Rule 5 Decision: Chris Wright
The Rhode Island lefty has a lot of fans in the org. Will he also have a seat on the roster?
This is the eighth 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:
Unintentionally, this turned into reliever week in our Rule 5 Decision profiles! I suppose that’s to be expected — after all, relief pitchers make up the vast majority of actual Rule 5 picks. In the last Rule 5 draft to take place in December, 2020, 15 of the 18 players selected were relievers. So it’s natural that players moving up the bullpen depth charts should occupy a lot of our time when thinking about protection from the Rule 5 draft. Today’s entry will be our fourth bullpen arm in the series, and with this year’s earlier protection date (MLB has confirmed that Nov. 15 will be the protection deadline this year, though the official offseason calendar hasn’t been publicly released as of yet), I probably won’t get to some other interesting candidates, like Joey Marciano, Blake Rivera or Clay Helvey.
But Chris Wright demands his own post because he brings a quality that the sport has always valued: lefty who misses bats. Though he doesn’t boast a high 90s fastball like his former teammate Cole Waites, batters consistently swing at his low-90s offering as if it had several more mph behind it. There hasn’t been a left-hander not named Kyle who’s missed more bats than Bryant University’s own Wright — and that makes him worth a closer look.
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