Under the Radar Prospects: Kervin Castro
How much do we know about the most surprising new Giant?
Photo Credit: Amanda Loman | Salem Statesman Journal
Perhaps you’re reading this thinking: “uhhh….Roger…..a player who is currently on the 40-man roster can’t, by definition, be ‘under the radar,’ so what the heck are you talking about here?” And, yes, true. If the metaphorical radar has any practical real-world equivalent, the 40-man roster is probably the best possible place to locate the radar screen.
Still, three months ago, you would have read the heading and been totally unfazed. “Ayep!” you would have thought, “that dude is totally off my radar!” I, myself, barely managed to include Castro on my Top 50 last fall, sliding him in a slot #43 less than two weeks before his big promotion (which — note to self: wait until the 40-man additions are announced before starting a Top 50 in the future!).
So perhaps Castro isn’t really under the radar so much as he’s kind of a UFO on the radar. We can all see he’s on the radar screen, but nobody’s quite sure where he came from or how he got on the dang thing!
So, let’s correct that right now.
Way back in the summer and fall of 2014, Castro was a stout young Venezuelan catcher trying to catch the eye of an MLB team and take his place among the J2 signing class of 2015. You may remember Ben Badler on the There R Giants podcast (subscribe and rate today!) mentioning that there’s an entire sub-genre of Venezuelan catchers in every J2 class and many teams basically “pick their flavors” and gravitate towards two or three that they like every year. But in 2014, nobody was gravitating towards young Kervin. The arm was definitely there, but the rest of the game didn’t attract a lot of attention.
So as 2014 dragged on without a handshake, Castro turned to a new ploy. Jettisoning the uninspiring bat, he took his strong arm to the mound, and there he caught the eye of Giants’ scouts. The strong arm wasn’t a surprise, but it was also a quick arm, suggesting a chance for increased velocity as he developed. More impressively for a newcomer to the mound, he showed a real feel for spinning a breaking ball.
It wasn’t quite the same as the time Francisco Liriano showed up at the Giants camp to try out as an outfielder and got signed the same day to be a pitcher — but it wasn’t entirely not like that either. Ultimately, the pitcher version of Castro was given $100,000 signing bonus and officially became a Giant on July 2, 2015, just six months after his 16th birthday.
After training at the team’s complex for another 10 months, he got his career started as a 17-year-old RHP in the DSL 2016 season. Being a neophyte on the mound, the Giants went slowly with Castro, putting him into just 13 games over the course of the three month DSL season, and having him throw just 21 innings. But somewhere in the transition, he torn his UCL and, before his career was even up and running, he ran into the dreaded year-plus rehab schedule for Tommy John surgery, which robbed him of virtually all of the next two seasons.
As spring training of 2019 approached, Castro came to Scottsdale, Arizona having just turned 20 years old, with a total of 22 not entirely inspiring professional innings under his belt. If he wanted his career to continue, it was going to be an important spring. As it happened — and not for the last time — Castro was up to the challenge.
Throughout the spring and early summer, Castro showed off one of the better arms among the pitchers in extended spring training. Jason Pennini (then of Prospects Live, now of the Minnesota Twins) caught Castro a couple of times in extended games and had his fastball as high as 98 in one of the appearances, though the other time it was more 93-95. Still, Pennini reported that the fastball got lots of swings and misses, had good boring action, and came from efficient arm mechanics that would likely play up in shorter bullpen stints.
Castro was also still showing a curve with the potential to be an average pitch and, unusual for a young pitcher with so little experience, he was a strike thrower who pounded the zone with everything he had. When assignments came out at the end of XST, Castro somewhat surprisingly vaulted over the rookie league and landed an opening day assignment with short-season Salem-Keizer.
Castro spent the summer as the Volcanoes’ best starter, posting a 2.66 ERA over 14 starts — a truly remarkable performance for a player who’d literally never started a game before in his life. That summer he started a 15th game too — the Northwest League-Pioneer League All Star Game.
Outside the ERA, the numbers weren’t necessarily eye-popping. He struck out just 8.11 batters per 9 innings, but he kept the ball in the park, was relatively hard to hit, and was extremely stingy about bases on balls, walking just 13 batters all year (by far the fewest for any qualifying starter in the league).
He had ended the year having taken a huge leap from where he had started. It wasn’t the kind of year that had him rocketing up lists — indeed, he wasn’t included in the Giants Top 30 for either Baseball America or MLB last year — but it was enough to get him noticed in a sleeperish kind of way. Enough to make scouts curious what else was in there.
But if the Giants sent him off with a development plan last winter, it’s likely that physical conditioning was one of the “growth areas” they included. At just 6’0” tall, the former catcher still had a catcher’s body, and the stoutness was always threatening a softness that needed to be firmed up. Think 21-year-old Matt Cain level of softness. If you watch the conclusion of the clip below, you can see some of the limited athleticism Castro was displaying at the time in his attempt to cover 1b:
And perhaps that had something to do with the inconsistent velocity that Castro showed throughout 2019. From Pennini’s sighting of him hitting 98 in extended, reports from Salem-Keizer hovered in the low 90s, usually touching a high of just 95. As good friend GPT noted, Castro’s listed 185 lbs. didn’t seem to be telling an accurate story:
So perhaps this little back and forth Q&A between The Athletic’s Melissa Lockard and Giants Farm Director Kyle Haines should have stood out to me more than it did during last fall’s Instructional League:
Melissa Lockard: Is there anyone who you were surprised by what they were able to accomplish on their own during the shutdown period?
Kyle Haines: I thought Kervin Castro came in in really good shape.
As it turned out, that, perhaps, was a tell. Just one month later Castro was one of the most surprising 40-man additions in recent memory, with Farhan Zaidi and Scott Harris raving about his stuff and potential to move quickly through the system. The fastball was reportedly up again, even from Pennini’s 2019 high — this time touching 100. Baseball America’s Josh Norris, who has seen Castro’s final 2019 start, had this to say to me about the promotion:
I did see Kervin Castro at Salem-Keizer. And when they protected him, I was kind of like “what?” He’s 21. In short-season ball he didn’t look like anything particularly worth protecting — not like a guy who would stick on a big league roster next year as a Rule 5 pick. But they say he came back from the shutdown with about 4 miles per hour more fastball and a much more defined curveball and now could be, maybe not a starter, but he could be a reliever [in the big leagues]. And especially the way they like to do it….they like the fastball up and the vertical curveball down. It’s not a secret. It’s not unique to them. But it’s their signature at this point and this is the pitch package that he came back with…He sounds like he got a lot better.
That Castro was able to show up in the Fall with the type of physicality and stuff that would command his bosses’ attention is an absolute credit to devotion and work ethic. Like his fellow countryman Luis Matos, Castro was more or less abandoned in a Scottsdale hotel room for the entirety of the summer and was left to his own devices to figure out how to spend his time, work on his craft, and build his body.
As he had in 2019, Castro rose to the occasion and pushed himself to the forefront of his camp. It’s truly a remarkable story so far. Kervin Castro signed a professional contract more than five and a half years ago. In the years since, he has appeared in exactly 28 games, fourteen of them starts, and thrown 89.2 professional innings. He’s never appeared on a Top 30 list. He’s never appeared in in a full season league. Indeed, he’s never pitched on any domestic team currently in the Giants’ organization!
And here he sits, a full-fledged Giant, preparing to report to his first big league camp in (apparently/possibly/reportedly/maybe) just two weeks. Kervin Castro might just be a UFO after all. And he might be just starting to take flight.
Wow, quite a story!
Good recap - thanks for that.