Photo Credit: SF Giants
Crocuses and magnolia trees are blossoming in my neighborhood, and every day brings new footage of bullpen sessions and BP — complete with Heliot Ramos hitting balls off the batter’s eye! Spring is in full sproing! Let’s celebrate by cracking open a new mailbag and seeing what’s on the minds of There R Giants’ readers everywhere!
Unfortunately, one thing that tends to come in bunches when players first report to camp is bad injury news from the preceding months, and we’ve definitely had some biggies this week. In addition to players in big league camp, like Keaton Winn and Kai-Wei Teng, being pushed to the sidelines for a bit, The Athletic’s Keith Law reported this week two major surgeries that took place this winter for Giants’ prospects. In his Giants’ prospect list, Law reported that shortstop Aeverson Arteaga had had thoracic outlet surgery in the fall, and Gerelmi Maldonado, who ended the year on the IL with elbow tenderness, has had Tommy John surgery. I’ll be honest, both of those came as a surprise to me (particularly Maldonado’s TJ), but I have since confirmed both with the Giants. We won’t be seeing Maldonado at all this year (which knowledge probably would have changed my placement of him in the 50) and Arteaga’s timeline is unclear, but I’d expect it will start with some time in extended.
On the bright side, one formerly injured prospect is back again. Sweet!
Of course, when I get out to Papago, I’m sure I’ll find more players who don’t appear to be taking part in activities to tell you about. It is the way of every spring. For those who have asked, I will be heading out to Papago Park in mid-March, so we’re still a few weeks away from Camp Notes — but I’m as eager to get them as you are to read them. Won’t be too much longer now.
As always, I want to thank all of my subscribers for making it possible for me to do this work, and offer everyone else the opportunity to get thanked in the future.
And now, to your questions…
Is there a world where Whiz or Birdsong see big league time before the all star break? How do they look so far?
Well, let’s take a peek at the ol’ multiverse…
Sure, I would say if you run 14,000,605 different possible futures, you’d likely run into quite a few that saw Carson Whisenhunt or Hayden Birdsong up in the next six months.
Heck, in Whisenhunt’s case, we might need to run quite a few simulations to find a future in which he ISN’T up before then. After all, in the world we’re actually in, he can’t be much more than about two more lat strains away from a shot at the Opening Day roster. Where would we imagine he currently sits on the Starting Pitcher Depth Chart, after all? Beyond the current healthy four of Logan Webb, Kyle Harrison, Jordan Hicks, and Tristan Beck, I’d say the contingency plan would be something like Kai-Wei Teng (already down and delayed to start the year), Spencer Howard or maybe former A’s pitcher Daulton Jeffries (coming off a multitude of injuries and surgeries), and then someone like Mason Black? Whisenhunt can’t be too far behind if more ill fortune befalls the spring camp.
That may not be exactly right, but it sure doesn’t feel like there are a wealth of other candidates should ill-fortune befall the staff in spring. It’s not exactly going to take a Rube Goldberg-esque chain of events for Whisenhunt’s name to pop up to the top of the list. Whether Whisenhunt would be ready to take up such an opportunity is a very different question. I tend to be a little conservative, I suppose, but I think more time to work on the non-changeup elements of his game would be to his ultimate benefit.
Now for Birdsong, I would say the case is very different. Though his upside may be as strong as any pitcher in the system, he ended his 2023 with some pretty serious “TO DO” boxes in need of checking before he’s a serious candidate for a callup, as I detailed in his Top 50 post just this week. So for Birdsong, the situation really is more about his development than anything else. I don’t believe the Giants would turn to him as a contingency — they’d bullpen their way through situations as necessary (I suspect we’ll see plenty of that again this year).
Instead, Birdsong’s progress will be determined by how well he handles the challenges in front of him: more consistent strike throwing with all of his pitches, further refinement of the slider and maybe some work on the change, consistency with the deadly curve. If he takes those further steps in his development, then this will start to be a question worth considering. For now, I’d imagine he returns to Richmond to start and gets busy working to force decisions. For me, he’s in a very similar place to where Black started 2023, and following Black’s path for the year would be the most likely future scenario.
Pavs said yesterday that the Giants are hopeful that Reggie Crawford moves quickly. How realistic is that given how few innings he's pitched? What innings limit do you expect for him this season?
It’s all a matter of expectations. As I noted in my Top 50 write up of Crawford, it seems most likely to me that the Giants are thinking about how they might take advantage of Crawford’s talents in a relief role this year. The process of building him up to a starter’s load is almost certainly going to be a multi-year process — he’s simply thrown too few innings in his life.
It makes far more sense to view both Pavs’ tweet and Dave Flemming’s statement on the podcast (that some in the organization raised the possibility of Crawford appearing in the majors last year) through the lens of pitch quality. That is the perspective through which most front offices are now evaluating pitchers and making personnel decisions.
Crawford has truly advanced stuff. He’s a big-build left-hander who can get his fastball into the upper 90s, throws a break-down breaker, and is a reasonably good strike thrower given his paucity of reps. The Giants almost certainly want to make use of those bullets far sooner than the long-term process of building him up as a starter candidate might allow for. He has “Now” stuff, but “way way Then” outlook as a starter.
So why not take the Jordan Hicks/David Price/Adam Wainwright route instead? Get his immense stuff up to the majors where he can start competing and helping the club win now, and if, at some point in the future, you want to think about getting even more value out of him as a starter, then that’s something that can be dealt with in due time over an offseason.
Crawford has thrown 35.1 official innings over the last five years combined. Add in unofficial innings — fall ball, Team USA, etc, and you probably can’t bump that up much beyond 50 or 60 at a max. I would say that getting him up to 50 innings in the coming season would represent a pretty significant accomplishment (and the fact that he’s already set back once again doesn’t help any). Why not maximize the impact of whatever innings they do get, by moving him as quickly as the stuff allows and not worry about the role so much?
Reggie and Bryce seem like great guys. That said, did the Giants make a mistake drafting 2-way players, as opposed to focusing on elite up-the-middle athletes?
Henrique Gonçalves
Hi Roger, first of all, thanks for the awesome work you do! My first ever mailbag question and I actually have 2 of them. Hope they're not too bad!
With Reggie Crawford moving away from being a 2-way player, do you think Bryce Eldridge is already on the same path or will the Giants give him a real shot at pitching this year?
How does the non-roster invitee pitching group compare to previous years? I can't think of another time there were so many exciting pitching prospects together in camp.
I feel like there's been quite a bit of dismissing of Eldridge's chances as a pitcher, including Longenhagen's recent comment that he is not a two-way player (which I presume to be an incorrect interpretation of his post-draft hitter-only time). But the word on draft day was that he was possibly a top three round pitcher, which is much better than Reggie Crawford was with the bat. Extra patience with the two-way portion should also be possible given that Eldridge is much younger and not recovering from TJ. All of that to say, I understand Eldridge is very exciting as a hitter, and you don't want the pitching disrupting that, but is skepticism on the pitching something you're hearing from the team/industry or solely a reflection on the quality of the bat?
Lots of questions regarding the “Two Way Player” status of Crawford and Eldridge — both of whom have been re-introduced as one-way players this spring. This has always been an overplayed narrative, in my opinion. The Giants weren’t drafting players they truly believed had a chance to develop on both sides of the ball — they liked Crawford as a pitcher and Eldridge as a hitter from the beginning and never sought to conceal that, though in deference to both players they were willing to give things a try. The degree to which the athletes’ “two-way player” status mattered, as Scouting Director Michael Holmes repeatedly said, is that the org valued the athleticism that it takes to be able to compete at a high level on both sides of the ball.
From that perspective, one could say that they were valuing very much the same elements of the game that “MCS” is getting at, I think, with his “elite up the middle” comment. The reason up-the-middle athleticism is so important in baseball scouting is that is translates to every corner of the game. Amateur shortstops and center fielders populate the corners of every big league lineup. Who can forget Michael Morse’s initial MLB appearances coming at the shortstop position? The explosiveness and dynamism it takes to play up the middle is a necessary element when it comes to making the necessary adjustments as players move up and face better and fiercer competition — and gives them an added advantage when some of that explosiveness downshifts with age and they need to move down the defensive spectrum.
In the same way, the Giants believe that a player’s ability to do two such different things as pitch and hit is a good indication of their underlying athleticism — and believe that level of athleticism should help their development. As for “making a mistake” with their focus? Well, not for nothing, but left-handers who throw 100 and teenagers with 70 raw power tend to be pretty highly prized in the baseball industry as well — and populate the 1st round of the draft every year.
As for whether the Giants will give Eldridge a “real shot at pitching,”…. well, hey, what have we here?
Perhaps the only really surprising part of that is the firm move back to 1b, after the Giants spent most of the summer and fall working Eldridge out in RF. But as the history of 6’7” ballplayers is thin to begin with — and even thinner outside of 1b — it’s not a shocking development. Frank Howard really wasn’t the most gifted LF who ever lived. But that man could hit!
It’s not that Eldridge doesn’t have some legitimate talent on a hill — but the potential impact is extremely imbalanced. This may be overstating the issue, but you don’t worry about trying to develop a solid middle relief arm at the cost of slowing the development of a potential MVP-level power bat. The combination of Eldridge’s extreme Exit Velocities, strong swing decisions, and surprising contact ability for a player with such long levers is driving some extreme optimism about his offensive potential. And the Giants don’t want to put any artificial breaks on his ability to move quickly if that bat takes off. Which I guess answers Rae’s question that it is more excitement about the bat than skepticism over the arm that is driving his situation.
Enjoying your top 50 MiLB prospect pieces, Roger. Thank you for your great work. My question: where do you see our top five picks playing (at which level[s]) this year? I hope Bryce Eldridge and Walker Martin ascend to High-A. Joe Whitman, Cole Foster and Maui Ahuna? Best guess on #6-10? Clearly we need to accelerate the pace at which we "grow our own" MLB players vs. acquiring talent from outside the organization.
Thank you very much! I love having a community to share all of my thoughts with and don’t say often enough how much I appreciate all of my supporters! You make my work possible and I never forget it!
As to your question, I’m not entirely sure whether you’re asking where this group will start the year, or my predictions for how high each of them will rise? Certainly, it seems most likely that all of this group (plus the 6-10 draftees) will open at San Jose. That’s been the Giants’ pattern thus far. Of all the players drafted in 2021-22, only Wade Meckler opened his first full season in High-A — and both of those drafts were college-heavy players. Certainly, a draft led by two high school players (one of whom has yet to make his pro debut) wouldn’t be likely to leap over the Low-A level to start out with.
It’s possible that the glut of middle infielders — including this draft class and others like Jose Ramos, Anthony Rodriguez, and Javier Francisco — could force someone to play the Meckler role. If so, my best guess would be Foster, since he at least has some Low-A experience (though, unlike Meckler, Foster’s wasn’t a strong performance there).
As for Whitman, he might not last long in San Jose, but it seems to be pretty clear that the Giants are in no hurry to send their prized young arm straight to early-season Eugene to deal with the cold and rain. I can see him moving up in May, the same way Whisenhunt and Black did, for instance, but I feel good about saying he’ll start in San Jose with most of the rest of his class.
If the question, however, is how far any of these players might advance before the season is over, we’ve seen enough the last couple of years to believe that they can all carry themselves as far as their talent will go. After watching an 8th round ascend through every level to the majors in just five months last summer, I wouldn’t put a limit on the growth of any of these young talents.
However, as for your final comment, I will say that my firm belief is that you can’t promote your way into development; you have to develop your way into promotion. Pushing players faster doesn’t necessarily equate to getting them to be successful faster. It’s true that teams are getting more aggressive about moving their best players, letting the majors serve as the finishing school. But we’ve also seen, since the pandemic, that the gap from Triple-A to the majors appears to be larger than ever at this point, and players need levels of skill and tools that are nearly unmatched to get to that “finishing” point. We certainly saw that proved well enough with the players the Giants pushed to the majors last year, who might have benefited with more time to work on some of the lesser aspects of their game before arriving at the most challenging level.
When I first started following a few years back, I fell in love with Ismael Munguia after reading a profile in that year’s top 50. He has long since fallen out of your top 50 list, and yet he is a consistent NRI at Spring Training. What should I make of these mixed signals?
Well, Joseph, I’m glad to hear that because I’ve always had an abiding affection for Munguia’s game (and the player himself) as well. I’m not sure what to make of your comment that he is a “consistent NRI at Spring Training,” as this year marks his first ever non-roster invite to big league camp, but perhaps the fact that he got called up from the minor league camp for some games last spring is the confusion there?
Anyway, I take it that the question is why Munguia dropped out of my Top 50 the last couple of years. Let us start with the most obvious: Munguia fell out of my Top 50 last winter after missing the entire 2022 season with a wrist injury. Though I did anguish a bit about that — I wanted to squeeze him in at the end last year, but the combination of an injury significant enough to miss a year, his advancing age for a prospect, and uncertain contract status (Munguia was a minor league free agent each of the last two winters), caused me to drop him just off the back end.
This year I was most fortunate to actually get to see Munguia play regularly and interact with him a good bit during the year, and all of his many virtues showed through during the summer. He’s a smart, committed, caring player who brings big energy to every day, shares his knowledge and passion with teammates, gives his all, and is universally beloved by teammates, coaches, and fans. It’s hard to say more than that about a player. He also really wants to win!
But there are still baseball reasons why I left him off of my Top 50 this year (though I certainly did consider them in the back end area). Munguia is an extremely small player, which is not itself something that discounts anybody, but I do think it’s something that can make it hard for him to stay on the field — especially given how hard he plays when he’s out there. And we did see him miss a little more time last year with injury. As he starts to move into his later 20s, being able to recover quickly and overcome the physical demands of the game becomes more and more an issue. As far as skills go, while the top-of-the-order spark plug brings a ton of contact ability to the plate, he doesn’t marry that skill with a great eye (as, for instance, Wade Meckler does), and has a bit too much tendency to chase balls out of the zone. Finally, while he’s a capable defender in all three outfield spots, his reads and routes could still stand some improvement in order to really work as a 4th OF type.
Put all of that together, and I can definitely see Munguia seeing time in the big leagues at some point (and fervently hope that will be the case), but I think ever profiling as a sustainable big leaguer would be more of a challenge. That dropped him down into my 35-level tier which falls just outside the 50. But, of course, I’m rooting for him to rise above that level!
I’ll just finish by noting that Munguia is someone I think will continue to have a career in this game long after he finishes his playing career. I’ve watched him work with his younger teammates and I can see a real passion for teaching the game that I think will always be a driving force for him. He’s also as tough a competitor as you could hope to find. All of which is good enough reason to continue loving him, whether he finds a place on my rankings or not.
Jeff Nelson
Is there eventual hope for Hunter Bishop. How fast is he? Could he be a drag bunt demon like Mickey Mantle was? Can he hit to all fields? Does he get injured training for the NFL combine rather than the fluid muscles and movement required in baseball?
“Hope springs eternal” — is that not the classic baseball saying? Obviously, it’s not a great thing for a player to have as little experience as Bishop has garnered in his career just a few months prior to his 26th birthday. He’s not that far away from the time when physical skills begin declining while his game skills have yet to progress beyond a rudimentary A-ball level. That’s a tough combo to overcome.
As for the many other questions here, I guess I would say: very fast; drag bunts don’t seem to be much in vogue these days; Bishop certainly has all fields power; and no, I don’t believe he has ever trained for an NFL combine, but he certainly is a big, muscular person who generates enormous kinetic power — more than that body of his seems to be able to contain, sadly.
The big thing for Bishop is to get healthy, try to stay healthy, and see what happens. As long as he wants to keep putting in the work and chasing the dream, people are going to be rooting for him to succeed. I know that he certainly has always impressed those around him with his qualities as a person.
Hello. I have some questions about Heliot Ramos. I was surprised when he was drafted in 2017 because he was the type of prospect that the Giants had a terrible track record of developing (i.e., young, athletic, raw, toolsy, outfielder). After almost seven years, unless something drastic happens this season, the best thing I can say about Ramos is that he's better than Wendell Fairley.
A theme that you often repeat is that player development takes a long time with more failures than successes. However, the inability of the Giants to develop prospects like Ramos has been a problem for decades. A success rate of zero (Bryan Reynolds doesn't count), suggests that the Giants, despite their best efforts, are underperforming random chance in developing prospects like Ramos. That's pretty hard to do.
When an organization has such an obvious, systemic flaw, how does it typically address the issue to get better results? What change, if any, have the Giants made in this area? With regard to Ramos, would he have been better off being drafted by another organization? What would it say about Giants player development if Ramos were succeed on another team if he doesn't make it with the Giants?
So, look. Nothing comes closer to the intellectual equivalent of empty junk food calories than retrospective draft critiques. Everybody should have drafted Albert Pujols and Mike Trout! How obvious! That said, you are certainly not wrong that the Giants’ history of drafting and developing high school hitters is an incredibly poor one over the last quarter century — I’m going to have more to say on that topic on Monday, actually.
That said, circa 2017, I would have said that the Giants were in an era of pretty poor player development no matter what kind of player they selected. They were failing to develop refined college hitters, the best college pitching in the land — basically every kind of player. The very next year they took the consensus best, and most polished, college slugger in the draft and have, to date, completely failed to develop him into any kind of positive major league value. The nine years of drafts between 2010 and 2018 constituted a disastrous failure to build on their major league success through their player development — and, as a result, a lot of good baseball people lost their jobs, and the fortunes of the major league club fell into disarray. If you want a single snapshot to encapsulate what exactly has gone wrong with this organization over the past decade, you couldn’t do better than this:
THAT is why the Giants have had one winning season over the last seven years.
How do organizations address obvious systemic flaws? Well, go back and read that previous paragraph first, I guess. A lot of people lost their jobs. Since the hiring of Farhan Zaidi as President of Baseball Operations, the Giants have done a lot of things to attempt to address those systemic issues. They’ve poured money into coaching talent, technology, analytics, and world-class facilities on the player development side. They’ve also turned over just about the entire minor league coaching staff. They’ve increased the size of those staffs, adding data analytics staff, strength and conditioning coaches, nutritionists, as well as other resources. They’ve directed greater focus on the use of data to help identify growth areas for players. They’ve built pitch design resources basically from scratch. They’ve begun to measure virtually everything every player does on a ball field and comb through it all, seeking the measurable that might hold the key to greater success for each player.
In other words, they’ve done what most every other organization in MLB is doing — trying to catch up to the trend setters that really benefited from the data and technology revolution at its inception. And, at the same time, they’ve brought in a lot of new scouts on both the pro and amateur sides and tweaked the models that help those scouts evaluate talent. That’s a lot of doing things!
What they haven’t yet done is seen fully flowing fruits of those investments build into a sustained process of success. Time will tell if all of the changes are leading to something good or not. But given that the team is about to go into a major league season with rookies or second year players at shortstop, catcher, center field, four-fifths of the rotation and probably a good amount in the outfield corners as well, I suspect we’re going to know something fairly significant about that question by the end of the 2024 season. Maybe the answer will even involve some good things for Ramos!
One thing that I think is NOT a good response to having troubles developing young players is to simply stop going after the players you think are the best. High school draftees make up a significant portion of big league regulars and always will. At the same time that the Giants drafted Ramos, they were also working to secure deals with Marco Luciano and Luis Matos, who were even younger and rawer than Ramos — should they have avoided trying to sign those high upside players because they had struggled with their player development previously?
As for the final question: “would Ramos have been better off being drafted by a different org?” Don’t make me pull out the Dr. Strange gif again! As Milan Kundera wrote, “living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come,” that is the unbearable lightness of being. Despite some struggles the last few years, Ramos is still one of fewer than 23,000 people who have ever played in a major league game, and I imagine he’ll be playing in more of them yet in the future. There are other 19th overall picks who can’t say as much. New Manager Bob Melvin has promised to view the Giants’ young talent with fresh eyes, and there will certainly be outfield reps to go around before this year is over. As with all of us, his future is still unwritten.
Hi Roger, there’s been some recent criticism about the quality of the Giants player development in a Baseball America podcast and elsewhere. Do you have any sense that the organization itself has recognized weaknesses or is trying to make changes?
More downer questions! Sigh, if I must…
Indeed, if you want to hear a really shocking excoriation of the current state of Giants’ player development, I invite you to listen to The Athletic’s Eno Sarris go to town on the organization in the Giants’ team preview section of a recent Rates and Barrels podcast. Sarris’ critique was particularly notable not just because it was so unequivocal, but because Sarris, who comes from an extremely analytical bent, has generally been a big fan of the way that the Giants have been run under Farhan Zaidi. He’s also someone who has deep connections within the R&D and analytics departments around the game, and could well be vocalizing a growing skepticism of the Giants’ organization that goes beyond his analysis alone.
This is a point that I’ve made before as well — from conversations I’ve had with some of my contacts, there is some growing skepticism in the industry regarding the Giants’ player development efforts. I heard it last year when the team wasn’t able to pull Casey Schmitt out of his slide or to get more from Matos in his debut. I think it’s perfectly fair to say that the Giants are on a bit of an island with regards to the faith they’re showing in their current youth movement.
That makes the stakes — and the major subplot — of the 2024 season pretty obvious. If you’ve been listening to my KROG podcasts with Kerry Crowley, or yesterday’s There R Giants pod with Grant Brisbee, I think you know that I’m pretty fascinated by the Giants approach to the offseason, which has consistently involved kicking potential guard rails off the roster, rather than building in more security. They seem to be doubling down on their belief in their young talent — especially the young pitching — in a way that, if nothing else, is certainly audacious.
They have an internal evaluation that is driving great apparent conviction. In one respect, you could say that this is the same conviction they showed when they signed Kevin Gausman, full in the belief that they could get the best out of him — and then proved they could. If they can bring that same successful “infrastructure” to bear on the Kyle Harrisons and Tristan Becks of the world, then this narrative will flip in a hurry. What we don’t yet know is how strong the foundation for their conviction is. Is it underpinned by an array of data that has decision makers humming with confidence (“this is going to work!”), or is it the conviction of the desperate gambler, who knows he’s down to his final wager (“this had better work!”)?
Fortunately for the Giants, the answer to this question is not going to come from podcast diatribes or org rankings on the internet. The answer is going to come on the field of play. If the coming year brings us multiple clear player development success stories from the Harrisons and Keaton Winns and Carson Whisenhunts and Marco Lucianos and Luis Matoses of the world, then we’re going to start seeing a lot of “smartest guys in the room” articles being written about the Giants’ player development processes. If the youth movement washes out? Then buckle up, because it’s going to be a bumpy ride going forward. Let us hope that the answers coming are of a positive nature.
Ken Gregory
What are your thoughts about the farm system rankings that come out this time of year? Have they had a good record of predicting player success at the major league level? I always wonder how they take on the ranking of so many prospects throughout the minor leagues, especially once you get past the most highly visible ones. How do they winnow down the list and gather information to form conclusions? And are they able to get a large enough sample size of observations of all the players being considered for a ranking, to form judgments that we fans should value?
Roger, To your experience, what becomes of these top prospects? In terms of this season and in a broader 2-3 year scenario… statistically, how many from a top 15 prospects list can one expect to be contributing to the major league Giants? If you need to distinguish this between position players and arms, you would be kind.
The general rule when it comes to following prospects is that being the top of the top matters more than anything else. That’s true of draft classes, it’s true of org rankings, and it’s true of prospect rankings in general. The vast majority of major league value comes from the top of the draft and the top 5-10 players of Top 100 lists — as we can see from the two Tom Tango graphics below (the top one representing value from drafts and the bottom value from Baseball America’s Top 100 lists.
The same is true of the Organizational Rankings you see around. There is very strong historical evidence that being considered the best of the best of orgs translates into almost immediate success at the big league level — frequently the top organization finds themselves in World Series within a matter of years, and almost universally some level of playoff success is coming in the near future for the team with the best farm system. For clubs that hang around the top of Org rankings year after year, those success rates tend to be even higher yet.
Implicitly, the more teams or prospects start falling into the squishy middle, the less meaning rankings tend to have. So, being ranked 13th or 20th best organization doesn’t really suggest a meaningful difference, nor does being ranked the 45th best prospect versus the 89th. By the time you’re into team rankings, beyond the very top players, you quickly move into the realm of players with some tools and a fighting chance, but a lot of obstacles to overcome in their dreams of finding big league success — and those dreams are about as likely to come true for the #7 player in a system as they are for the 27th to some degree or another.
Still, it is a mistake to think that only the creme de la creme of prospects find any success. Even the most barren farm systems have some future big league talent in them — or at the very least tradable assets. A couple of years ago, Baseball America did a survey of all farm systems between 1998 and 2012, and found that teams averaged 35 future major leaguers in a farm system at any given time, including an average of 21 who would go on to have at least a three-year career. Perhaps most surprisingly, the average farm system during that decade plus had about 3.5 future All Stars at any given time. And those numbers weren’t all being pulled up by the highest achievers — there was only one instance in that 15-year period of a club having no future All Stars in the org in a given season, and no instances of teams have fewer than two future three-year careers.
The problem for the Giants, of course, is that they have really been on the low end of the spectrum for most of the last dozen or more years. While their farm systems are producing a lot of players who appear in the majors, they aren’t getting the sustained careers, starters, or All Stars as frequently as hoped for. Back when I posted my very first There R Giants’ Top 50, prior to the 2021 season, my list included 21 players who have already become major leaguers — including 7 of the top 10! It even included one future All Star (that’s All Star closer, Camilo Doval, to you!). But beyond Doval, there’s nobody on that list who has yet to grab a starting job and hold it. Several members of that Top 50, however, will be given every chance to do so this year, and, as I wrote above, the results of that experiment will tell us a lot about where this organization is headed.
Outside of the big three, which 2023 and 2024 signed position players are you most excited to follow this season?
Hmmm….assuming the big three refers to Eldridge, Martin, and Arias, I’ll say that the guys I’m most excited to see this year will be Lisbel Diaz, who snuck into the back of my Top 50 and is maybe the best hitter in the system that nobody is talking about? Carlos Gutierrez and new IFA signee Jhonny Level are two other interesting DSL bats I’ll be watching. From the draft class, the three shortstops, Maui Ahuna, Cole Foster, and Quinn McDaniel, along with outfielder Scott Bandura all have my interest.
But, you know, the answer, as always, is: ALL OF THEM!
With the drop from 180 to 165, what former big prospects do you see as this being their last year to prove themselves?
The drop from 180 to 165 is going to be a huge story in the upcoming season, and Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper has been doing tremendous work in showing us how and why that is the case. If you’re a BA subscriber, you should definitely be following all of JJ’s work, including this great piece from earlier in the week that gives a great sense for how hard it is for Farm Directors to simply keep all of the rosters functional on a day to day basis. I don’t want to step on JJ’s intellectual property too much, but this quote from an anonymous Farm Director sums their situation up perfectly:
“All 30 farm directors, the first thing and last thing we do each day is (figure out) ‘do we have enough bodies?’”
That said, I wouldn’t put my focus on “former big prospects.” The guys who are going to be most affected, as that same article notes, are the pitchers who have formerly been the “slack” in the system. The guys who hang around on the edge of pitching staffs, or on the developmental list, or back in Papago in extended spring, waiting for the minor injury that needs covering. Over the five levels of domestic ball, every org has about 5400 innings that need covering, and there are now going to be only about 80-90 pitchers per org capable of covering them — which works out to some 60-65 innings per pitcher. That’s where this new limit is really going to make things difficult.
It’s not about the Will Bednars of the world, it’s the Nick Herolds who are going to get lopped off lists.
My question is this: who are the Giants prospects you think are most likely to jump into top 100 lists this year? And are they any dark horses or players further down your list you think might have a chance to be on future top 100 lists?
That’s the spirit, Quinn! Let’s end with a little optimism!
So, let’s see, the players who have leaped into the back end of the Top 100 the last couple of years have been of a couple of types: left-handed pitchers with big stuff who performed at high levels, or newly drafted players with big upside. That would suggest that maybe the most likely players to jump up in the coming year are the two 2nd round picks, Walker Martin and Joe Whitman. One could also imagine Rayner Arias possibly working his way into this discussion, especially if he spends some significant amount of the year in the Cal League and continues to perform — though the still 17-year-old might be another year away from such recognition. It goes without saying that the future #13 overall pick could be a candidate as well — following in the footsteps of Eldridge — though the change in the ACL’s schedule could impact newbies’ ability to make a big opening impression.
Beyond that obvious group of players, the only real wild card that makes sense to me today is Hayden Birdsong, who really does have all the tools to put together a big push up in rankings. He’s got the classic power pitcher’s body and stuff, and can really catch eyes with his ability to dominate quality hitters. That said, you never know what a year will bring. Certainly, at the start of the 2021 season, nobody would have predicted that then-obscure 8th round pick Caleb Kilian would end the season sneaking into the very back of Top 100 lists. Guys who perform on the field — especially at higher levels — can change their stars quickly sometimes!
And with that, let’s close up the mailbag for this month. I’ll be back with another Free For All in March, just before I head out for the desert — hopefully your questions will help me know what to look for when I get to Papago. Happy Spring Training everybody!
The context/history/detail you include to support your answers are so helpful. Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions!
That 10 Year total WAR listing might be the bleakest thing I've ever seen on your site, Roger. Your summation of what Zaidi and company have done to correct that was terrific. Everyone who wants to see Zaidi fired for supposedly not having a successful farm system need to read that.