Night of the Living Camp Notes

Playing Under the Lights

I got my first night action at Papago Park last night. That usually means that camp is coming to a conclusion. Next Sunday will be the Giants’ final camp games before they send players off to their assignments.

Not surprisingly, things are starting to come into pretty sharp focus at this point. With the Giants’ major league roster decisions made, the players who will open the year with the River Cats tomorrow night are all in Sacramento, getting prepared for their year to begin. Down here at Papago, the working groups are really consolidating, and you can see exactly where the true battles that will decide roster decisions are happening.

I’ve been posting the starting lineups every day in my camp notes, but let me go beyond that and show you the “extra position players” lists for last night as well, and I think you’ll see where the tough decisions are going to take place — especially now that the extra guys who were taken north for exhibition games have returned to their rightful work groups:

There are a few pinch points there that jump out at me. Richmond’s group currently lists four catchers (Adrián Sugastey, Onil Perez, Zach Morgan, Thomas Gavello), which might be hard to contain on one roster. There’s also some pressure in that corner infield 3b/1b group, with Matt Higgins, Andrew Kachel, and Justin Wishkoski likely competing amongst each other for playing time opportunities.

Another really interesting group to me is the Eugene outfield. There, James Tibbs III, Bo Davidson, Jonah Cox, and Lisbel Diaz look to be the primary unit, which could make it hard to find playing time for Rodolfo Nolasco and Scott Bandura. I actually haven’t seen Bandura in a game yet, so he might be dealing with something that is going to land him on the IL to start the year. Still, opportunities in that unit are going to be tough to come by — especially early in the year, when Maui Ahuna is likely going to be taking most of the reps at DH, while he continues to rehab from Tommy John (on which topic, it does seem that 9th round pick, Zane Zielinksi, is heading for the lion’s share of the shortstop duty in Eugene until Ahuna is ready to play defense again).

One way to ease the roster crunch would be to return Diaz to San Jose for more seasoning. The San Jose outfield doesn’t seem as tough a unit to crack right now — especially with Jakob Christian not getting reps in the outfield in camp. That might be the way they solve the crunch, but Diaz has really been making that decision tough by swinging a hot bat in camp. He’s also been playing well in the outfield. This play is hard to see from my home plate camera, but Diaz did a really nice job here going back on a ball to the wall in CF a couple of days ago (it sounds like the Giants will look for opportunities to play him in center some this year). He’s been impressing with an all-around game this week. We’ll see what the reward for that is in a few days’ time.