Rule 5 Decisions: Setting Up

The Annual Sorting of Protection Candidates Begins.

Photo Credit: Madalyn Harrell | SF Giants

Ok, bear with me. It seems maybe just slightly possible that the Rule 5 draft isn’t the biggest thing on your Giants-loving mind just right now. It’s not the most important thing going on in Giants-world, and with the World Series starting up tonight (raising with it apocalyptic thoughts of the Dodgers becoming the first repeat champions in a quarter century), it’s probably not first and foremost on your mind.

And yet the baseball calendar is remorseless — and my off-season editorial calendar is telling me that as October comes to an end, the annual sorting must begin. Less than a month from now, on November 18, MLB teams will need to set their rosters to protect players from the Rule 5 draft. Consequently, it’s time for me to engage in my annual guessing game to determine which player(s) have had a 2025 worthy of making them a member of one of the most selective groups in the world: MLB 40-man players.

As I’ve tried to emphasize over the years in my various Rule 5 Decision series, the question of who gets protected and who doesn’t is not a simple matter of value — it doesn’t tell you whether a player has a big league future or not, or whether a team believes in a player or not. It involves a host of complicated dynamics tugging the strands of that most complex of baseball systems: roster management. Teams are always weighing the likelihood of losing a player versus the value of a roster spot.

Last year, the Giants came up on the losing side of that particular calculation — and I would guess that experience is still stinging a good bit in the collective imagination of the front office. Much like Jake Gittes’ experience in Chinatown, in trying to “protect” Carson Ragsdale, they ended up making sure he was lost to them. That’s the kind of difficult-to-swallow wager that will stick with someone for a while, and you have to wonder if their experience with Ragsdale might well hover over their decision-making process this year, pushing them towards a more conservative approach to protection. After all, the chance of losing a player permanently in the Rule 5 draft is always quite remote; the chance of losing player who is DFA’d, and exposed to waivers, in season, is relatively high. Did the Giants weight those two possibilities appropriately enough last year?

Perhaps, like Mr. Gittes, the lesson they might take away is that, when it comes to Rule 5 decisions, one should do “as little as possible.” Forget it, Buster, it’s Rule 5!

Ragsdale, of course, would end up having a rather eventful first year as a big leaguer — one that involved getting DFA’d three times by three different teams, and suffering through one of the most forgettable MLB debuts of all time, when the Orioles let him absorb an eight-run drubbing over three innings. Tangentially, Ragsdale was college teammates for a year with David Villar, and boy will those two have some stories to tell if they run across each other in South Florida this winter: collectively they racked up five DFA’s and a release in 2025.

Anyhoo, today I’ll go through my annual “setting up” exercise, wherein I take a look at the Giants’ roster situation heading into the winter, and get you acquainted with the club’s potential decision points as they head into a process that will try to avoid “doing the Ragsdale” once again.