We’re into the There R Giants Top 50. Over the winter months, I’ll write a post on each of the fifty players in my rankings, leading us back to the much-needed spring. Our list of previously covered players is getting a little long, so from here on out I’m moving the links for the full list down the bottom of the post.
I suppose it’s fitting that as finish up this piece on Camilo Doval, I’m keeping one eye on the news out of Florida, waiting to see if MLB’s technocratic arrogance will continue to keep the game shuttered and cause the first loss of games in more than a quarter of a century. Fitting because Doval is one of several prospects we’ll talk about in this final stretch whose progress and development is being potentially harmed by the continued lockout [EDITOR’S NOTE: Keeping an eye on that news ended up being a pretty gutting way to spend a day — but I’ll have more to say about that in tomorrow’s podcast].
While he’s firmly established in the minds of many fans as a capital “M” major leaguer, his foothold on a big league career is still fresh, fragile, and tenuous. This is, after all, a pitcher who walked more than 7 batters per 9 innings in Sacramento last year, before his absolutely stunning denouement to the 2021 season in San Francisco.
The cement, then, isn’t dry yet on Doval’s development, and getting in a full camp working with the Giants’ major league staff and catchers is important to a player like him, still trying to establish himself on the roster and in the league. Being kept away from the training staff, the pitching lab gurus and biomechanics technology, the strength and conditioning staff, all of this is harmful to a player on the edge of a career like Doval (or Joey Bart, or Heliot Ramos), even more than it is to his established veteran counterparts. It feels like we’ve spent the better part of the last three years talking about how various abnormal impediments might adversely affect players’ development — it sure would be nice to get back to a normal calendar at some point. That point clearly isn’t today, however … and we wait.
Meanwhile, we pass the time by pondering what Doval’s triumphant September might suggest is in store for his Giants’ future. The potential value provided by relief prospects is always the fly in the ointment for prospect rankings. How do we measure up the value that 50 or 60 innings a year might provide against the contributions from potential every day starters or staples or a starting rotation? How do we account for the performance risk that one typically associates with these most combustible and mercurial members of a major league roster?
We know that the value that metrics like WAR place on relief pitchers doesn’t seem to square with the value that major league teams place on them, but does that translate to specific, individual relief pitchers, or do teams simply value the teeming mass of relief prospects/free agents/flotsam and jetsam from which to pluck an orange and juice it before eyeing up the next one? One day a reliever is a team’s mainstay, their Every Day Eddie, the next day he’s fodder for the waiver wire or returned to the minors. So promising in one look, so puzzling in the next.
Is it ever right to put one this high up the rankings? Can we ever really identify who is going to stick and become a late-inning stalwart and who will fall into the vast legion of crazy-stuff but ever so slightly untrustworthy relievers populating the major and minor league landscape these days? In the words of Oscar Hammerstein (as best as I can remember them, anyway): How do we solve a problem like relievers?
If such philosophical quandaries are intimidating in the abstract, they are absolutely frightening when it comes to Doval specifically, since the sidewinding right-hander is, and has always been, in the words of Fangraphs’ Eric Longenhagen, “one of the weirder pitchers in all of the minors” — a pitcher who now looks to add “one of the weirder pitchers in all of the majors” to his résumé as well.
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