"Welcome to 2025!" Edition of the Free For All Mailbag, Vol. I

Photo Credit: Richmond Flying Squirrels

When I was a wee young Rog, I remember thinking about how exciting it would be to see the century change over on January 1, 2000 — to straddle two separate definable eras — and often dreamt of that day that seemed impossibly dim and far away. How shocking, then, to significantly-older Rog, to wake up and realize that we’re now a quarter way through that far-off century that followed. That’s crazy! We just started this thing the other day, didn’t we? Ah, the inevitable, grinding gears of time, wearing our lives away.

But crazy or not, we’ve now worked our way into the year 2025. What will it bring? And what better way to start it off right than a good old fashioned There R Giants’ Free For All Mailbag! For the newcomers, I tend to have these available to all free subscribers about once a month in the offseason, and once the baseball season gets underway in April, we have one every week.

And speaking of getting underway, let’s see what questions you all have for me in this impossible new year of 2025. I had so many questions this month (and, it goes without saying, answered them at such length), that I’ll once again split this one into two pieces, concluding on Monday. In this first half, there’s a lot of talk about organizational rankings and reputation.

Travis Bickle

Super big picture question…what do the Giants need to do differently to improve their perennial bottom third farm system? And as followers of the system (and There R Giants), what should we be watching for as signs, even small signs, that the system is improving?

Big picture seems like the perfect way to start things out, Travis, so I appreciate the question. Let’s give a little context here, because it’s reasonable to wonder how close Travis is to the truth when saying “perennial bottom third farm system.” Here’s a recent tweet from friend of the site, Carlos Collazo, using historical Baseball America farm system rankings:

By this measure, Travis is absolutely spot on. The Giants have, on average, been in the bottom third of the league in BA’s rankings covering the last decade — and it’s worth noting that their high-water mark in that decade was boosted primarily by the presence of Joey Bart and Marco Luciano, neither of whom have given club much value on the field for all that excitement.

So, the situation really has been pretty dreadful for at least the last dozen years or more — and I doubt the 2025 organizational rankings are going to do much to boost things upwards. (For what it’s worth, that was an even longer period of awfulness prior to Matt Cain being drafted in 2002, which stretched back firmly into the ‘80s, before prospect ranking was even a thing. Which brings us back to Travis’ question: how to improve this ongoing negative trend.

Putting first the important caveat that I am an amateur outsider who still has much to learn from my conversations within the industry, I think you’re going to need to see a bigger emphasis put on athleticism and big tools. Those are primary drivers of these kinds of system rankings. That means big velocity and stuff in pitchers, and size, athleticism, and power in hitters (along with the all-important hit tool).

A.J. Preller is far from a perfect GM (and constantly appears to be on the verge of losing his position), but one aspect of the job he has absolutely nailed is in acquiring the kind of young players with big, exciting tools that drive prospect rankings and help swing major deals for star-level talent. Preller focuses almost exclusively on high school players at the top of drafts. The Pads last 11 1st round picks have been high schoolers, a streak that dates back to 2016, and six of the last 10 2nd round picks over that same period have come from high school ranks as well. They also make a habit of grabbing the $4+ million dollar shortstops and catchers on the international market who tend to turn into big helium guys quickly (note that both Ethan Salas and Leo DeVries, the club’s last two top IFA signings, were immediate Top 100 prospects). The vast majority of those players have turned into trade capital — though they smartly kept Jackson Merrill around — and several of them are on the verge of becoming All-Star level players (indeed, CJ Abrams was an All-Star last year).

If you want to see the Giants start to rank higher in org rankings — and more importantly develop the kind of talent that makes for big league starters and needle-moving trade chips — then adding more youth and big physical tools is the key. Youth, because the game is getting younger all the time and getting prospects into the lineup when they’re still in their early 20s is a priority for most teams — so that they can grow into that age 26-28 peak that is currently where most MLB value is being created. And “big physical tools,” because the major league game is, as I keep quoting Joey Votto, a heavyweight match where physicality trumps all.

The Giants have, for a long time now, tended to scout, draft, and sign college-heavy classes full of solid players with solid skills, but that has left the farm all too often short of athleticism, physicality, speed, and youth. And, on the pitching side, they’ve often looked at feel for spin and mound presence — all-around pitchers — rather than going after pure high-octane stuff. Will Bednar has been more their style than Reggie Crawford as a broad generalization.

I detailed the Giants’ dreadful history with high school hitters last winter, but it is worth noting that several of the club’s most recent successes AND top 100 prospects have been high-round high school draftees (Heliot Ramos, Kyle Harrison, and now Bryce Eldridge). By the way, to update that awful list from last year, Ramos’ big year means he now has tied Travis Ishikawa for the most career fWAR by any high school hitter the Giants have drafted in the past 36 years. Progress!

I’m overstating things a tiny bit to make a point — certainly we’ve seen the club gamble on big tools at the top of the draft (Hunter Bishop, Reggie Crawford) and lower down (Grant McCray, Dakota Jordan), but those players have been the exception over the long haul. Pitchers like Will Bednar and hitters like James Tibbs III (who gets outstanding grades for his hit tool, but who lacks speed, athleticism, and defensive ability) are the type that help keep the Giants’ org rankings low — even if they turn into capable big leaguers.

And I should accentuate that point — while the Giants have been consistently low in organizational rankings for the last decade or more, they have also produced some pretty good major league talent and even one legitimate star in Logan Webb. But their strong propensity to draft college players has often led them to produce older than normal “young” players even with their success stories (Tyler Fitzgerald turned 27 at the end of the 2024 season and Landen Roupp 26). And while those are absolutely examples of successful development, they aren’t the kind of success stories that shoot teams up to the top of org rankings across the sport. Heck, even the Giants’ top decision makers didn’t much believe in Fitzgerald as a valuable big leaguer prior to his July breakout, so it’s not surprising that most of the rest of the industry didn’t either.

Beyond that, we shouldn’t overlook one of the most important functions of player development — making the players they have on hand better. Boston has climbed to the top of most current org rankings by doing exactly that, showing tremendous improvement with a host of their hitting prospects in improving bat speed and power production, enabling a 4th round college pick like Kristian Campbell to go from your basic anonymous Day 2 sort of prospect into a top 100 type of player. Getting big — and sustainable — improvements like that on the hitting side of things (to go along with the improvements the Giants have shown for several years on lower drafted pitchers) would go a long way towards helping revive things.

So those are the things I’d suggest you look for. A turn towards more high school picks, greater prioritization of athleticism and physicality or the ability to get guys stronger and more physical, along with a stronger emphasis on big velo pitchers would help the club enhance its prospect reputation going forward, because those are the players who tend to make up a large portion of Top 100 lists.

HaakAway

Bleacher Report is Ranking the SFG Farm System as "Worst". Fangraphs has them at 28th. Would you agree? What kind of data do you use to rank farm systems?

Let me be clear on this: I don’t rank farm systems. And the reason I don’t is that it would require me to have far greater knowledge of the other 29 systems than I currently do. I have very deep knowledge on one farm system (Giants!), and a surface level, I-see-a-few-of-these-guys-and-subscribe-to-Baseball-America knowledge of others, but that’s not sufficient for lining up real strengths and weaknesses across 30 organizations. For that, I listen to experts that I trust, and, as I think I’ve made clear over the years, for me the leader in this industry is Baseball America. So, let’s check in on what BA’s great editor-in-chief, J.J. Cooper, had to say about Bleacher Report’s ranking:

So, there you have it, BA doesn’t view the Giants as the worst system in the game, largely on the strength of one elite prospect. That seems about right to me. I would expect that, next spring when we see the org rankings roll out at BA, they will, however, be sitting somewhere around the 20-22 position, an area of the org rankings that, as we saw above, has become so persistently associated with the Giants, they might just as well pay to have their name placard on the 20-spot.

Of course, some of the lower rankings this winter will a result of a huge wave of graduations last year, which is generally a good thing. Were Hayden Birdsong and Marco Luciano still prospect eligible, the situation would be a bit rosier. But even with that, I don’t think we can say that the Giants are in an enviable position as far as young talent goes — even some of their rookie graduates are on the wrong side of 25 (Tyler Fitzgerald and Landen Roupp, for example). And, while Bryce Eldridge certainly surged last year, the season also saw a lot of disappointing setbacks from both young (Walker Martin, Rayner Arias) and old (Vaun Brown, Reggie Crawford) players.

They aren’t the worst, I don’t believe. You have a potential bat in Eldridge, a solid back-end starter in Carson Whisenhunt, and some very interesting pieces just getting their careers started who may turn into something. But the system really lacks depth, or a quantity of quality. Simply put, they haven’t been good enough at keeping up with their competition in terms of player development. They really haven’t had the kind of pieces that swing deals for proven big league talent, and they have struggled to establish quality starters in the lineup. Last year was a turn for the better, and there is reason to hope that players like Heliot Ramos, Kyle Harrison, and others will take another step forward in 2025, but until they produce real impact young stars of the caliber of several of their division opponents (the Pads with Jackson Merrill, or the D’backs with Corbin Carroll, for instance), they won’t really have turned their hoped-for corner in establishing a farm that propels the organization forward.

HaakAway

SFG had six players taken in the Minor League Rule 5. LAD had five taken. How much weight can we put on that as judging the value of a team's system? It seems like at least one indicator to me.

This is a good question, John. Minor league rule 5 picks aren’t hugely valuable players — very, VERY few of them ever see the big leagues, and generally they are selected by teams more to help fill out rosters at various levels than for any greater purpose — but there IS a value in that, and the fact that the Giants have been plundered rather heavily for this purpose the last few years does mean something, even if it’s hard to say exactly what that “something” is.

For instance, Andy Thomas isn’t a player who has made my Top 50 the past few years, but he is a solid receiver whom pitchers really like working with (Mason Black specifically mentioned him to me as the player who helped him get the feel for his gyro slider), and who can work a walk and flash occasional power. He’s pretty solid upper minors catching depth, in other words, and a club that was looking at a depth chart that was a little light on catching options for their Double- or Triple-A affiliate could do much worse than to grab him. The Giants, meanwhile, as I showed in my Roster Previews, have pretty solid coverage for their Double-A catching situation, and could afford to let Thomas go after two years of underwhelming offensive performances in the league.

The unknown element here, however, is how teams choose to make such players available. Players selected in the minor league phase of the Rule 5 draft are those who are eligible for the Rule 5 draft in general (and remember, this year there were fewer candidates for the draft due to various COVID-related circumstances) who are not included among the 38-players available for protection on the Triple-A roster. Those minor league off-season rosters are not publicly available, so we can never really compare apples to apples here. Most teams will leave some vacancies on their Triple-A protection roster so that they can make picks in the minor league section of the draft, but how many open spaces they leave is unknown. It’s entirely possible that some teams intentionally place certain players on their Double-A roster as a practice of roster pruning.

With the 165-player limit forcing teams to give up on certain players earlier than they would have in previous years, putting players who might be in line for a release come spring in a position where another team that has room for them can snatch them up is both sensible and reasonably humane. That’s the piece of the puzzle that we can’t really see from outside.

I don’t want to make too much of that notion, however. Julio Rodriguez is a player the Giants surely wanted to keep and had plans for in the coming year — they just re-signed him in October to prevent him becoming a free agent after all. But a lot of teams had their eyes on him, and, for whatever reason, the Giants did not protect him on the Triple-A roster. I heard from scouts from several different clubs asking about Rodriguez when he turned up on the Double-A roster. Not surprisingly, he was in demand (or as much “in demand” as being picked in the minor league phase can be) and was lost to the Astros. The fact that the Giants felt deep enough in relief arm to leave a legitimately valued player like that unprotected (despite obviously having some spaces on their Triple-A roster) does, indeed, say something about the system, as John suggests. But I wouldn’t make too much out of it — it doesn’t mean they have as much talent as the Dodgers, for sure!

Backpack5

I remember hearing in the past a sentiment that the Giants’ farm system has been undervalued for some time because rankings are partially based on the past few years of prospect graduations/contributions, and the Giants had very few from say 2015-2023. Am I remembering that correctly? If so, is it still true?

Also, do you think the recent success stories (young as they are) would change how people viewed the Giants’ system in past years when looking back?

Backpack, I personally believe that fans are always of the belief that their farm system is undervalued, and it’s pretty easy to see why this would be so. For my readers (and myself, of course), we spend so much time really getting into the weeds with all of the players in our own system, and come to love their potential and flashes of ability. Because we have far less — if any — knowledge of the depth of prospects in the other 29 organizations, it becomes very easy to overrate our own guys and underrate all of those unknown others. That’s the genesis of “prospect hugging.”

But no, I personally don’t believe there is much validity in the theory you’re espousing here. In fact, farm systems that graduate a number of players in a short while tend usually to go down in the rankings for that very reason — more talent on the big league squad usually means a temporary draining of talent from the farm. A good example of that is Atlanta, which produced the bulk of one of the best clubs in the NL in a short period of time, and has been ranked as one of the two or three worst systems in baseball for the last several years (though they do still keep producing small contributors).

And, for the most part, I don’t see that the contributors the Giants have developed recently would retrospectively change how people viewed the Giants’ system. For one thing, several of their contributors were fairly highly regarded. Heliot Ramos and Kyle Harrison were long-time members of the Top 100. Even Hayden Birdsong snuck onto Baseball America’s Top 100 before he graduated — and would probably have leapt up the lists much higher had he not graduated so incredibly quickly. Patrick Bailey was, in retrospect, probably undervalued, but mostly that was due to questions about how much he would develop offensively — questions which seem very legitimate to this day. Even someone like Tristan Beck was, when healthy, always regarded fairly well as a player who would probably pitch in the majors and help a club, which is right in keeping with the player he’s become. Tyler Fitzgerald has certainly surprised most every evaluator and scout I know (including not a few inside the Giants’ organization), but I would say that mid-20s college picks who strike out 30% of the time are never going to blow up rankings.

So, no, generally, I don’t think that any of this should change how other organizations view the Giants — especially given that I’m omitting a lot of elite prospects whom they have not succeeded in transitioning to the majors.

What mostly pushes the reputation of a system is the talent they have on hand, and there are certain organizations that simply do a better job of both acquiring exciting talent and developing the talent they get their hands on. The Dodgers have been a top farm system seemingly forever because when you visit their minor league camp, all you see are huge bodies and giant velocity everywhere you look. As an aside, when I went to the AFL in November, one of the first sights to greet me was a giant mountain of granite in a Tigers’ uni blasting balls into the stratosphere. The thought instantly popped into my mind: “that guy looks like a Dodger.” And, in fact, he turned out to be Thayron Liranzo, one of the players Detroit got from LA in the Jack Flaherty deal.

It’s good that the Giants brought some players to the majors the past couple of years who seem poised to contribute. But the way to improve the reputation of the system is to get a lot more talent in, and start pushing a lot more talent out. Quality and quantity, those are the watchwords. Nailing those 1st round picks a little more often than they’ve done lately would be a good start.

David Jaulus

Who is one player in the Giant system that doesn’t get talked about much who you are high on as a prospect and where do you see that player eventually fitting on the big league roster in the future?

Danny V916

Over the last couple of seasons, guys like Keaton Winn and Hayden Birdsong have come out of nowhere to most SF fans, but not to There R Giants’ readers 😉. Any guys you're watching that are a little below the radar to most SF fans who could have a Winn or Birdsong like arrival in 2025?

I always find questions like this difficult, because I talk about everybody in the system! So, whose level of knowledge are we dealing with here, the standard KNBR caller or the well-informed There R Giants’ reader? And how high do I need to be on the player? For instance, Juan Sanchez is a name who comes up frequently in texts I exchange with scouts of other teams, which makes me fairly certain that he’s going to see big league time, and I think has the gifts that can make for a fairly sustained career in a big league bullpen (though he needs to get through his Tommy John rehab first). But that sustained career is likely to be in a low-key, second lefty out of the pen sort of role. He’s definitely the first name I thought of, but perhaps you’re looking for higher reward outcomes than that?

I’ll be honest, I don’t think the system has a ton of real starter potential just at the moment, but let me come up with a couple of names who could really start to pick up steam in the next year or two. Argenis Cayama gets as much buzz from people in the org who I talk to as anybody in terms of long-term potential. A lot of people think this young man could really be special if it all comes together for him. As a barely-turned 18-year-old who has only thrown 24 innings so far in his career, he’s a very long way from showing that such an outcome is particularly likely, but he’s a guy who could become very exciting in the next couple of years.

And then Josh Bostick is another (slightly older) pitcher whom I keep getting really positive scouting buzz about. He’s still learning about himself as a pitcher after a peripatetic college career that involved two-way play for the first few years. The Giants believe he’s just starting to scratch the surface of what he can become, and his first season had some ups and downs. But he has a good pitcher’s build, quality stuff, and some shapes and spin rates that light up the pitch lab metrics.

None of those guys exactly answer Danny’s question (though Sanchez could conceivably get through his rehab and return late in the year). So, I’ll throw in one more — don’t be surprised to see Trent Harris blow through the upper levels and make an impact on the big league bullpen this season.

Let’s stick a pin in the bag at this point. I’ll be back on Monday with lots of Bryce Eldridge talk, questions regarding several of the Giants’ post-prospects, as well as the IFA class which will be signing next week.