The Post-Prospects: Hitters Edition
Before they leave the rankings, how do the former prospects measure up?
Obviously, it’s been an emotional and, for the most part, pretty shitty week in the world of the San Francisco Giants and their fans. Failure leads to fall guys, reassessments and changed directions. It follows like the seasons. It was probably always going to be impossible for Gabe Kapler to live up to the Giants’ legends that came before him, but it’s still shocking to see the first firing of a Giants’ manager since I was in college (which, trust me, has been a long, long time). But that story — and its aftermath — is a topic I’ll leave to better, more qualified writers, while keeping an eye on how the course corrections apparently underway in house affect player development — as they surely will. It’s worth remembering that when Jimmy Davenport was fired, it was just a blip on his decades long career helping make the Giants a better organization. Managers are hired to be fired, and that doesn’t need to be the final act of their careers, nor the most important.
The focus of There R Giants, of course, is always squarely on prospects — the kids working their way up the ladder. As we get into the winter, I’ll be spending a lot of my writing time focusing on depth charts, roster previews, and, of course, rankings of “prospects.” But that’s a word that carries within it a certain ambiguity. Every year, we get to dust out the prospect lists, snipping off those players who have used up their rookie eligibility at the major league level, thus making them bonafide “big leaguers.” They will ne’re again be rookies, nor consequently, “prospects.”
But, as we know, this leaves a pretty big gray area that I get to conveniently ignore — the wide swath of players who are no longer considered “prospects,” but who haven’t truly established themselves as consistent major league players. The players who are still trying to establish themselves as big leaguers, and still developing their game to a big league level, get conveniently pared from our lists right as they get into the most complex, and in some ways captivating, phase of their career — and really outstanding big league careers are developed right at the point when those players stop being considered “prospects.”
The Giants graduated plenty of players from their prospect identification with the rookiepalooza of 2023. But some of those graduated players — maybe several of them — will be right back in Sacramento when we greet the start of the 2024 season.
More importantly, all of those players have affected our (and, I presume, the Giants’) perceptions of them with their work over the past few months. So, before I plunge into looking ahead, it seems only right that I spend a post looking backwards at the players who forevermore will no longer be in my purview, and reassess my “prospect” views of them. Was I too rosy or too dour in my projections? What took me by surprise in these big league debuts? Where can we look forward to future progress, and where are dark clouds starting to set in?
Today, we reassess the Post-Prospect group of 2023.
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