Photo Credit: Richmond Flying Squirrels
If I could go back in time and convince Dinah Washington to record a theme song for this series (which is maybe the greatest notion I’ve ever conjured up in this project, and I’ll get right to work on the time machine as soon as this post is done), it would, naturally, be “What a Difference a Year Makes.” A year can make a massive difference in a player’s outlook, their skills, their body, their approach, their mindset — it really can make all the difference in the world in this game. Brian Sabean used to say that “every year is its own journey” and they all lead to a new and different destination.
That reality of player development is making itself keenly felt in this current series, which has focused primarily on players who are not becoming eligible for the Rule 5 draft for the first time this year. Today’s post is the fourth I’ve written so far in this series. To date, we have covered:
With today’s look at Nick Avila, that means that three of the first four players I’ve written up were originally eligible for the draft last year, but are now back in again in newer, and perhaps more interesting form. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything to tell you that Avila won’t be the last player in this series to have been eligible for previous Rule 5 drafts either.
This wasn’t as much the case last year. Then, I wrote up decision cases on 11 players. If we include Marco Luciano (whom I did not write up because his case seemed so obvious to me), then eight of the 12 players I deemed the most difficult decision points* were first-time eligible. Of the four who were eligible in previous years, I lumped two of them together into a post about players who were about to become free agents whom the team might conceivably have considered adding to the roster to keep them in house, as they actually did do with Isan Diaz. While that fit within the general rubric of the series, it was actually a different sort of roster decision altogether.
*I shouldn’t forget to mention that I failed to get around to writing a post on Keaton Winn in that series, once again putting the fallibility of my judgement in bold relief.
But this year, it’s the repeaters who are really taking center stage. As I wrote in the introduction to this series, that’s in large part because the lion’s share of players who would have come up for first time eligibility this year were already added to the roster in-season. That shifts the focus on the development of older classes.
Avila, who last year became the first Giants player selected in the major league portion of the Rule 5 draft since 2017**, is, in some ways, the most interesting repeater of them all. In 2022, he spent all spring with the White Sox before being returned to the Giants. So, our question for today is pretty simple: how much of a difference has the past year made for a pitcher who, for a matter of a few months, got to live that sweet 40-man life last winter, before being plunged back in to the ranks of the minor leaguers?
**Remember Albert Suarez? Signed as a minor league free agent, he pitched parts of 2016 and 2017 with the Giants and had just been re-signed as a minor league free agent again in December of 2017 when the D’backs grabbed him in the Rule 5 draft. When he failed to make the club out of spring training, the Giants declined to spend the $25,000 to take him back and he played out the year in Reno before heading to Japan for the remainder of his career. The last “prospect” taken out of the Giants’ system in the Rule 5 draft was Joe Biagini, back in 2015.
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