Rule 5 Decision: Nick Avila
Modesto native's rise has been dramatic, will it result in a 40-man spot?
Photo Credit: Richmond Flying Squirrels
This is a Free For All There R Giants’ post. There won’t be too many of these this winter, so if you like what you see, by all means become a subscriber to receive all my Giants’ prospect work delivered straight to your Inbox.
This is the sixth 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:
It wasn’t all that long ago that I legitimately feared Nick Avila could be heading for a release. Pitching as a starter in the 2021 Eugene rotation, Avila was getting rocked. Over an 11 game stretch, he posted an 8.01 ERA, with opposing hitters torching him to the tune of a .351/.408/.553 batting line over 48.1 innings. Essentially, every batter Avila faced over a two month period hit him like a Hall of Famer. As a new draft class began signing, forcing cuts to keep the total number of players below MLB’s mandated maximum of 180, Avila’s position as a pro didn’t look overly stable to my, admittedly amateurish outsider’s view.
That the right-hander from Modesto could go from that point to become a serious candidate for 40-man inclusion in just over a year is an incredible story. How does that story end? Let’s dig in and see…
The Case For Adding Avila to 40-Man
Near-Major League Ready Relief Arm
It doesn’t get much more solid than that! This is a guy who could potentially help in a big league bullpen next year.
The transformation from a pitcher who was being battered as a starter in Eugene in mid-summer 2021 to a bullpen weapon who could be ready to contribute to the big league club in 2023 was a dramatic one. Avila went through some of the changes when we spoke earlier this year. The first thing that changed for him was simply having a new mindset when he went to the bullpen. “Going from starting to the pen, something just clicked for me, just going out there and throwing everything as hard as I could, 100% on every pitch.”
That transition from holding something in reserve as a starter to more “max out” as a reliever is a common enough path to success for failed starters, but it was another change that combined with his move to the pen that really picked Avila’s game up.
“Originally,” Avila said, “it was just [trying] to hide the ball, just to turn my body because I felt when I was coming out of the windup, I was showing the ball, and it was almost like I was a pitching machine. I started hiding the ball, turning my body more, and then that just sort of helped me get into my back leg more and driving down the mountain a little more.”
The mechanical adjustments that Avila crafted with his pitching coordinators give him a funky, knock-kneed setup that always reminds me a bit of Ichabod Crane. But in addition to helping him hide the ball longer, the new setup helped his stuff pick up, and that led Avila to a complete change in his pitch mix. As a starter, he had mostly thrown a two-seam sinker. But as he started hitting the upper 90s from the new setup, he began throwing more four-seamers, touching as high as 98 and often sitting 95-96 with the pitch and getting great carry on it high in the zone.
About the same time, at the suggestion of Eugene pitching coach Alain Quijano, Avila resurrected a curveball that he had mostly stopped using. With the added power of his new mechanics, that pitch too had gained added power and depth. Avila liked the new action he saw on the breaker, and spent time experimenting with the pitch shape until he got it to a near perfect vertical drop.
That gave him the perfect north-south or high-low two pitch mix that much of the industry has trended towards the last few years. He then added a cutter to give him a horizontal look and his transformation was well on its way to completion. In the offseason, he continued working to perfect the shape of his new curve and four-seamer, and also spent a lot of time thinking about how to deploy his new-found repertoire. “It was really,” Avila said, “diving into the mental game and really understanding what all my pitches were doing and refining the pitch shapes and what to throw to righties and lefties. Because I felt when I started last year, my stuff wasn’t as good, but it was still decent, but I just didn’t know where to throw my pitches and who to throw them to.” Gaining new weapons was a big step in Avila’s development, but understanding what to do with them was the real game changer.
It was relatively early in 2022 that a scout from another team told me he thought Avila was a potential candidate to be poached in the Rule 5 draft. Going through a list of candidates on the Eugene squad (where Avila would ultimately be named the Best Relief Prospect in Baseball America’s survey of league managers), the scout said “I think Avila’s the one. You could grab him in the Rule 5 and make it work.”
Avila had quickly grabbed the Eugene closer role — in a bullpen that also included Cole Waites — and ended up leading the NWL in Saves despite being promoted to Double A in the first week of July. Avila doesn’t feature the truly explosive stuff of Waites’ powerful right-arm. Where Waites was running K rates of 40-50% in Eugene and Richmond, Avila’s were a more modest 27%. But Avila does a better job of sticking in the strikezone, and keeps walks to a minimum. It may be more of a 6th-7th inning profile than a 9th inning one, but it certainly looks like there’s a potential major league arm here. The stuff really pops.
The Case Against Adding Avila to 40-Man
Victim of the Numbers Game
A reader recently wrote in to say that one crucial element that I was leaving out in these Rule 5 decision posts is how many open slots there are going to be on the roster when the decisions are made. This is true! It’s a significant part of the decision-making process that I’m completely dismissing in making my binary Yes-No decisions. If the Giants only have two potential 40-man openings, then the choices are going to be that much harder. If they have seven, then more of these prospects can be brought on board.
So, let me address why I’ve left that crucial piece of the puzzle out of all of these posts at this point. The primary reason behind my failure to try to guess how many spots could be up for grabs is the current rather messy state of the Giants’ roster. The Giants currently have more players on the 60-day IL (10) then impending free agents (5 if you include both Carlos Rodon and Evan Longoria), which is a classic square peg into a round hole situation. There are going to be cuts and DFAs and non-tenders and all sorts of adjustments at the back end of the roster. Grant Brisbee, over at The Athletic, just posted an excellent off-season primer for the Giants. In that piece, he listed as many as 17 current members of the 40-man who are candidates for removal. That’s a lot!
But that, of course, doesn’t suggest that all of those places are going to be filled with current minor leaguers who may or may not need protecting from the Rule 5 draft. There will be player acquisitions this off-season. There will be free agent signings. There may be trades. Much — if not quite all — of the soft spots on the 40 man need to be reserved for these additions. After all, it doesn’t do much good for the Giants to protect a player from the Rule 5 draft in November…. only to have to expose those same players to waivers in February.
The Giants’ front office under Farhan Zaidi has shown a limited willingness for using 40-man spots on players who won’t impact the coming year’s major league roster. In 2021, the only protected player who didn’t later appear in the majors that year was Alexander Canario — and he was used in a deadline deal. In 2022, the Giants used one spot on a player who was unlikely to make the majors (Randy Rodriguez), but they were willing to risk losing other players in the same position (Prelander Berroa and Seth Corry to name just two). Indeed, their reticence swung the other way — they didn’t protect David Villar from the Rule 5 that never happened (which may have been fortunate) and he did end up impacting the big league roster.
So while there’s no way to know exactly how many spaces the Giants are willing to open up for this year’s crop of 40-man players, expect them to be conservative about it. Expect them to reserve as many spots as possible on players that they figure will be in the mix for big league jobs in the upcoming season. That’s why I’ve ended up with a NO verdict on most of my players so far. But it’s also true that there are currently enough soft spots on the roster to accommodate those players whom the Giants do decide to protect.
A case like Avila’s falls right into the gray area of that reality. Among those “candidates to make room if needed” on Brisbee’s list were guys like Zack Littell, Mauricio Llovera, Yunior Marte, and Luis Ortiz. How the Giants feel about their current bullpen candidates will play a big part in the decision of whether to add Avila to the roster or not. They could well like the player and believe in his long-term ability to help the organization, and still be willing to risk losing him if he’s far enough down the current depth chart of options for 2023.
The Verdict
Although the Giants have been willing to risk exposing players to the Rule 5 before, I’m guessing that part of the focus on player development that Farhan Zaidi emphasized when introducing Pete Putila as GM could include bringing a slightly wider group of internal candidates onto the roster. Avila hasn’t been a big name prospect coming up, but he’s worked his way into the plans after posting an 0.95 ERA over 28 innings in Double A, with a strikeout per inning. In doing so, he caught enough eyes to make him a serious candidate to be poached. I think he needs protecting.
Add Him to 40-Man?: YES
Report with Pitchers and Catchers come February, Nick, and we’ll see you at Oracle this summer!
Winter League Update
With the long season working into its ninth month since way back in spring camp, some of the guys are probably starting to feel the weight of the year at this point. After jumping out to a huge start, Luis Matos’ numbers have been slipping in the AFL — I don’t believe he’s had an extra-base hit since the opening week. Adrian Sugastey, playing just once a week on the taxi squad, has been having good success in his at bats, though with little power to show for it. Logan Wyatt, who had a lost season for the most part, has been reaching base in half of his plate appearances, showing his typical strong sense of the strike zone. All of the Giants prospects playing for the Scottsdale team are getting the opportunity to work with longtime Giants’ Triple A hitting instructor, Damon Minor, who is serving as the Scorpions’ hitting coach for the fall season.
Will Bednar’s unfortunate season has once again been felled by health woes. After a back strain and COVID wiped out the bulk of his season, he’s been shut down yet again with another bout of back tenderness. In his few innings in the AFL, Kyle Haines said by phone that Bednar looked rusty, and his fastball was still down a tick from his junior year in college. On the other hand, Carson Whisenhunt’s AFL just started, as he got his first start on Saturday night after building his arm back up following his own COVID delay.
Not too much activity going on in the winter leagues so far, especially with Marco Luciano disappearing lately from Estrella’s lineup. Down in Venezuela, Diego Rincones made a loud opening statement with two home runs in his first two games! Ricardo Genovés also homered in his Venezuelan winter league debut. Both Rincones and Genovés are set to become free agents this winter if they are not added to the 40-man roster.
Thank you Roger for another interesting piece. I really hope that the Giants give the likes of Avila a chance in the bullpen next year ahead
Tough stuff in the DR of late: old friend Alexander Canario took a tumble trying to avoid a tag at 1B and broke his ankle as well as separating his shoulder. He's done for the season and heading to Chicago for medical evaluation.
And to Roger's point in an earlier comment, if anyone needs evidence that LIDOM is a wildly competitive league take a look at the Toros del Este squad who after a 3-10 start to the season fired their manager Pat Listach and replaced him with (old friend alert?) Héctor Borg as interim manager.
So old pals Alen Hanson and Fernando Abad have a new skipper.