It's the "Holy Cow, Did You SEE That!?!?" Free For All Mailbag
Wow, what a performance last night! What a special, special kid out there having the time of his life, doing what he’s prepared himself to do for nearly his entire life. And a kid that we’ve spent the last three or four years watching, studying, getting to know — almost literally from the first moment he was drafted. Remember this little gem from the very earliest days of this site?
This is the payoff for spending all of this time watching over the players learning from the lowest levels and youngest ages. A feeling that you have some tiny bit of understanding of what it took for him to arrive at his moment in time when it finally comes.
And so we arrive at the final Free For All Mailbag of August. Can you believe it? I’m not ready for things to end, and for solace, I retreat, as I always do, to my all time favorite bit of baseball writing:
The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.
The greatest Literature Professor turned Baseball Commissioner ever! Ah, Bart, we miss you.
Anyway, what I really need to do to console myself over lost time is answer my awaiting correspondence. To the mailbag we go….
What are the odds Randy Rodriguez and Jose Cruz remain on the 40 man roster this offseason given their struggles to throw strikes?
That’s a reasonable question. We’ve seen the Giants move away from young relief arms that they’ve added to the 40-man somewhat quickly. They added Gregory Santos and Kervin Castro prior to the 2021 season, and both were gone before the 2023 season began, so I do have some question about those roster spots once we get into the post-season and the inevitable roster pinch starts in again.
That said, short relief arms are, as we all know, highly mercurial which means stuff can go up just as quickly as it drops down. I would think they’d want to see both of these guys in camp next spring to assess how likely they are to impact the 2024 team. Really, Rodriguez’ stuff has been outstanding this year and his strike-throwing isn’t that much worse than Camilo Doval’s (who he also resembles somewhat in pitch mix and stuff, even though he’s missing a couple of Doval’s highest mph). I’d have a hard time seeing them move away from a pitcher who is so highly regarded around baseball (unless this involves some multi-player deal).
Cruz’ case is a bit different, because his stuff really has backed up this year along with an extremely challenging bit of strike-throwing. I heard from a few different scouts last fall who were surprised to see that the Giants had protected Cruz, and I do wonder if they have some regret about that move at this point. But they also know much more comprehensively what interest other teams have in players. Still, my sense is that the Giants are unlikely to go back on that decision quite so soon, and will at least want to get into next year to see if Cruz can return to a more developed version of the 2022 edition that we saw in San Jose. That pitcher would still be a potentially impactful arm, and it might be risky to move away from him just because of one sub-standard minor league season.
The Hillsboro Hops announcer gave a surprisingly glowing mention of Damon Dues, currently batting over .300 for the Emeralds. What do we know about this guy? (The player, not the announcer...)
Sure, Dues is a player who makes his way into There R Giants now again. In fact, if you recall the “Prospect Draft” that I took part in last spring with my friends Marc Delucchi, Wrenzie Regodon, Kevin Cunningham, and Brian Recca, Dues ended up on the bench of my team (parenthetically, I hadn’t looked at that team since March — it’s interesting, including inspired picks like Tristan Beck, Diego Velasquez, Victor Bericoto, and Hayden Birdsong, and…. well …. less inspired picks, I suppose).
Anyway, Dues belongs to a phylum of player that we should easily recognize in the Giants’ system. He’s not very big or physical or athletic, but he has outstanding contact skills and a strong sense of the strike zone. His 7.9% swinging strike rate in the NWL this year isn’t quite so high as Wade Meckler’s rather ridiculous 5.2%, but Dues is still in the top 10 in that category for all hitters with as many as 25 PA.
Dues is also something of a “poor man’s version” of Meckler in a few other categories, as his overall contact numbers and in-zone contact numbers both sit slightly under Meckler’s on the Eugene team lists: (79% to 85% for contact, and 82% to 95% in in zone contact).
That might make you think that Dues is a Meckler Light, but there are some other numbers that I should probably add in here to help complete the picture. Dues is an excellent contact hitter, and has a strong sense of the strike zone, though his chase rate with Eugene (22.5%), is actually a bit closer to Grant McCray’s (25.1%) than to Meckler’s (19.4%). But while he makes a lot of contact, the quality of his contact is more problematic. His Exit Velocities, no matter how you look at them, sit at the bottom of organizational rankings. Since I do happen to have access to 90th Percentile Exit Velocity for the org (and since that is the number most teams consider to be most important), I’ll use that one. Dues’ 90th Percentile EV is a lowly 97.4. Only one player in the organization has a lower one — a similar type player, too, in Richmond 2b Hayden Cantrelle, who sits at 96.5. A few of the players with 90th Percentile EV below 100 have actually been released during the course of the season, though there are a couple others near the bottom of that list who are very good prospects — which is a good teaser for telling you to check out today’s Stats Review, where I have a graphic focused on precisely that number!
It really is difficult to succeed in today’s baseball with contact that soft, but once again, Meckler comes to our rescue to some degree. His 90th percentile EV is about 101.5, and since coming to the majors, the hardest ball he’s hit so far has been just 99.7 mph, which sits in the 4th percentile of big league hitters. Whether he can continue to be successful in MLB at that level is, I suppose, an open question.
Roger, I was struck by your recent comment that the SF farm system doesn't have many prospects that grade out as average MLB starters and that there is still much work to be done 4+ years into the Zaidi era. That's disheartening. But I appreciate that big picture analysis and hope you'll expand on it. We keep hearing about the org's commitment to and huge investment in player development (e.g. Papago Park). With so many 40-45 FV prospects in the system, it seems reasonable to think that effective development in the coming years would translate into a few more 50-grade players. Yet, this regime doesn't have a good track record of that to this point in the minor league ranks. What confidence level do you have that the Giants PD will help more players level up to become 50 FV prospects going forward? And why? With several high-bonus guys dropping a FV level (or more) and maybe only Luis Matos ascending to a 50 grade, I must say this normal optimist needs to see the proof in the pudding to be a believer. Sigh.
To be honest, I would say it’s rarely true that any organization has that many future average starters in their farm system, though it is true that many more are graded out that way potentially. But, let’s try to quantify what “not many” really is. If I look at MLB’s most recent ranking of the organization (which includes the draft class), they put 50 or better grades on the top nine prospects in the system, with #10 prospect Hayden Birdsong, dropping down to 45. Baseball America is, in one respect, more optimistic — it looks like they have 15 players with a 50 or better — but they also include the Risk Factor numbers which essentially works as a drag on the likely outcome, and several of those 15 they place in the highest tier of Risk. In the end, both lists probably are seeing the system similarly.
I haven’t done my own ratings yet and probably won’t until the season is over. But last year in my Depth Chart series, I had nine players listed as grade 50 or above. Of that group, I’d have to say that I’m considering a drop down into the 45 or 45+ range for about four of them. I had Patrick Bailey listed as a 45 in that series, which certainly seems to have been a half to a full grade low for him. I don’t see anybody else that I feel particularly bad about their 2023 grades, though I probably do regret placing Birdsong in the RP category, which caused me to drop him out of the 50.
But to your question, I would divide that into pitchers and hitters and say that, right now, I feel a lot better about the organization’s ability to improve their pitching prospects than I do about the ability to improve the hitting prospects. We’ve seen quite a few pitchers raise their profile in this organization over the last few years — starting with the guy who started last night’s game, who wasn’t remotely considered a 1st round talent by anybody other than the Giants three years ago. It seems like an annual occurrence now to see somebody like Caleb Kilian or Landen Roupp or Keaton Winn or Birdsong break out of the pack and become a legit major league arm where previously they were hardly a blip on the industry consciousness. On the hitting side, the progress has been a bit sparser. Meckler obviously is a pretty successful story, though how much you can really put on development when a guy only spends 90 days in the system is hard to say. There are players who have improved their profiles in the system — McCray, Vaun Brown, possibly Victor Bericoto belongs there, too. But I don’t think we’ve seen evidence that the org is “good at” developing hitters right now.
Part of that is that hitting is much harder to develop than pitching, given some of the technological breakthroughs we’ve seen lately, and part of it might just be that it takes more time. But part of it might also be that the club just hasn’t developed their own secret sauce on that score as of yet. I know they believe very highly in the power of data to help improve performance. I’m not 100% sure how wide the adoption of that is up and down the system, and finding ways to bridge the gaps might be more challenging than the club hoped.
Not exactly a question but Randy Rodríguez's Saturday might have been as impressive a two innings as Sacramento's had this season (apologies to Kyle and Ryan Walker). There's a lot of action on weekends obviously, so just didn't want him getting lost in the shuffle. Hammering the zone with full velocity/strong pitch shapes, all his sinker misses were in, all his four-seam misses were up, all his slider misses were down, just like you'd want them to be for chases. Looks like he's tried to shorten things up and be more direct to the plate over the last few weeks (horizontal release point is more neutral, vertical release point higher). Just one game of course but was really great to see
Asked and answered, counselor! I agreed, which is why I tried to highlight it in yesterday’s post!
After the end of short season ball, how does the 2023 draft class compare to the previous five years’ drafts?
I appreciate this question, John, but it’s not the type of question I really like to answer. My tendency is to be a little conservative when it comes to incoming classes. Everybody is always excited about the new talent every year — and that was as true when the names were Hunter Bishop or Will Bednar as it is for Bryce Eldridge. I always push newbies a little bit down my lists until I see them get into pro ball and play a season. And, in fact, I might be even more bearish in the future, because I can think of some recent occasions where I pushed newly drafted players higher than my inclination based on reputation, and I later wish I’d left them where I had them.
So, that said, I don’t think we really know much more than we did back on draft day (or days), and at that point, it certainly looked like the Giants had a really good class. I do know that the Giants have been very pleased with the at bat quality they’ve seen from Eldridge so far, which is certainly encouraging. If I had to pick players from further down the draft who have made a strong first impression, along the lines of Birdsong or Spencer Miles last season (and Miles’ mention reminds me of a good reason not to get too reactionary to complex level performance), I suppose I would say pitcher Josh Bostick and outfielder Scott Bandura. I’ve gotten good early buzz on those two. Walker Martin and Maui Ahuna, of course, haven’t gotten into any games due to physical issues, but it sounds like they’re excited to have both in the fold.
What are your thoughts on the wave of promotions this year, and most particularly Meckler? Are the Giants overrushing him considering he isn't Rule 5 eligible for a couple of years and he's got to prove himself ahead of players who've had much more playing time through the minors. You made a great point before about the difference in ball flight coming out of rows of seats/fans/lights compared to single or two-story stands that I'd not really thought about before when it comes to adjusting to the bigs.
It is very clear that the org decided to shake up their processes this year. While you can very clearly point to a specific need that forced the Giants to aggressively promote Casey Schmitt, Patrick Bailey, and Luis Matos, there is also just no doubt that this was an organizational change. Farhan Zaidi has spent many years talking about the need to get guys 500-600 upper minors ABs before considering them ready, and that’s really a type of soundbite you don’t hear from him anymore.
I think, mostly, that just reflects a realization that they were falling out of pace with the industry and needed to reassess some of their development beliefs. Watching Atlanta pluck players straight out of Double A for the middle of a playoff race — not even always highly regarded prospects — certainly can have the effect of changing some of your core beliefs. And, for those of you longtime listeners to the podcast, this was signaled to you long before the rest of the Giants’ world knew it, when Dave B. Flemming appeared last year, because one of the things he said that he had been told by the front office was that they had to get more aggressive about challenging their prospects. As Dave related it, he’d been told by Zaidi that “slow playing them just wasn’t working.” I think that also reflects an attitude that new GM Pete Putila brought with him from Houston (as an aside, one thing I’ve heard from various sources during the year is that we can expect Putila to bring in more of “his” development people this winter — though I’ve never been able to determine to my satisfaction whether this is based on any real knowledge, or whether it’s just what people assume will happen because that’s what new GMs do?).
As for Meckler in particular, one Giants official told me right after the promotion was announced that he thought it sent a really good signal to the other players in the org, because you could see that the Giants were putting their money where their mouth was. They tell their young players that they’ll be rewarded for adopting a highly disciplined approach to swing decisions, and here was a dramatic example of a player being rewarded rapidly for that very thing. What better way to get others on board.
That said, I don’t disagree with Andy Baggarly’s assessment that it was a gamble because of the 40-man implications. Somebody is surely going to risk Rule 5 exposure this year because of the spot that Meckler was given — a full three years before the service time calendar dictated the need. Whether that gamble pays off or not — time will have to tell on that one. He certainly has a lot of skills that the Giants value, and his focus and intensity are difference-makers.
We hear countless stories of prospects and fringe players being signed out of organizations that previously employed current Giants employees, the Dodgers being the most obvious current example for us. Have Giants prospects who had to move on gotten similar lifelines from former Giants development folks now with other organizations?
It took me a bit to bend my brain around that question, but I believe I have it now. You’re noting the tendency of this regime to bring in players from the Dodgers whom either Farhan Zaidi or Gabe Kapler or both knew when they worked in LA (Matt Beaty, Willie Calhoun, and the like). The first step towards answering this question, then would be to identify other organizations who currently employ former Giants’ officials, and this is actually working my brain a little bit.
Former Pitching Sciences guru Matt Daniels left the Giants last winter and ultimately took a job with Minnesota, and there are coaches who have landed elsewhere (Danny Santin is a hitting coordinator with the White Sox this year, for instance, and longtime Giants’ coach Jose Alguacil is part of the Kansas City Royals’ staff this year). But the obvious place to really look is Detroit, where former GM Scott Harris now runs the show.
And, yes, there we do find that some former Giants minor leaguers have found a place to continue on their careers. Over the last year (since Harris’ arrival), Detroit has signed Diego Rincones and Kervin Castro (my second Kervin mention in today’s bag!) as minor league free agents, and they recently claimed Isan Diaz off of waivers from the Giants. In addition to grabbing up player talent, they also hired Michael Brdar to be their major league hitting coach. Brdar, a product of that same De La Salle baseball program that sent Kyle Harrison and Armani Smith into pro ball, was the Giants Coordinator of Hitting Instruction for their Player Development until being hired away by Bob Melvin before the 2022 season to be his hitting coach. He spent a year with San Diego before following Harris to Detroit (perhaps learning a painful lesson about how much instruction you get to do on a roster full of high-priced stars in the interim, but that’s just my hypothesis).
We’ve also seen a few former Giants’ prospects picked up by the Nats recently, with both Frankie Tostado and Pat Ruotolo visiting Richmond with the Harrisburg team. That team does employ former Richmond data analyst (and friend of the site), the delightful and brilliant Samantha Unger. I don’t think Sam’s making any Nats’ personnel decisions, though, so that’s likely just a coincidence.
Why hasn’t Diego Velasquez been promoted to Eugene? He seems to have more than earned it. Is he blocked by Aeverson Arteaga and others? Or are they just taking their time with a young player?
Allow me to use this question to once again promote today’s Stats Review, coming out shortly, which will include a different lens through which to view Velasquez’ outstanding full season debut that may or may not cause you to recalibrate your question.
Generally, the latter sub-question is the answer here I believe, but, as always, there are many things behind a decision to promote a player than simply statistical performance. In fact, whenever I raise this topic in a conversation with Giants’ PD officials, they almost invariably downplay the stat line as a motive behind such decisions. Some of that, no doubt, is measured to reduce the chorus line of “move him up!” whenever a player gets hot, but a lot of it is genuine, because the team has much more understanding of a player’s development than any stat line is going to show. For one thing, they have far advanced data, which they are taking both before and during games — they know how hard players can hit a ball or what their bat speed is, whether the release points on their pitches is similar enough to crease deception for hitters and how the spin efficiency of a specific offering is working.
They also know non-performance things about players. How much dedication they show to preparation and to strength and conditioning — which are two huge priorities for this organization. I can say for certain that there have been times when fans were wondering why a certain player hasn’t been promoted when one of those two things (or both!) were behind the Giants’ reluctance. I can’t say that about Velasquez, but I do know that the Giants have long been encouraging him to get after it a little more in the gym and improve his physicality — both in terms of strength and quickness, which will be essential for him to remain an up-the-middle player. He’s just 19, so we can expect him to simply grow into a little more strength, but I think the Giants would like him to improve on nature with a more rigorous strength regimen as well.
While I think you can basically answer the question with your final surmise — there’s no harm in leaving a very young first-year player in place — some of those other factors could be playing a part in weighing whether or not he’s ready for a step up as well.
Ok, lightning round:
Mailbag question: Roger, if you were the Giants’ GM/PBO, how would you handle Schmitt between now and next April? You were more optimistic about him, post-draft, than most; do you still see the same potential? Is it reasonable to think he can fix his hitting problems? And do you see his struggles- and really, the team-wide non-Flores struggles - as an indication that the current group of hitting instructors are not as helpful as they should be?
I’m not — and never really have been — super excited about the idea of Schmitt playing up the middle. I think his best value is likely to be as a Hoover at 3b who hits enough and gobbles up ground balls. So personally, I suppose my answer would be to put him in Sacramento, play him every day at 3b, and wait to see if the swing decisions improve and the power blossoms. It was seeing him as a shortstop that caused the Giants to rush him to the majors — and I’ve never really seen him that way. If they could have found a different stop gap to help fill in for Brandon Crawford’s absence, then they might not have been so inclined to push him to the majors when his batting line in Sacramento was actually below league average.
I think there is a good feel for hitting and an ability to make hard contact, but he’s obviously going to have to stay inside the strike zone much better for those abilities to activate. I’m not sure that’s going to happen getting sporadic time in the majors. As I discussed with Danny Emerman on last week’s pod, though the Giants have a vocal belief in their ability to finish player development at the big league level, so far the track record of doing that for hitters is lacking.
As for hitting coaches — I’m not a big believer in pointing blame at them when things go wrong. For me, the game is about the players and they’re the ones who deserve credit and blame. Primarily, I would say this season’s offense has been the outcome of poor health. Nobody is going to have an effective offense when the entire back half of the lineup is rookies — certainly nobody is going to have an effective offense when they string together four rookies hitting below 100 wRC+. The problem has been that the veterans the team was relying on have been largely unhealthy (which was, frankly, predictable), and for the most part, under-productive when on the field. The fact that the team philosophy has caused them to go after players with a history of fairly high strikeouts has played into the issues, because it accentuates their inability to sustain rallies (which the whole backside of the lineup being rookies also aggravates). The amount of rally-killing strikeouts this team has had this year is a number I really don’t want to look into very closely.
Thought of one more as I was reading your weekend review of Keaton Winn and looking at the Statcast data for that game. Winn seemed to be throwing a (new?) sharper breaker in his long search for something that moves to the gloveside. 6 pitches (#s 5, 18, 33, 41, 42, 52), 85 mph, -4 IVB, 0 HB, 2 whiffs, 2 called strikes, a routine fly ball, and good location. Shape was pretty consistent, almost like a curveball. Do you have any ideas on what breaker shape he's trying for or has felt most comfortable with (even though none have stuck)? Or just which you think would fit best with the rest of his pitches?
I noticed that, too. It’s much slower than his old slider, though there was some of the same shape to it, though I don’t really know the answer to your question. Winn isn’t a “flat wrist” thrower, to my knowledge, though he doesn’t seem to be a super-pronator either. Honestly, I think that using the slider as just an occasional “show me” pitch to upset hitter’s expectations will probably end up being effective — much as it has proven to be for Kevin Gausman the past couple of years. The splitter is so nasty that the “other pitch” doesn’t necessarily need to be that to help the entire package play.
So which one of these is the most true statement? 1) The Giants want to ramp up their pitching prospects slowly to avoid stress/injury during development. 2) The Giants are going all-in on the opener/featured pitcher approach, and are very comfortable having just 2 or 3 traditional starters. I know, two things can be true at the same time, but I am struck by how rare it seems to have prospects going over 60 pitches, even as we close in on the end of the season.
I’m big on starter mentality which used to be finish what you start but now should be get through 7.
I think the reluctance to let their starters build past 4 innings stunts their mental and physical growth as pitchers and if the reasoning is to protect arms I don’t think it’s working, there seems to be a lot of injuries maybe caused by high stressed pitching knowing a quick hook is coming instead of letting the pitcher work it out. What do you think of this?
I’ve heard both sides of this argument (or maybe it’s more multifaceted than a simply “both sides” implies). Teams don’t want to wear out arms in the minors but, on the other hand, how do teach young pitchers how to navigate their way through 6 or 7 or 8 innings if you don’t let them know what that feels like in the minors?
It’s true that the Giants have had quite a number of pitcher injuries this year, particularly to starters. That might suggest that the experiment isn’t working — or it might just tell us that pitcher injuries are a part of the business and knowing how to prevent them is a highly complex process that the industry is forever trying to understand better. I do know that Houston has been keeping their starters at very low innings loads for several years (some of which involved Putila being Farm Director), and yet they ended up with a championship rotation of starters — and also saw a huge number of them fall to injury along the way.
I’d put it this way: the Giants want to avoid using up too many bullets on meaningless minor league innings, and they’re comfortable enough with flexible pitching plans that they believe that getting pitchers to the big league is the important thing — from there the issue of role can be sorted out between the player’s performance and the day-to-day plans of Kapler and his staff.
As I mentioned on last week’s podcast, they have an excellent case study in how that can work out for the best. Between his high school rawness, his TJ, and his suspension, Logan Webb pitched just 302 innings in the minors over six seasons. He threw seven innings exactly three times in his minor league career. Once in his final start of the 2015 short season in Salem-Keizer, once about two weeks before undergoing Tommy John surgery in 2016, and once in the final start before he made his big league debut. After his TJ in May of 2016, he wouldn’t throw more than four innings in a game again until July of 2018, and he’d throw as many as 5 innings just 16 times before he pitched in the majors — the vast majority of those coming the year he made his MLB debut. Webb, in other words, learned to pitch in the 7th inning, the 8th inning, and the 9th inning at the big league level.
Is Charlie Szykowny going to get the old school nickname of eye chart?
I don’t know, but between Szykowny and Justin Wishkoski the Giants have certainly presented me with my spelling challenges for the future!
And with that it’s time to close up the bag. Don’t forget to look for the Stats Review a little later, I promise there will be interesting things in it!
Interesting little factoid at the end there on Webbs milb innings.
Thanks for the responses! On the Giants minor league starter workload, I do think it's worth noting how few of the injuries seem to be arm-related. José Álvarez is the only TJ on the MLB side (or even the notable prospects side, I think?), and among starters, Corry, Ragsdale, Simon, Murphy, Whisenhunt, and DeSclafani seem to be the only major arm injuries since start of '22 regular season. Not sure what Maldonado's injury is, too. In any case, that's a shorter list than some big league rosters have seen, let alone the full-season part of an organization. That does raise an interesting question as to whether the lack of innings is leading to other ailments that more work normally papers over (i.e., more back/leg injuries because you're not being built up for a big innings count)