Rule 5 (Adjacent) Decisions: Ricardo Genovés and Diego Rincones
Long-time Giants set to hit free agency
Photo Credit: Trey Wilson | Richmond Flying Squirrels
This is the tenth in a series focusing on the Giants’ upcoming Rule 5 protection choices. There’s a fairly large selection of players who present challenging decisions, so we’ll take a look at them one by one. In previous editions, we’ve looked at:
Time to play “one of these things is not like the others!” Today’s post isn’t actually a Rule 5 Decision, because neither of the players I’ve chosen to bundle together today will be eligible to be selected in next month’s Rule 5 draft. So they don’t really belong in this series, not really. But I’ve chosen to include them anyways, because they do represent roster decisions that need to be made by the organization — and soon! While players who need to be protected from the Rule 5 draft must be added to the rosters next week, on November 15, the decisions impacting Diego Rincones and Ricardo Genovés come even sooner than that.
If these players are NOT added to 40-man roster by tomorrow, they will become seven-year minor league free agents, free to sign where they will. You might remember this same sequence last year, when Sacramento reliever, Yunior Marte, who was set to become a minor league free agent, was added to the 40-man roster about a week or two ahead of Heliot Ramos, Sean Hjelle, and Randy Rodriguez, who were being protected from the Rule 5 draft.
Rincones and Genovés are not alone, of course. There are a number of other players in the system who fit in this bucket: long-time flamethrowers Melvin Adon, Abel Adames, and Willian Suarez (one of the really interesting development stories of 2022), and of course there’s There R Giants’ fave Ismael Munguia, who cruelly and crucially missed his final year before free agency, after a huge performance in 2021 in Eugene. There are others, too. Some have been with the organization for many years (a lá Jacob Heyward), some just passing through (e.g. Riley Mahan). All will have the freedom to direct the future of their career this time next week. Some of them might be re-signed to minor league deals (which are guaranteed and tend to be a little bit higher earnings than the salaries of the bulk of service-time controlled minor leaguers), but most of them will be allowed to move on and try to catch on elsewhere. For instance, Andres Angulo, who reached this same point a year ago, spent the 2022 season in the Baltimore Orioles’ system, and his fellow free agent, Sandro Fabian, caught on with the Rangers last year.
So let’s assess the chances that these two long-time farmhands might spend another season in a Giants — or Giants-adjacent — uni come 2023.
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