Rule 5 Decisions: Victor Bericoto

Young Slugger Trying to Rise

Photo Credit: Richmond Flying Squirrels

For the next couple of weeks we’ll be examining the major cases of Rule 5 protection candidates, to see who the Giants might choose to add to the 40-man roster this year. The Rule 5 protection deadline this year is November 19. So far in the Rule 5 Decisions series, we’ve looked at:

• Setting Up the Rule 5 Decisions

• Cole Waites

• Juan Sanchez

• Aeverson Arteaga

• Carson Ragsdale

• Carson Seymour

• Christian Koss

It’s a strange year for the Rule 5 Decisions series. Victor Bericoto becomes the second player I’ve dedicated a full Rule 5 post to for a second year in a row (Aeverson Arteaga also got his own post in the 2023 version, while both Carson Ragsdale and Juan Sanchez were featured in the concluding “…..and the rest” edition last year), while there’s only one player we’ve touched on who has reached eligibility for the first time. Does that seem odd to you? It seems odd to me!

And yet, maybe it shouldn’t. I talked at the beginning of this series about the tremendous impact that the COVID pandemic had in limiting the number of players coming “online” as first-time protection candidates. What I didn’t mention in that set up piece was the equally forceful impact it had on the development arc of young players. It’s not all that unusual for players to lose years to injury along the way, but the missing 2020 season compacts all of those losses for young players trying to improve themselves. For those who have had injury take a year away from them (including Arteaga, Bericoto, and, of course, Ragsdale’s multiple injury-impacted years), their reality isn’t just one crucial lost year, but two in short order.

Bericoto, the subject of today’s post, had a strong debut season as a 17-year-old in the DSL. And then he got no significant game reps again until he was 20, thanks to a wrist injury that limited him to just seven games in the summer of 2021. What does that gap do to a player’s development — to their brain’s ability to predict the movement of incoming pitches or their muscles’ ability to quick-twitch? This is a question that the industry has been grappling with ever since.

Giants’ Farm Director Kyle Haines has talked for years about how crucial it is for young players to get constant reps. You can see this effect by looking at the shape of the careers of college hitters. Go to the Baseball Reference page of most any player drafted out of college and look at the steady improvement in their production from Freshman to Sophomore to Junior years. There are exceptions, of course, but if you take the 60,000 foot view, that improvement is steady, constant, and very predictable.

But for players like Bericoto, or Luis Matos, or Marco Luciano (who has also lost time to injury), those steady reps at the crucial 18/19 age years never happened. Has that affected their ability to make rapid progress? Almost certainly, but exactly how is harder to say. Still, it’s not a shock to me that if you look at the top ranked players who were signed as international free agents in 2018, you see a class that has mostly not yet jelled, with only the Mets’ Francisco Alvarez having any real success at the major league level so far.

So maybe cases like Bericoto’s, Arteaga’s — players who come up before the Rule 5 tribunal a second or even third time before they’re ready — should be the norm at this point in the game’s evolution, and something we should expect to continue seeing until this “lost year generation” has passed through the minors.

All things considered, Bericoto really has made remarkable progress in the slim time he’s had on the field in his career. Let’s take a look at just how much progress there’s been…