There R Giants #45: Ghordy Santos
Photo Credit: Michelle Valenzuela | San Jose Giants
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:
When you really stop and think it, the journey for international players is absurdly long — scouted at 13 or 14, committed with teams at 15, signed at 16, starting their official pro career at 17 with levels and levels ahead of them. Most, of course, never make it past the bottom-most of those levels. A huge percentage never make it off the island.
Take this happy-looking bunch, snapped together on signing day more than five years ago, their eyes full of promise and glories:
How many of those names do you recognize? Ismael Alcántara, the big guy on the left, was the headline at the time. His pro career appears to be over now — his Giants’ career definitely is — with a total of 75 games played, 21 of them in the US. Luigi Pichardo was signed for $125,000 and thought to have an advanced hit over power profile. He played just 29 games in the DSL. Instead it was $60,000 signing Alexander Canario who took center stage in this group and even the über-talented Canario has still yet to reach Double A in six professional seasons.
It’s a long, long road for these youngsters (it’s a long, long road for U.S. kids, too, just with a different road map, one full of travel ball teams and showcase events mixed around their high school days). Later that same summer of 2016, I heard word that the Giants officials were particularly excited by what they were seeing in workouts from shortstop Ghordy Santos. Of course, I also heard that they were similarly excited about young infielder Sammy Jorge, whose career is now over at 141 games, all of them in the Dominican. So, you have to take tales of promise at that level with some industrial level quantities of salt.
It takes a long, long time for the path to gain shape and definition — for tangible profile to begin to take form in a player’s career. In 2022, Ghordy Santos’ career might, at long last, truly make that transformation from amorphous promise to a solid shape.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to There R Giants to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.