop than the average RHP cambio and significantly less arm side fade. Is this just a funny coincidence? Is it the Giants’ preference for Webb-like cambios filtering down through their dev teams? Are the Giants good at developing this kind of pitch, or am I only wondering that because Daniel Blair and Hayden happened to be offseason training buddies? Hope that wasn’t too many ways to ask the same question, thanks again!
You’re too kind! I, in fact, am the privileged one. Because of you subscribers, I get to spend my time chasing down players on back fields around the country (and even further afield this year, I’m hoping).
As for your question, I believe I’ve heard that Joe Whitman is trying it out, too! Add one to your list!
I don’t know that I’d put an organizational or programmatic spin on it, Slightly, professional sports have always been a copy-cat world, and Birdsong’s success with the pitch last year was certain to inspire others — especially his friends and teammates who are constantly picking each other’s brains and trying out each other’s grips and tricks — to see if they could achieve the same quantum leap he had made.
Changeups are, at one and the same time, a crucial pitch for an arsenal — because they are one of the least prone to major platoon splits — and an incredibly difficult pitch to master. ‘Feel’ and confidence are critical components of having a great change — and they just don’t come easy. Having mechanical devices that create the changeup’s effectiveness — as Webb discovered with his Seam-Shifted Wake experimentations, and Birdsong found in the rare (a year ago, at least, maybe not so much this year) “kick” change, can help take some of the “feel” requirement out of it and bring more consistency to the pitch.
In addition, as with sliders and breaking balls, data has shown that off-speed pitches that come in above 85 mph tend to be effective even with less than perfect shape and movement. As is the case with fastballs, everybody is chasing velocity in every pitch they throw. That’s modern ball.
You often talk about the harm of hitting prospects losing a year. Specifically, I'm thinking of Rayner Arias essentially losing two years - the discourse with Arias seems to be that he's actually damaged by two lost years, rather than just delayed. Could you expound on that? Is it rust that is hard to wash off? Is it that a player has a finite number of years in which they can be learning things like recognizing pitches, and those are being squandered? To the naked eye, it would seem that losing two years of development wouldn't hurt a prospect so much as delay their debut by two years, but it seems clear that's not the case. Would love to better understand why that is.
This is something you hear a lot from Player Development people, and I know I’ve heard it from Kyle Haines before — with young players, you just want to feed them reps, to the point that getting them the reps really matters more than what they actually do with them (which is maybe something to remember in Walker Martin’s case).
Without getting too far over my skis here (because I’m no brain doctor), the way I think of this is something akin to brain plasticity. As an infant’s brain is far more capable of absorbing a language than our hard, brittle old adult brain is, so you want to get young players seeing thousands of pitches to get their eyes and brains used to those shapes, speeds, and movement patterns. And the younger they are as they absorb that information, the more valuable it is to them later on.
In essence, a batter’s swing is the result of what we think of in the computer/statistical analysis world as modeling. The brain creates a model of the movement it expects from a pitch in real time — and, for that to work, as with any software program, you need to feed the machine crap tons of data early on, so it can run simulations over and over millions of times, learn from its mistakes, and get better at the modeling process.
Again, I will say this is how my decidedly amateurish brain has understood the things that player development officials have said to me, but I think I’m on the basic track with this. It’s true, of course, that many players miss time with injuries and overcome that to go on to excellent things — and I think we all still have high hopes for Arias doing just that (as do the Giants).
But I will say that when I saw him at 16 (my god!) in spring camp 2023, I thought his ability to recognize spin from older pitchers was advanced for his age. When I saw him at 18 the end of the summer last year, I thought his ability to recognize spin was a little behind other players. That’s the result of two years of lost reps and two years of mostly not seeing spin. Can he recover? Of course! Adults can learn foreign languages (at least, I’m told that’s true — my multi-year efforts on Duo Lingo certainly aren’t proving the point any). Ronald Acuña, Jr. missed a huge section of his age-18 season and was still in the majors at 20. Arias is still a very talented player with the tools and game knowledge to develop into a very good big leaguer.
But it gets harder to stash those reps inside the gray matter and use them to zoom up the learning curve the older a player is. Arias will come to Papago Park in March still a couple months shy of his 19th birthday, and get back into the “rep acquiring” business at about the same age as most high school prospects, so it’s not like he’s suddenly way behind the curve. But he’ll never again have the opportunity to see thousands of professional pitches at the ages of 17 and 18, and there is some sort of cost to that loss which can be hard to recover.
It’s Jan 31. Assume the Giants make no other significant moves. Chart a path to how they win 90 games.
We’ll end where we began today — a little bit of hope!
I don’t think all of the following need to happen — things will go wrong in a season and you have to find a way to roll with them — but some important clump of the following would be the blueprint. I’ll put these in what I think are weighted order of importance:
Good health! This roster is way too thin to endure another bad run of injuries;
Mere competence on the road — stop turning into the Rockies every time they leave Oracle;
Chapman, Adames, and Webb continue to be the 4-5 WAR players they are, with maybe a career season from one of them;
Verlander and Ray show up and provide innings; if they want to give something like their 2023 and 2021 versions (respectively) for at least a couple of months, that would be nice, too;
Ramos and Fitzgerald are at least as good as their 2024 versions;
Kyle Harrison and/or Hayden Birdsong turns into a Dude, a lá Webb in ‘21;
Somebody from the Encarnacion/Villar/Matos/Luciano group pops off in a Darin Ruf 2021 or Mike Yastrzemski 2019 sort of way;
Get a lopsided season series result against one NL West competitor; whether it’s a drudging of the woebegone Rox or catching a Fathers team in disarray, jumping on some opponent’s throat (as they did when they went 17-2 vs the D’backs in 2021) can really help!
Beyond all of those specific personnel results, however, something I think is at least as important is that the culture of the team shifts. It’s always been my personal belief that the real secret to the 2021 team’s success was an ability to sustain intensity game after game for six months. They played at playoff series intensity for at least the last four months of that year — never taking a game off, never letting the fatigue of a Sunday night game on the East coast followed by a Monday night game on the West Coast cause them to phone it in for a night. It’s hard to keep that up over the course of the year.
The last few Giants’ teams have been prone to prolonged periods of flat, uninspired play. That’s something that comes from the character of the team, and it’s something that will need to change for success to come. I don’t know if Posey’s presence in the locker room as an Executive can provide the same whip-hand that he did as a teammate, but between him, Adames, Chapman, and Webb, the team will have to find a way to build a culture of winning for itself, and hold everybody to that standard for the next six to eight months.
(It would be nice if somebody could hold ownership accountable, as well, by picking them up by the ankles and shaking until some more money starts to tumble out of their pockets, but that’s not quite the hopeful sentiment I’m looking to foment here).
With that, I’ll close the bag up until March. I apologize if I didn’t get to everybody, but I really want to get back to the Top 50, so I didn’t want to split this month’s into two pieces. Maybe in March, when I’m sure we’ll all be excited by the return of real games!
Enjoy the flowerings of spring, everybody!
Roger:
Have not yet read the new mailbag you just published, but I want to take a minute to give you a big THANK YOU for the excellent work you have done on the top 50 prospects. You give us strong and solid information on our MiLB prospects. Your attention to detail and deep dive information helps us watch and learn about the paths these young men are taking in their effort to realize their dream of playing organized (MLB) baseball. Much appreciated. Now I'll read the mailbag!
Especially good mailbag. Thanks!