Luis Matos' surge one of several surprises in upcoming Baseball America rankings
My talk with Josh Norris gave us a lot to think about
Photo Credit: @l_matos24 on Instagram
Hello from the other side! All rested up from holiday? We successfully cooked up a full turkey dinner for two complete with six sides and a pie so I consider my time off successful. Here’s hoping you all can say the same.
But now let’s turn our attention back to the baseball. You may have noticed that last week I quietly returned with a new podcast, speaking with Baseball America’s Josh Norris who is writing up the system for this year’s Prospect Handbook. Josh had a lot of fascinating things to share — including a lot of internal evaluation from his sources inside the Giants’ organization — so let’s dive in to the juiciest and most important nuggets that came out of our talk.
The New Top 10
First and foremost, we can draw some pretty firm conclusions about the shape of Baseball America’s Giants Top 10 (which sadly won’t be dropping until sometime in January). Josh made it pretty clear that the top five in his rankings this year will be:
Marco Luciano
Joey Bart
Heliot Ramos
Luis Matos
Kyle Harrison
The big question we’re left with there is whether Matos has enough juice to skip over Ramos or even Bart. After that we likely have the group of Bailey, Bishop, and Canario, probably in that order.
Patrick Bailey
Hunter Bishop
Alex Canario
There’s then a tier of players who will make up the 9-15 range: Seth Corry, Will Wilson, Jairo Pomares, Sean Hjelle, Tristan Beck, Luis Toribio and Logan Wyatt. My guess for the final spots is:
Seth Corry
Will Wilson
Now let’s look a little more closely at those surprises up at the top.
Luis Matos has joined the system’s top tier
It wasn’t just us fans watching the organization’s prospect twitter feed and trolling Instagram accounts, the bosses were wowed by Luis Matos’ performance at Instrux, too! Norris made that very clear, dropping this amazing quote: “there are guys in that [organization] who will tell you he is their top prospect, not Luciano.”
That’s a jaw-dropper, and was entirely meant to convey the level of rising enthusiasm for Matos’ game, not any degree of tarnish on Luciano’s gleam. We’ve heard the ringing endorsements from other sources as well — notably Pat Burrell, as Duane Kuiper mentioned in Friday night’s Chalk Talk (where President of Baseball Operations Farhan Zaidi also raved about the youngster). Norris didn’t dissemble at all when asked if Matos was in the upper tier of the system at this point:
Number 1, first and foremost, with a bullet, is Luis Matos…he should be mentioned in the same conversations with Marco Luciano and Joey Bart and Heliot Ramos… He showed the ability to hit, to put bat to ball. There’s power there…and he is, I believe, their surest-fire prospect to play CF in the long term.
That’s all the ingredients you need for a star-level player and though Matos is still just 18 years old (he turns 19 in January) and has played just a handful of games in the US, that’s the bar he’s starting to establish for himself. I had Matos as the 5th best prospect in the system with a 55+ future grade on him, but after my conversation with Josh I’m nudging him up to a full 60 grade.
Who’s coming in CF?
But wait a minute — what was that about Matos being the surest CF prospect in the system. For those Willie Mays-lovers among you (and who isn’t a Mays-lover), Norris did have some cold water to throw on our dreams of a pipeline of star CF coming. At the end of the day, the question might not be “how are they going to accommodate all these CF” but rather “where are they going to find time to play all these LF?”
Here was Josh on the various candidates:
Heliot Ramos: “[The Giants] still say he could play CF in a pinch, maybe RF. I think they have some guys coming up who could do that a little better.”
Hunter Bishop: “It’s not going to happen. [The Giants have] told me flat out that they don’t expect him to do that. You don’t see too many guys that size stick in CF.”
With Canario something of a raw route-runner (despite his speed) and now again losing development time, it looks like the OF parade is going to find itself crowding into the corners until Matos’ time comes, so we should settle in for a good long wait before we get to scratch that Mays-itch.
Kyle Harrison is the system’s finest pitching prospect…
And here I thought putting the 19-year-old still waiting for his pro debut in my top 10 was daring! Norris told me straight out that he’s going to rank Harrison above last year’s #14 overall pick!
He is their #1 pitching prospect right now. Period! His combination of left-handedness, low-90s — touching 96 now in velocity — and command of the fastball for someone his age puts him ahead of some of the other higher names in the system
Though Harrison isn’t filling up his scouting card with a bunch of “60” pitches — at least not yet — he is a cerebral competitor on the mound, thinking through how to beat hitters and then executing his plan. The Giants have been working on the shape of his breaking ball, so he can get it to the back foot of right-handed hitters, giving him a well-rounded three-pitch mix to deploy.
While the fastball velocity is ticking up with greater strength and conditioning, it’s his command of that pitch in particular that make the Giants’ brass high on Harrison. And it’s what separates him from last year’s top pitching prospect, 2017 3rd rounder Seth Corry, who has made strides with his command, but as Norris said, “he’s never going to be a guy who can throw it through a thimble.”
Which brings us to…
…and that’s both good news and bad
While Harrison’s growth is an exciting new development in the system, Josh was also frank that there’s another reason that a just-drafted high school pitcher whose yet to make his pro debut is the top pitching prospect in the system: the hitting is well ahead of the pitching in the system. GM Scott Harris made the same point in Friday night’s Chalk Talk.
Specifically, Norris noted that Hjelle had some (unstated) behind the scenes reasons why he was absent from both the Alternate Site and Instrux and, though he did the best he could to get work in, the year was still a step back.
As for Gregory Santos, who was recently added to the 40 man, and who Fangraphs’ Eric Longenhagen recently said would be part of his Top 100, Norris said he was “strictly a one-inning reliever” but with the power arsenal to potentially be an impact reliever. Santos thus fits in a group of power-armed relievers in the system with Blake Rivera, Camilo Doval, Jose Marte, and potentially fellow-40-man add Kervin Castro.
Norris did have good words for starter Tristan Beck, who could well see Oracle Park in 2021 with his “hop and hammer” mix of a lively fastball at the top of the zone and curve ball down.
Still, the overall feeling from listening to Norris is that the rebuild is going to have to include impact arms acquired from outside the system.
Patience is still the watchword
If our podcast was a drinking game and you had to take a gulp for every mention of “there’s still work to be done there,” you might well have found yourself under the table by the time the show was concluded. In varying levels of degree, Josh used that phrase for all of: Marco Luciano, Joey Bart, Heliot Ramos, Hunter Bishop, Camilo Doval and Seth Corry! That’s a lot of collective work to do.
But don’t despair! This doesn’t mean that players are falling short of expectations — it’s still a very exciting system on the upswing. But it does mean that development comes at its own pace and we’re still a ways away from seeing the best of this talent manifesting itself at the big league level. For those of you dreaming of guys like Hunter Bishop or Seth Corry or even Marco Luciano leap-frogging the entire minors in a single bound, take a deep breath. Be present in the moment! The tiered system of the minors is set up to increase levels of challenge in manageable chunks so that all players don’t experience the sink or swim firehose that we saw Joey Bart go through this summer.
It’s still going to be awhile for most of these prospects to start making an impact at the major league level, but there’s much to anticipate at journey’s end. In the meantime, let’s all enjoy the players of today as much as we look forward to the players of tomorrow!
For those of you who haven’t done so already, I encourage you to listen to the full interview. But for those of you who still like to take your information in via the written word, here are a few other nuggets that Josh gave us on the system’s major talents:
On Marco Luciano:
He didn’t take over the Alternate Site. He did really well at Instrux but there are still things to do with him and they showed at the Alternate Site…I would expect Luciano to move very quickly….When you ask about him staying at shortstop [the Giants will] say: ‘he might be a guy whose bat doesn’t allow him to get the reps to stay at shortstop. His bat might push him faster.’
On Joey Bart:
I think he performed admirably considering the fire he was thrown into. He was their best option from a defensive standpoint… and that’s why they brought him up. But they admit, he still has a big hole on the inside part of the plate… He’s a big, strong man who can hit it very hard and very far, but he has a hole he has to close. And this might be why he’s a power over hit guy in the future.
On Heliot Ramos:
He had six at bats in Instrux before he tweaked his oblique so it was a negligible experience…It’s the same question with him: it’s plate discipline, it’s refining his approach. He’s not as much of a free swinger but he has some weaknesses. He was particularly vulnerable to sliders last year. Now, after the Alternate Site experience time he’s not vulnerable to one pitch or the other but there’s still work to do to tighten up his strike zone awareness and figure out what pitches he can drive. He’s probably not going to be a 70 guy or maybe even a 60 in terms of “hit” or “power” but he’s a nice blend of both… It is weird that he sometimes gets a little lost for a guy who’s a top 5 prospect in the system, a top 100 prospect in baseball.
On Alex Canario
I’m immensely impressed by what Canario was able to do with that shoulder injury over the past couple of years. It wasn’t something that just popped where he was super healthy and then he tweaked it and needed surgery. This is something he was dealing with for a while. And to put up the kind of numbers he did at Salem-Keizer with that nagging at him is really impressive.
On Hunter Bishop
Bishop is a little more raw than you’d expect for a college guy from Arizona State. The hit tool was always a question, even when they drafted him, and it’s still a question…He has work to do to shore up strike zone discipline, learn which pitches he can damage better and maybe to be more selectively aggressive. There’s a happy medium between getting too deep in counts and letting pitches go by that you could drill. They drafted him knowing the hit tool was a work in progress.
Winter League Action
There are some Giants’ prospects getting in a little action in the Caribbean winter leagues, particularly in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, both of which are running shortened versions of their normal winter leagues. Mostly, the teams are full of ex-Giants, from the fondly remembered big leaguers (like World Series hero Juan Perez) to minor league free agents like Rodolfo Martinez and Carlos Navas. Jose Siri, who both entered and exited the organization this year is off to a particularly torrid start in the Liga de Beisbol Dominican, or LIDOM, hitting .316/.422/.368 (it’s generally difficult to hit for power in the LIDOM).
But there are just enough Giants’ prospects to keep us interested as well, so let’s give an update of how guys are doing.
Sadly, the biggest news from these leagues thus far has been Melvin Adon’s injury, which came in his very first appearance in the LIDOM. Just one pitch after he’d lit up the radar gun with a 101 mph fastball, Adon let go with a high fastball and immediately crumpled in apparent discomfort.
There’s been no word of Adon’s status since, but the following day he was non-tendered a contract, removing him from the Giants’ 40 man. As Kiley McDaniel clarified, typically when non-arb eligible players are non-tendered, they do so with an agreement already in hand which keeps the player in the organization while paying them more than they would be likely to receive on the open market as a MiLB FA. By a quirk of MLB regulations, non-tendering a player who isn’t arb eligible is the only way to remove them from the 40-man without exposing them to waivers. We’ll keep our ears tuned for further news of the hard-throwing Adon.
Another pitcher who is capturing some attention in Venezuela is the 22-year-old lefty Luis Amaya, last seen as part of San Jose’s bullpen in 2019. Amaya, who has been in the Giants’ system for six years, throws a sneaky, deceptive bit of velo out of a 3/4 delivery and has always posted impressive strikeout totals. Amaya is one player who has an outside chance of being plucked in the Rule 5 draft.
The Giants also have several players performing in the Colombian Winter Baseball League including pitchers Jasier Herrera and Luis Moreno, and There R Giants fave catcher Andres Angulo. Unfortunately, the Colombian league, as far as I can tell doesn’t post their statistics anywhere.
Where the irrepressible @GiantsProspects finds some of this video is beyond me! But as for the LIDOM, that is easy to find as they have a great site set up, where you can pay for a league pass ($19.99 for the season), watch individual games a la carte ($2.99) or sign up to see highlights from past games for free. It’s an oasis of delightful baseball action to help us through winter.
Lastly, speaking of our friend GPT, he and I will be recording a Rule 5 preview later this week which I hope to post on Wednesday to get you ready for the draft Thursday morning. If there’s any Giants-related activity in the draft, I’ll have that for you on Friday as well as, fingers crossed, maybe some definite word on the future alignment of the Giants’ minor league system?
We can hope anyway. Just as we hope the Giants come out of the Winter Meetings with exciting new talents. Take care, friends!
In ranking the latest developments, I’d say a vaccine is 1A and Matos is 1B. Super excited for both!