There R Giants #35: Tyler Fitzgerald
Photo Credit: Kevin Cunningham | Giant Futures
We’re into the There R Giants Top 50. Over the next few months, I’ll write a post on each of the fifty players in my rankings, leading us back to spring. So far, we’ve covered:
As minor league baseball prepared to resume in April, 2021, everyone from Farm Directors and General Managers to prospect-covering journalists to knuckleheads on the internet like me had questions: what the effect of the lost 2020 season be? How would players recover? What would the quality of play be like? Would the levels be equivalent development environments to their pre-pandemic versions? There were many, many questions, and we all waited for a few answers.
We’re still far from a complete understanding of the impacts of a lost year of minor league development, but one theme did develop over the last year — there were some players who came back from the gap year a better version of themselves. You heard it over and over during the summer: “this is another guy who got better during the pandemic.” Players were cast back on their own devices with vastly disparate access to facilities, equipment, and even competition (some players were able to get in regular live ABs and even some team plays). But some players came back from the gap with some significant improvements — to their physique, to their game, to their skills — and used that to springboard to a new level of development.
There R Giants #35 prospect belongs fully to this sub-genre of 2021 prospect analysis: Tyler Fitzgerald is one of those guys who got better. It wasn’t a perfect year for the 2019 4th rounder, but it was definitely an impressive step forward. And it came with some pretty memorable highlights!
So let’s explore the story of a guy who really was one of the low-key surprises of the year!
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