There R Giants 2024 Top 50: #41-45

Arms! We got Arms here!

Photo Credit: K.A. Fulmore | Richmond Flying Squirrels

So far in the Top 50:

• Just Missed List

• #50-46 (Lisbel Diaz, Hayden Wynja, Alix Hernandez, Carson Ragsdale, Ben Madison)

Welcome to a heapin’ helping of relievers, more relievers, kinda relievers, and guys who may not be but are more than likely relievers. I hope you enjoyed your little taste of emergent offense in Lisbel Diaz last post, because he’s not going to have much company at the Top 50 bat rack for a while now.

I mentioned this on this week’s podcast, but a lot of the tilt towards pitching in the system right now is a simple by-product of recent drafts. Between 2020-2022, the Giants drafted 41 players. Twelve of them were position players — and of that 12, one has already retired — 2021 19th rounder Irvin Murr III, who never made it off the complex. Murr has company, as two others have yet to move beyond rookie ball (2021 11th rounder Donovan McIntyre and 2022 14th rounder Nomar Diaz). Eight of the twelve were Day 3 picks, including a 2022 run from the 13th (Thomas Gavello) through the 17th (Justin Bench) rounds that produced more than 40% of all the hitters drafted over that three-year period. (And yes, I have mentally assigned “LHP” to Reggie Crawford rather than “TWP” for the purpose of this paragraph).

Simple math tells you that you’re going to be a little thin on the position player side after such a heavily biased run of player acquisition. Over the long haul, “2023 Draft and recent international classes to the rescue” should be the rallying cry for lovers of offensive talent. But that’s a tale for a later day. Meanwhile, here at the 2024 edition of There R Giants’ Top 50, we soldier on, cataloging out pitching wares….