"The Off-Season is In Full Swing" Edition of the Free For All Mailbag

We’ve fallen back. I’ve been to the fall league and back. Thanksgiving is a week away. From all of which, I can deduce that we are fully into the holiday season, and the hot stove is turned on and cranking up. Soon the transactions will start flowing like wine!

Don’t believe me? Well, tomorrow, we’ll find out who the Giants are protecting from this year’s Rule 5 draft (Carson Ragsdale is in, Cole Waites and Carson Seymour are “on the bubble” by my estimation). If more than one player goes on the 40-man, some others are going to have to come off (and some may come off regardless). Three days after that is the deadline for tendering contracts to all of their arbitration-eligible and pre-arb players (we tend to care more about the arb guys, but the Giants have non-tendered several pre-arb players in recent years, including Waites just a year ago). It seems highly likely that the Giants will tender all four of their arb-eligible guys (Mike Yastrzemski, LaMonte Wade, Jr., Tyler Rogers, and Camilo Doval), but that doesn’t mean that all four will be part of the team come spring training, as ESPN’s Jeff Passan has reported that both Yaz and Wade can be had in trades.

Yessiree, things are about to get hectic! And what better way to soothe a harried and jumbled mind than to sit down with a nice relaxing dive into the mailbag. You’ve asked, and I will see what I can come up with for an answer. It’s the November edition of the Free For All Mailbag! We got a lot of questions in this month, so I’m going to break this mailbag into two pieces, with the second part running on Friday (on Wednesday, we’ll check in on the personnel moves).

Travis Bickle

What do you make of the Giants’ new Buster Posey era coinciding with budget cutting measures? Can the farm system thrive and produce stars if it’s seeing resources or staff headcount reduced?

Dennis Touros

Could the investment in Mission Rock have negatively impacted the Giants payroll?

This is a great question, Travis, and if you’ve been listening to my recent podcasts, it’s been one that is on my mind. In fact, I wrote about this issue just last week.

What Sort of Farm System Has Buster Posey Inherited?

I will say a couple of things here. First and most importantly, I don’t know that these two things are coinciding, exactly, and it might be better if we de-coupled them in our minds. The belt-tightening is likely an ongoing process with or without Posey. As I wrote in that piece, staff leaving without being replaced has been going on for a few years now, and I’ve heard people talk about budget pressures on the Farm Director basically ever since the pandemic season and its associated revenue losses. However, as I’ve written previously, at least on the minor league side, is that it’s hard for me to tell if budgets are being “cut” are simply “reallocated.” While there have definitely been staff losses on the coaching side, there have also been a lot of staff additions in other areas and departments. Still, I think we can absolutely say that the major league staff has been cut down — and in ways that have cost the organization some really talented coaches. I’d guess that at least two members of Gabe Kapler’s coaching staff end up Managers somewhere in the not-too-distant future — and I wouldn’t be surprised if the number ends up being larger than that.

To Dennis’ point, I will say that I understand where some of the financial pressures might be coming from. The Giants engaged in two huge capital projects through the teeth of the pandemic, and I would say in general, anybody who had major capital projects going on in 2020 would have experienced a long line of supply shortages, schedule delays, and ballooning budget issues. In addition, it wouldn’t be that surprising if the Mission Rock project has produced post-pandemic revenues well short of what might have been projected back in the heady days of 2018. So I get that the situation is not cut and dried (perhaps it’s not coincidental that the St. Louis Cardinals, another club that invested heavily in real estate development around their stadium just prior to the pandemic, are also talking about cutting back on payroll).

That said, I think the view of most Giants’ fans on that is “pull your big boy pants up and act like the marquis franchise you always say you are!” That Mission Rock development has placed a significant cost (and logistics) burden on fans as well, so fan sympathy is liable to be pretty limited if it turns out to be slightly less of (or more delayed) a cash cow than hoped. The end result is that the Giants constantly talk the talk of being one of the jewel franchises in MLB, and that status comes with certain walk-the-walk expectations attached. Maybe you can’t get Shohei Ohtani to take your $700 million dollars. But you certainly can match the Dodgers’ spending levels in the player development and staffing areas — and the Dodgers are most certainly not cutting back on either the field-level staffing or analytics departments. Heck, they just announced last week that they’d hired Max Bay — the original creator of the Stuff+ model — away from the Astros to become their Senior Quantitative Analyst. They also maintain a large pro scouting team that integrates seamlessly with their quants in player evaluation and development. So they’re not scaling back on any of these levers.

As I say, it’s hard to tell from the outside what exactly is going on with the financial picture. It seems clear that ownership is not enamored with passing the first CBT threshold, but they have shown a willingness go to that level, and they’ve invested significantly in several areas of the organization. It would certainly be reassuring to hear the powers that be, at some point, come out and make a full-throated commitment to investment at every level of the org, but that never does seem to come from the hydra-heads of Giants’ ownership.

We’ll just have to stay tuned to see where some of these trends go.

Beau

So it sounds like an automated strike zone is coming to MLB at some point, possibly even by 2026. How will that diminish the value of Patrick Bailey and his framing ability?

On this, and several other important topics impacting the game’s near-term future, I highly recommend listening to this podcast interview of Commissioner Rob Manfred from last month. When the ABS came up in the discussion, Manfred very pointedly said that he believes the time for testing is coming to an end, and by next spring, the league and player’s union should reach a decision point one way or another. (I will say as an aside, that on every issue that came up in that podcast, I thought Manfred’s takes were quite reasonable).

The most likely outcome of that decision point would seem to be that full ABS implementation will not be coming to MLB. Rather, the challenge system, which has been vastly preferred by players and most other people around the game, will be the likely outcome, if any change is going to be made (which is still in doubt!). The Athletic’s Eno Sarris (also last week’s guest on There R Giants podcast), had some interesting quotes this week from the likely AL Cy Young Award winner, Tarik Skubal, who told Sarris:

"Take the box off the TV….The umpires are actually pretty good. Challenge system is fine, don't let the game end on a terrible call. Our game is in a good spot, just let it breathe for a few years."

I suspect Skubal’s view represents the majority of players. The challenge system is efficient and fairly quick. The catcher, batter, or pitcher must make the challenge motion (tapping the top of their head) immediately once a pitch is called, and the result comes up on the screen in seconds. Each team starts the game with three challenges. Like MLB’s current replay system, unsuccessful challenges cause the challenging team to lose an opportunity going forward.

If that is the system that we see come to MLB, framing ability like Bailey’s will still have value. Teams will want to be strategic about how they use challenges — obviously they won’t want to be in position where crucial late innings calls go unchallenged because hitters burned through the three challenges unsuccessfully in the early innings. And I would suspect that hitters are going to challenge mostly egregious calls — they’ll want to make sure that they’re correct. Now I will say that my experience is that hitters tend to be successful in their challenges a little less frequently than either pitchers or catchers, both of whom have a direct view of the strike zone (unlike the batter’s perpendicular view). That, however, is anecdotal based on my erratic viewing habits.

All of which is to say that Bailey may lose some value when batters can combat his greatest — and most count-impacting — frame jobs, but his framing value shouldn’t dissipate entirely. Ballparking it….maybe 50-60% of it will remain?

Chris

Is it too soon to see the impacts on development of NIL in college baseball? Are guys staying longer in college or going to college instead of signing out of high school? Is competition from NIL deals going to drive up signing bonuses? Has the gap between the top college teams and the bottom minor leagues changed?

Chris, I’ll be perfectly honest with you: this isn’t at all my area of expertise, and if you really want to dig into this topic, I could recommend several Baseball America podcasts for you. In particular, this would be a great question for Carlos Collazo and Ben Badler on their “Future Projection” podcast. Geoff Pontes at BA recently had a fascinating show on whether the time is now right to open up draft eligibility to all college players.

The landscape in college sports has obviously been changed irrevocably, with the transfer portal and NIL causing mass disruption. Further, college baseball programs are now going to be able to offer expanded and full scholarships going forward, but at the cost of new roster limits, which will cause many schools to have to sever ties with incoming commits on short notice this year (a process that is going on right now).

I don’t think anybody really knows how all of this is going to shake out. I do know people who believe that the combination of full scholarships and NIL dollars could increase the bargaining power of high school players or draft-eligible sophomores, and could possibly cause the number of drafted players who don’t sign with pro teams to tick up slightly. Certainly, to some degree, that gap you speak of is closing, due to these new developments (especially for players who don’t get seven-figure signing bonuses). But we’ll need more years before a clear picture emerges. The negative repercussion, however, is that the smaller roster sizes at schools (combined with possibly more players getting to or staying at campus) is going to cause a lot of players to be squeezed out of opportunities, and some worry about a serious backlog of players at the top programs.

I guess the real answer to your question is: yes, it’s too soon to know what those impacts really are. But this is going to be a fascinating story to follow going forward.

Simpson, Erik

I've been wondering for a while about the significance of Marco Luciano's injury history. I know that the Giants yanked him around this year--in what seemed to be a battle between Zaidi and Melvin--but I'm thinking about the bigger picture that this young man literally broke his back not too long ago. I know there were always questions about his defense, but they have intensified recently, and I wonder how much of the explanation is simply that anybody with that level of back injury would have some effects on fluidity of movement for a good, long time. So there's the question: if Luciano had entered the Giants' system as an unknown international player right after the back injury, what would his performance record since that time say about his prospect status?

Ok, I’ve done a terrible job in sequencing these questions today, because there’s only so many times I can say “I don’t really know” to a question. But Erik, you have definitely asked us to peer through the outer edges of a black box with this one. In the summer of 2022, Luciano experienced a fracture to one of his lower vertebrae. That winter, he re-aggravated the injury. This much is known.

And yes, here we are, two years later, talking about a lack of fluidity and also trying to grapple with decreasing exit velocities. It’s very tempting to draw a straight line connecting some of those dots. But temptation is not always the wisest counselor, and our human desire to see patterns and connections everywhere we look can lead us into confusion as often as to clarity.

I will say this: I’ve never known any scout or evaluator who wasn’t an employee of the San Francisco Giants who believed he was going to stick at shortstop — and that broad consensus certainly predates his back injury. I have had so many conversations over the years about what I perceived to be his defensive stiffness at the position — it always seemed to me that he played the position with a high center of gravity, rather than low to the ground. Though I’ll admit that in 2023, I did think he was moving a little more athletically as the summer went on. He’s never had a particularly strong internal clock — and the game can speed up on him on defense. But the real issue this year appeared to be some basic issues with concentration or possibly confidence. The majority of his defensive miscues that I saw came on the simplest plays, often on balls hit right at him, which suggests to me that at least some of his issues have been on the mental side.

There have certainly been those inside the organization who have for years advocated moving Luciano to the outfield and removing that burden. “Let him concentrate on hitting and just go mash,” is definitely a sentiment I’ve heard expressed. But, except for in those brief days when it appeared that Carlos Correa was going to be the future, that idea has never held sway at the top of the organization….until now. Now, with just one option year remaining to him and so many questions left unanswered, the focus is going to have to be on getting him closer to his offensive potential. Without that….working on the rest of his game isn’t going to matter all that much.

Are there lingering issues from his back injury that have had deleterious effect on his development? Probably the only thing worse than playing “armchair psychologist” is playing “armchair medical specialist,” so I’ll have to abstain from answering that one. But he certainly wouldn’t be the first player whose career was knocked off kilter by a health issue. Like you, I’ve always held the suspicion that Joe Panik’s broken vertebrae, suffered shortly after being named an All Star in 2015, played a primary role in his career careening downhill, almost from that moment on.

As to your real question here, counterfactuals aren’t typically my thing. There are too many nuances of understanding that get thrown out with the flow of time. No opinion is formed in a vaccuum. Had Luciano’s entire career consisted of his 2023-24 seasons, with a blank slate coming before that time, we would probably be wondering what he was doing in Triple-A at all, and I’m not sure there would be a prospect status to discuss. But here in our universe, the feats of his amateur, complex, and lower minors career help to contextualize things. As Posey said recently, you can see that it’s in there. Can they — and he — finish the job of bringing it out? That question will hang over much of 2025, because he still represents one of the best chances this org has of developing a star hitter.

Josh G

Assuming Roki Sasaki would legitimately hear the Giants pitch, who are the best prospects you’d be willing to trade for more International Bonus Pool money to better entice him?

Oh boy, is this a good question! And it’s a great opportunity to back up a bit and talk about the latest Japanese sensation. So, for those who don’t know, Sasaki is a 23-year-old right-handed pitcher who can arguably be termed the greatest power-pitcher in Japanese history. A phenom, he was touching triple digits with his fastball in high school. He started his professional career at the age of 19, and along the way, has compiled a 2.02 career ERA over more than 400 innings for the Chiba Lotte Marines. During that time, he has averaged about 98 mph with his fastball, reaching as high as 103, which he pairs with a deadly splitter to become one of the premier strikeout artists in Japan.

When he was just 21 years old, he authored the most dominant two-start stretch in professional baseball history. He threw the 16th perfect game in NPB history — a start that included an NPB single-game record of 19 strikeouts and an incredible stretch of 13 consecutive strikeouts (also a record, naturally, in a league where strikeouts occur much less frequently than in American ball). He followed that historic outing with eight perfect innings in his next start. He was, unfortunately, removed from that game after the 8th due to rising pitch count concerns (and his bullpen blew the perfecto in the 9th), but it’s hard to imagine a greater two-start stretch than that one.

So now Sasaki is being posted, and, because he is just 23 years old, he is going to be an insanely valuable signing for some team. As was the case with Shohei Ohtani, because Sasaki is coming over before he turns 25, he will not be posted as a major league free agent, but will rather be constrained by MLB’s rules for “amateur international free agents.” That means he must fit into a team’s IFA bonus pool and will play his rookie year on a major league minimum salary just like any other rookie.

There are some yellow flags that come with Sasaki. Unlike some of the other Japanese star pitchers who have come over, he’s never won the Japanese equivalent of the Cy Young Award, and that’s mostly because he’s dealt with injuries. He’s only topped 100 innings in two of his four seasons, and never reached 130. He also did see some decline in fastball velocity (though we’re talking a decline to about 97 mph on average) and K rate this year. And, of course, like all Japanese pitchers, he’ll be coming from a six-man rotation. Those might be concerns that a team would really dig into if they were signing him to a $180 million dollar deal. But Sasaki will be signed for some $2-3 million bonus and play on a standard six-year rookie contract, which makes such nits much less of a picking concern.

The timing of this move is fascinating and will play an important role in how things progress. The 2023/24 IFA signing window is about to end on December 15, and the 2024/25 signing window opens on January 15 (in between is a “quiet period” to separate the two). Most teams have already spent most of the bonus pool for the current year, and nearly all teams have commitments in place that take up most of their bonus pools for next year (though one would imagine that a lot of GMs or PoBO will be happy to let their International Scouting Directors deal with the headaches that come with broken commitments in the Dominican if it means adding a talent like Sasaki to the coming year’s rotation).

If Sasaki is looking to sign before the current IFA period closes on December 15, money becomes an immediate concern for teams that want to make their pitch. Only four MLB teams have more than $1 million left in this year’s bonus pool, with the Dodgers (long suspected to be Sasaki’s preference) not-so-suspiciously leading the pack at $2.5. The Giants, because they did lose a commitment this year, are actually in a pretty good place as well, with somewhere between $1.25 and $1.5 million left to spend (the AP article linked above pegs the Giants at the lower amount, but Fangraphs’ Eric Longenhagen recently wrote that he has double-checked his figures with internal sources for accuracy, and he has them at $1.5).

So, here we get to Josh’s question. International bonus pool money can be traded — up to an extent. Teams can trade for up to 60% of their original pool amount (which fluctuates between about $5 and $7 million dollars). Normally, such deals are extremely minor in nature. Just to take a recent example, the Yankees picked up an extra $1.3 million in bonus pool money earlier this year in trades that involved J.T. Brubaker and Caleb Ferguson — and to be clear, some of that money came WITH Brubaker, not in exchange for him. So under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t take much for the Giants to add some money to their pool to bulk their offer up to, say, $2.5m — all they’d need is a waiver-wire 40th man type like Austin Warren, or maybe a low level lotto ticket like Junior Flores.

But these aren’t normal circumstances. This is going to be an extreme seller’s market. Anybody with pool money to offer — who doesn’t themselves want to make a pitch at Sasaki — will know that they can squeeze any potential buyers for a maximum return. “You want Roki? You come through me.”

And there are other complications, as well. Teams will have to obtain the additional bonus money before they can use it to make an official offer, which means whatever talent they give up for the extra money would be potentially handed away for no return if they couldn’t get Sasaki to sign — with the international window closing in just a few weeks, there wouldn’t be any other worthy talent available to spend it on. And, one final complication, returning to that AP story above, is that not many teams have significant amounts of money to trade, so it might take multiple deals to significantly bulk up the offer. Only 11 teams retain more than $500,000 in their current bonus pool, and that presumably includes several teams who would love to sign Sasaki themselves.

All of which makes this an unprecedented and unpredictable situation. Normally, pool money trades involve very low-level prospects. But if the Giants were given the impression that they had a real shot at signing Sasaki for just a few dollars more, I would say they should shoot pretty high up the ladder of their current prospect/young player lists. They don’t have a talent that is equal to Sasaki outside of Bryce Eldridge. Would Reggie Crawford, even with a year of rehab ahead of him, be enticing to a potential trade partner? I would think he might. How about starter depth Mason Black or Keaton Winn? If the Giants really felt good about their chances, the should be motivated to move one of their high-level pitching arms to get the job done. That’s certainly where their strength (and surplus) currently lies.

The real question is whether a half a million dollars here or there is really going to impact Sasaki’s decision at this point — which seems a little dubious.

Eric Walker

Does David Villar have a future with the Giants? His history suggests an acceptable or better level of MLB offensive production, and his defense is said to be quite good at 3B and acceptable in shorter spells at 2B. My feeling is that he has not had the continuity at the MLB level to produce up to his capabilities, but what is your take? (I see him as a potential IF "floater--a day a week at 3B, 2B, 1B, and DH.)

Also, if I can throw two at one time, how likely are Luis Matos and Wade Meckler to make the big club for 2025?

This is one of those areas where an incoming front office might see things a little differently, but right now, I’d say that Villar is pretty close to the end of the line with the Giants. Certainly, we can tell from the player movement last year that he had fallen to the bottom of the 40-man in Zaidi’s estimation. During the May and June onslaught of injuries, there was a substantial period of time in which Villar was the only healthy position player on the 40-man who was not called up. When Trenton Brooks was added to the 40-man and promoted over him to play 1b, the writing really seemed to be on the wall. And now Villar is out of options and buried on the depth chart (behind, among others, Matt Chapman and Casey Schmitt) — which is a pretty bad combination!

I think that I would push back on some of your optimism for him. In particular, I think Villar’s defense at 3b would cap out more in the “acceptable” range than quite good. He has good hands, and a decent first step, though his below average footspeed limits his range. But what really hurts him at 3b is a below average arm. By Statcast, his arm-strength in 2022-23 (when the sample size was plentiful and meaningful) was in the bottom third of major league players, just the 16th percentile in 2023. That kind of arm strength is always going to hurt a player’s chance to stick at 3b in the majors. That’s less of an issue at 2b, of course, but there, his limited range is more of a problem — and I’m not sure that he’s ever gained a sense of comfort at that position. Notably, he didn’t play 2b at all in 2024.

On offense, Villar has progressed up the ladder by murdering fastballs. But breaking balls and off-speed pitches have always given him issues, and that really hasn’t gotten better over time. In his 2023 chance at a full-time job, his whiff percentage versus off-speed pitches was 41%. In his short stay in the majors last year, he swung and missed more than 58% of the time he offered at a breaking ball. It’s hard to survive with those kind of whiff rates — especially as the league as a whole decreases usages of fastballs and becomes more and more of an off-speed game. And lastly, Villar’s plate discipline — the key improvement that drove his rise to the majors — seems to have regressed the last couple of years, as his chase rate has risen to problematic levels at both the major league and Triple-A levels.

Put all of that together, and it’s hard to imagine that the soon-to-be 28-year-old has much of a future in San Francisco, unfortunately. He’s too far down the current depth chart to stick permanently on the roster, but lacking options to further develop at Triple-A. And, of course, as he’ll be turning 28 in January, development time is quickly running out on him. But hopefully there’s another opportunity out there waiting for him, and, as you say, he can take it and run with it, proving that he is more than the player we’ve seen the last few years with the Giants.

As for your second question, Eric, I think that topic will come up in part two of the mailbag, come Friday.

Which brings us to the end of today’s portion of the mailbag. On Wednesday, we’ll wrap up the Rule 5 protection roster moves and any other news that comes our way, and I’ll be back with more questions and answers come Friday.