The focus was on Eugene from the start. Going back to the “way too early” roster preview for the Emeralds, I wrote at nearly this time last year, it was clear that Eugene was going to have a special group of players — one of the most intriguing collections of talent that any organization was going to have at any level. Of the eight 1st or 2nd round picks taken during Farhan Zaidi’s first three years in charge of the Giants’ baseball operations, five of them began the year on the Eugene opening day roster — as did Kyle Harrison, who was paid like a 1st rounder when the team built their 2020 draft around reeling him in. And the cream of the international signings of the past few years had arrived in the form of Marco Luciano, Jairo Pomares, and Luis Matos.
The Chicago White Sox tried a player development experiment this season called “Project Birmingham,” where they promoted the very best prospects in the organization (no matter what level they were at) to Double A Birmingham to promote concentrated and synergistic development environment. Without intention or design or disruption to the system, the Giants came close to doing the same thing with their “Eugene Project” simply through the natural progressions (or the lack of same) from so many of their top prospects in 2021. In all, the roster that began the season in the chilly, wet climes of the Pacific Northwest included eight of the top 16 players on the Baseball America ranking of the Giants’ system — and a clean sweep of the top four prospects on There R Giants’ 2022 Top 50. Going into the year, two things seemed self-evident about the Eugene team: 1) they were likely to dominate their competition; and 2) they were likely to move a lot of players up through the system quickly.
As was true of the Giants’ farm system in general this year, Eugene found a way to both confirm and confound those expectations. They absolutely did dominate their competition (in terms of both Wins and Losses and statistical record) and they did move a lot of talent upwards through the system — but the players who moved up weren’t always the ones we expected to see excel, and some whose performances were eagerly anticipated struggled to find their footing, or lost significant time to injury — or some combination of the two.
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