Memorial Day Free For All Mailbag
Memorial Day weekend is past! The traditional 1/3 milestone of the big league season has come and gone, and the time for talking short sample sizes is more or less behind us, too. We can start (but just start) to look at the season’s shape — both in the macro and micro senses. Which means that this is a great week to have a whole bunch of Giants’ prospects performing particularly well!
Goodness! That’s a lot of achievement for one week! Maybe some of these guys will come up in conversation in this week’s edition of the free for all! You never know what There R Giants’ readers are going to be interested in!
With that, let’s kick it over to the sponsors — you folks — before we get the mailbag fully opened.
Now let’s see what’s on your minds as the season hits the one-third mark…
With the bad news on the Eugene stadium and TBD on Sacramento's situation the next few years, can you comment a bit more on the good news of Richmond's new stadium? Do you know what would be the main benefits for the club? Besides having a brand-new stadium of course, but were there other points of issue this addresses Thanks!
It does seem to be all good news at this point with the Richmond stadium situation — which will be part of a billion-dollar mixed-use development to be called the Diamond District. The City Council recently gave their approval to the final funding plan, and that should be the final hurdle that could have tripped things up (I say this with many thousands of hours attending municipal Planning Committee meetings and a decent amount of experience at the vagaries of development projects).
The developers have already been selected. The initial renderings have been unveiled (though expect changes along the way, potentially significant ones). And right now, it seems like the project should be on track to be ready by Opening Day, 2026.
As for player development benefits, we’re mostly talking about upgrades to a truly outdated facility. The off-the-field areas for the teams are small and cramped, befitting a stadium that will be ‘celebrating’ its 40th anniversary next year. Though they have built a nice hitting cage underneath the stadium, you’ll see much more space and better facilities in the new park. I’d expect that the upgrades will include roomier locker rooms, separate facilities for female staff members (completely absent in the current stadium), greater technology infrastructure, an indoor pitching area (fully decked out with Hawk Eye), a true gym and workout area, a real kitchen preparation area, and much more that modern players expect. In truth, the affiliate stadium should be a match — as much as possible — for the state-of-art facility that the players utilize all spring in Papago Park. And today’s Diamond, it hardly needs be said, loses that comparison by about as wide a margin as possible.
There will also be some smaller advantages in the actual playing field. I would presume that the Giants will push for dimensions that are maybe a little more favorable for hitters — and new lights should help on that score as well. It looks from the renderings that the field’s layout will pivot around so that fielders are facing more of a north-eastward direction, as opposed to the current north-westward orientation, so center fielders shouldn’t open games by staring directly into the setting sun, skimming the rim of the stadium behind home plate. That should help. I do think that the new orientation will cause the prevailing winds to be blowing in from left field, so right-handed hitters might still have some issues trying to get balls out in that direction, but lefties could get a little advantage.
But the big thing should be the upgrade in space, technology, and facilities in the bowels of the new park. That’s where the real work these players do takes place, and the new generation of prospects coming through should have the best resources available to do that work.
(This video is about a year old, just to be transparent, and there have been some changes since then).
What’s up with Tyler Fitzgerald? He got picked off at 1b and potentially cost the Giants a win against LA, and he was sent down shortly after. I’d imagine that that’s not exactly why he was sent down. But the timing is suspicious considering he was doing well in the bigs by and large. At minimum, he seems like a better and more versatile option than the waiver claim of Ryan McKenna.
There were some other mistakes along the way, but, yes, that was basically the reason for Fitzgerald’s option down to Sacramento. Critical mental errors get young players sent down sometimes — we saw that with Mauricio Dubón in his days with the Giants as well. Rookie mistakes come with rookies — that’s the nature of it. But still, teams just aren’t willing to abide many mental mistakes from young players. Jon Miller, making the call for that play, said it pretty simply: “that can’t happen!”
And I’m sure there were plenty of teammates and staff sitting on the bench who had a similar thought run through their heads at that moment. It was notable, watching the dugout reaction on the replay, that several players were incapable of concealing their dismay, throwing their hands in the air or on their heads. That’s normally an absolute no no — you never show up a teammate — but that goes to show how egregious of a moment that was that the players simply couldn’t contain themselves in the moment. Beat reporters later relayed that Fitzgerald was told to watch a couple of pitches first, and instead he got out to his largest lead of the season immediately. It was just one of those things where he let the moment get a little too big and tried to do too much, but accountability does come in the wake of those moments sometimes, especially when it’s not the first time.
That single play wasn’t the only reason Fitzgerald was sent down, of course. The team needed more outfield depth, and Fitzgerald’s inexperience in the outfield had shown when the team tried him out there (there have been multiple plays where he got too close to the wall, for instance, and let balls bounce back past him). That’s why McKenna is here — the team just needed a little more reliability from the right-hand side in the outfield.
What’s difficult for a player like Fitzgerald (or Dubón, back in the day), is that there’s no specific way to “work on” not letting moments get too big for you. All he can do is focus on preparation, get his work done, and, when the next opportunity comes, try to focus on slowing the game down and staying within himself. It’s like when players in a slump try to hit a five-run homer with every swing — the trap is to try to regain trust and confidence by making one incredible play. That won’t work. He’ll have to get back into the coaching staff’s confidence one solid baseball play at a time when the next chance comes. And, with yesterday’s injury to LaMonte Wade, Jr., that next chance could be coming immediately!
Robert Luther
Grant McCray intrigues me. You wrote this recently:
“When I arrived on Tuesday at BP, McCray was working on driving balls up the middle and to the opposite alley with an inside-out swing that slices through the zone with a flat plane.”
Has there been a concerted effort to shorten his swing to improve contact, recognizing that he may sacrifice some power yet more utilize his speed?
I don’t think there’s any concern about the length of McCray’s swing. It’s true, as all of the recent bat data that MLB has released lately shows us, that players who hit a lot of home runs tend to have longer (and faster) swings because they’re making contact just in front of the plate, which is a slightly longer distance to travel, while Luis Arraez, for instance, has one of the shortest (and slowest) swings in baseball because he’s letting the ball travel very deep before firing off a swing.
Not to sidetrack myself too much here, but I think “long swing” is a concept that can cause confusion, because there are different types of long swings, and they aren’t all bad. A swing that is long because a player is aiming to make contact with the ball out in front of the plate is often a good thing — Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Gunnar Henderson all have long swings. But if that swing is fast and efficient at getting to the spot, that’s on the whole, a beneficial thing, even if there’s some sacrifice in contact associated with it, because the decision point needs to come a split second earlier. But swings that are long in the “back end,” in the load and trigger portion of the swing, will cause players to be late getting to their contact point. So, for instance, there was a recent story about Giants’ roving hitting instructors making an adjustment with Bryce Eldridge, bringing his hands further back — that naturally made his swing longer, but it also made his load more efficient.
McCray was hitting the ball up the middle of the field a lot in the Bowie series, so he may be working on letting the ball travel a little bit more. But I think what he was really working on that day was: a) timing, and b) bat path. It feels like bat path is really the crucial aspect of hitting that is least well understood publicly, but a lot of focus is put on it inside the game.
Generally speaking, the “math” behind hitting still says that swinging hard, fast, and looking to do damage results in the best outcomes in the aggregate. While there are outliers like Arraez, succeeding with that approach takes a truly unique skillset. I doubt the Giants have any interest in trying to turn McCray into that type of hitter — even if it were possible — but getting his bat path more efficient should result in letting him make more contact and get to his natural abilities. Certainly, things are looking good in that regard at this point — among his many other positive signs lately, McCray has struck out just five times over his last 12 games, while slugging .968!
Over the last two weeks, he’s certainly been looking like the best version of himself and he keeps this up at the Double-A level, Giants’ fans should be pretty excited about his development.
Two Luis Matos questions, take your pick of both or either or neither!
1) It looks to me like he has a slightly different set up in his hands, are you picking up anything in his swing that looks different to last year, or am I imagining things.
2) His MLB batted ball profile is fascinating and I wonder if you think it will last. Decent average exit velo, solid launch angle, below average top end exit velo. But he just never strikes out, and also rarely walks. This looks like the best case, or close to it, version of Matos and it’s fun to watch. Sustainable?
Looking at video I’ve shot of Matos over the years, he has generally held his hands high — starting around the letters ..
…and then lifting them slightly towards his chin when going into the load.
Generally speaking, I think we’re seeing the same swing this year, although players are always tinkering with mechanics. If you look at the following swing from this year, it doesn’t seem to be too different from the swings represented in the above screen captures from 2021 and 2023:
And why not keep the basics the same, when the results have continued to be positive. So, moving to your second question, yes, I think that spraying line drives around the ballpark with some pull side power is the best version of Matos that we can expect going forward. He’s improved his max exit velocity this year just ever so slightly over his rookie season, but he still has power and impact in his swing that is a little below average, based on the hit data. That’s the reason those “tweener” questions sometimes hover about him — and I suspect will continue to going forward unless his power finds a new level (will he have a 20 HR season in his future at any point?).
But the contact skills that we’ve seen from him certainly seem to be a baseline skill for Matos. He has been close to the top of league leaderboards in strikeout rate and swinging strike rate at every level he’s ever played at — up to the major leagues — despite always being young for his level. We can’t say for certain that his production is going to be sustainable going forward, but I do think we can be certain that his contact ability will be. And that’s a very good building block for being a productive hitter. If he can go back to working a few more walks, the way he did last year, and add just enough punch to make himself dangerous, then there should be a sustainable big leaguer in there of some stripe, and hopefully a good starting player.
IS there any way to keep Matos, Heliot Ramos, Marco Luciano, & Brett Wisely on the roster when the vets come back?
According to the laws of physics, two bodies cannot occupy the exact same space at the exact same time, and that applies to roster space as well as any other. Where there are two bodies for one space, something has to give.
That said, there really aren’t that many vets lined up to come back at this point. Putting the catcher situation aside, we’re really just talking about Nick Ahmed, Austin Slater, and Michael Conforto — none of whom’s returns sound imminent. If everything remains the same — and things rarely do — then Ahmed will take one of Luciano’s or Wisely’s spots (which one will be a fascinating decision when the time comes), while Slater would presumably bump McKenna off the roster. It’s hard to find a path for Conforto back onto the roster that doesn’t ultimately return Ramos to the minors, unfortunately. But the way he’s performed of late, he’ll certainly be back.
I think the best response to these types of questions is always: these things tend to work themselves out. Once you get into a baseball season, you never have everybody healthy at the same time. By the time the vets are ready to return, other issues will have cropped up. There will be new injuries and twists and turns in player performance that figure into whatever eventual decisions are made. But one thing that I think/hope this last month has made clear is that Ramos, who is on his last option year, belongs on this club long-term, and plans going forward should include him as part of the mix. With both Conforto and Slater heading into free agency next winter, it won’t be hard to clear a permanent spot for him.
It has been so great watching the younger players coming up and making cases for themselves as major leaguers! Also really surprising. Collectively, the group wasn’t banging on the door until injuries made their promotions necessary, correct?
Can you explain how we should think about prospects’ minor league numbers as being (or not being) predictive of how they will perform in the majors when given a chance?
I don't know how to look at or what to make of minor league stats either. Great question.
Healthy skepticism is always a solid approach to take towards minor league statistics — as frustrating an answer as I understand that to be. There have been attempts to make exact correlations of minor league stats to major league performances — so called “minor league equivalencies (MLE)” have existed for years at this point and, in one shape or form, sit behind projection systems like ZiPS or PECOTA or RoboScout or what have you. Internally, all teams have their own proprietary versions of these type of systems as well.
The problem is: none of them are particularly useful. When it comes down to it, the jump from Triple-A to the majors is a yawning gulf that keeps on getting wider — a topic much discussed both within the industry and in the public sphere. Teams are pushing pitchers with “major league stuff” up the ladder quickly and the result is that hitters are seeing a huge advance in velocity, spin, movement, etc. upon making the majors, and they have to adjust to that quantum leap in the harsh glare of the major league game where any mistake or slump comes with a guaranteed barrage of negativity on social media or the local airwaves. It’s a lot!
We’ve recently heard Mike Elias, the Orioles extraordinarily successful General Manager talk about how hard it is to determine when a top prospect is ready, and for a more “show and tell” sort of example, the Giants’ somewhat controversial decision to advance Wade Meckler to the majors last year is a good illustration of how fallible reliance on statistics can be. The core philosophy of the Fahan Zaidi Giants is “make good swing decisions,” and Meckler’s swing decisions at every level of the minors were just about as good as you could ask for. He let balls go and he hit strikes — exactly what the Giants value. But, when elevated to the major leagues, his swing decisions weren’t enough to cope with a league that could throw nasty breaking ball after nasty breaking ball in the strike zone, and he quickly whiffed his way back to Triple-A.
With all that said, I still value batting average in a minor league setting. The dispersion of talent in any minor league context is much less compressed than it is in MLB — that is, the ability of the bottom third in any minor league is very different from the ability of the top third, and that gap only widens the further down in levels you go. Hitters who are going to succeed at the top level should be able to do enough damage against the bottom level of talent in any league to keep a healthy batting average — and the proof of that can usually be proven by looking at the minor league record of most any long-time major leaguer, starter or bench player. These guys were almost always .300+ hitters in the minors.
Batting average, slugging percentage (or Isolated Slugging), strikeout percentage — these are really the core stats that I will weigh most heavily. Swinging strike percentage may be better than strikeout rates, as they take low-level umpiring out of the equation to some degree (unfortunately, swinging strike rates can be harder to find — on Fangraphs, for instance, you can find them on the minor league leaderboards search page, but not on individual player pages, which seems an oversight). Walk rates I think are a little more controversial. It’s valuable to make good swing decisions certainly, but it’s also pretty easy to walk a lot in the low minors by being passive — and that’s not necessarily a good thing. So I look at walk rates but only in Double-A and Triple-A do I take them very seriously. More important to me is to keep the spread of strikeouts and walks fairly low. Generally, low strikeout rates impress me more than high walk rates do.
All of that and a large dose of salt can get you fairly far.
One last thing on this topic — most teams nowadays rely heavily on Hawk-Eye generated data that isn’t publicly available for the minor leagues: exit velocity, chase rates, in-zone contact, etc. This is frustrating! But for There R Giants’ subscribers, I believe I should be getting a fairly robust set of these kind of under the hood numbers in the next week for the first couple of months of the season, and those will be mixing in to daily posts going forward. So you have that to look forward to!
My question regards UCL injuries to pitchers, what laypeople call Tommy John surgery. For a while it seemed as though every year a promising Giants MiLB system pitcher sustained this injury and lost one year-plus in his development. Lately it seems like this trend has reversed, as we've not heard about many of our pitchers sustaining this injury. Have the Giants developed a protocol that has reversed this trend, or maybe the industry? The Giants selected Reggie Crawford as their #1 pick in 2022 even though he had recently had TJ surgery. It appears he might be ready to help in the MLB bullpen this year, just two years after TJ. Interested in your thoughts on this.
Hmm….I have to think about that, Fan. I’m not sure that I would agree with your overall set up to that question. Currently, the Giants have Liam Simon, Gerelmi Maldonado, and Cole Waites all recovering from Tommy John surgery, and I while I don’t know the status of Chen-Hsun Lee for certain, he was sporting the tell-tale elbow brace when I saw him at Papago Park two weeks ago, so he has undergone some sort of elbow surgery this spring as well (and Lee already underwent TJ as a high school student back in 2019).
In recent years we’ve seen Ian Villers, Keaton Winn, Roberto Monegro, and others go under the knife for that specific procedure, so I definitely wouldn’t say that the team has found any golden pill to help avoid it. It’s 100% certain that the industry hasn’t, as we can tell from the constant barrage of articles decrying the plague of TJs that often sits like a black cloud over the sport. Guys who throw extremely hard put extreme stress on the elbow and ever it will remain.
The Giants did select Crawford coming off of Tommy John surgery — which is not that uncommon these days. Nearly every year, some college or high school pitcher manages to maintain their 1st round status despite falling to the surgery in the spring, and, going back about 20 years, the Giants once took a late-round flyer on an LSU starter named Brian Wilson whose spring had ended in TJ (back in those days, that did cause a plummet down the draft rounds). I will make a slight correction to your question and note that Crawford’s surgery came in the fall of 2021, so it will be more like 2.5 to 3 years since the procedure. But I’ll agree with you that he seems to be on the road to joining the club before the year is out.
Happy Memorial Day Roger. As with most of us, I’m thrilled with how the young guys are playing. I would love to learn a little bit more about Jerar Encarnación, the 26-year-old we just plucked from the Mexican league. Do you see him getting a shot at the major league club this year?
Ironically, I was talking with a Giants pro scout the day that story initially broke, and I asked if they’d ever scouted Encarnación. That scout’s familiarity with the slugger went back a few years, but I got a pretty good scouting report regardless.
It’s a tale as old as time: huge power, huge swing and miss. Encarnación is one of those players who can hit a ball a country mile, but has a bottom of the line hit tool. In his short major league debut with the Marlins, he struck out 40% of the time. He’s also not a player you’d ever want to see with a glove in his hand and heading for the outfield grass. So, pure DH without much feel for contact is a fairly rough profile for a major leaguer. The Giants signed him when they were in the worst throes of their surge of injuries, and he’s good depth to have on hand (especially with someone like Yusniel Díaz currently on the IL in Sacramento), but I’d imagine that an awful lot would have to go wrong for him to be considered for a call up. Let us hope we don’t see that day come!
You had a great analysis earlier in May about the best fastballs in the system. How about the best secondary pitches? Also, is a secondary by nature a non-fastball or could it be a different type of fastball than a pitcher’s primary offering?
Ooh, that’s a fun one. I also should say that I think this is an easier question to answer — or at least that I have more quality options to choose among. I had a tough time thinking of really great fastballs in the system once I got past a couple of great choices (and didn’t allow myself pitchers on the IL). For secondaries, there’s a lot more room to roam — I could probably do a list of just curveballs and just sliders (though I won’t!).
Let me first answer your second question. It’s true that we see more and more pitchers who utilize an off-speed pitch as their “primary” offering — think Jakob Junis with his slider or Keaton Winn’s splitter. And yet colloquially, the term “secondary” always refers to off-speed pitches, regardless of how a pitcher uses them. The one gray area might be “cutters,” which generally live in the fastball family, though they are also just slightly offspeed — they can probably be either a primary or secondary offering, depending upon the pitcher. Perhaps it’s a term that is starting to outlive its usefulness (though many such words continue to hang on in our rhetoric).
To the point, the best off-speed pitches in the system judged by yours truly:
Landen Roupp’s Curveball
Carson Whisenhunt’s Changeup
Let me stop at this point and say that you can put those two pitches in whatever order you’d like, but that’s the clear top tier for me. We step down a little when we move away from that pair. Both of those offerings are 70- to 80-grade pitches.Hayden Birdsong’s Curveball
Reggie Crawford’s Slider
That’s probably my second tier. Even though I said above that Crawford’s slider has been inconsistent so far this year due to lack of reps, it still has knee-breaking potential. After that I could go a lot of different ways.Mason Black’s Slider/Sweeper combo
Trent Harris’ Curveball
Joe Whitman’s Slider
Trevor McDonald’s Curveball
Dylan Cumming’s Sweeper
Carson Seymour’s Slider
Harris is maybe a provocative choice, but I really was impressed by this pitch when I saw him this spring, so I’ll give him a nod in my top 10. Generally, I incline towards the guys whose pitches are proven against the best competition, so there’s a lot of upper-level guys on my list — and then there’s Cumming, who has had such an exceptional start to the season thanks to his ability to spin a breaker.
There are, however, a ton of other great secondary pitches in the system: Carson Ragsdale’s curve, Kai-Wei Teng’s sliders, Evan Gates’ and Spencer Bivens’ sliders, Wil Jensen’s changeup, Ben Madison’s curveball, Jose Cruz’ changeup, Nick Avila’s curves, Spencer Miles’ and Liam Simon’s curves, Hayden Wynja’s slider, Jack Choate’s slider/change combo. Julio Rodriguez’ curveball. Cody Tucker has an interesting splitter … it’s a long list of guys! I’m probably not thinking of somebody with something good. But I’ve been a lover of Roupp’s curveball since I first saw it in Eugene, and I’m going to stick with him on the top of my list.
Speaking of Cumming, there’s news on the slider demon, as he’ll be coming to my part of the country now:
That’s one of a few transactions for the new week — you can look for those over in the other post today, which will also include summaries of last night’s games. And with that, let’s close up this week’s mailbag and get to the ballyard. There’s a whole new week of action coming at us!
Great answers as usual, Roger. However my mind needs some clarification. In that video of Grant McCray's triple, the moment he is safe at third he makes a square in the air and touches his left wrist. What does this mean? Some secret code? Do the kids all understand this but us old guys are just baffled?