My editor sent me a facetious note on Wednesday night, prior to Marco Luciano’s debut, wondering if having three players on the Giants’ active roster who had been originally signed by the team as international free agents was an all time record for the club. It wasn’t! We managed to find — with the help of the old expanded September rosters — a small pocket in time when the club had Pablo Sandoval, Hector Sanchez, Ehire Adrianza, and Francisco Peguero on the team together, and some days years later when Sandoval, Reyes Moronta, and Miguel Gomez shared the roster. I thought I had one where Sandoval combined with Waldis Joaquin and Osiris Matos, but, sadly, while all three were on the team in 2009, they were never all three together.
Besides providing cause for an exercise in Giants’ arcana, the point was that the Giants’ international development program has not exactly gushed forth a fountain of talent this century — as opposed to the days of our youth in the 60s when it was exactly what the Giants were renowned for. That point was underlined by a note in Andy Baggarly’s story yesterday, that the last time the Giants had two 21-year-old players signed from Latin America on their roster was 60 years ago, when the names were Jesús Alou and José Cardenal.
The 2018 international signing class — including Luciano and Luis Matos — always felt to me like it was an announcement of a sea change, a public announcement that that wing of the player development system was going to, henceforward, carry its full weight in the development pipeline. It’s taken time to work its way up, but with Camilo Doval a fully fledged All Star, and Matos and Luciano giving the team a pair of young talents the likes of which it hasn’t seen in over a decade, it does feel like the age of the Giants’ International Development is here at last. And there is more on its way! Many of the happy development stories this year have focused on players signed in the wake of that 2018 class (or in it, in the case of Victor Bericoto). After a few decades when the international department produced just an occasional talent, it really feels as if both rivers of talent acquisition are flowing equally at this point, which is one of the most important developments in the organization of the last half decade.
And having said that, the story of the day comes, in fact, from the Dominican Academy where two pitchers combined to snatch a tiny piece of baseball immortality:
It’s not exactly Matt Cain, but I’ll bet these youngsters slept happy and fulfilled last night!
HITTER of the NIGHT: Jose Ramos (SJ), 3 for 5, HR (2), 2b (15), 1 R, 6 RBI
PITCHER of the NIGHT: Jose Rengel (DSLGO), 5.0 IP, 0 H, 0 R, 1 BB, 4 K
So let’s dive into the night and get ready to celebrate the art of run prevention, and never forget what ol’ Pete Beiden used to say: take outs quicker than you make outs and you’ll always find success in this game.
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