This is surprising!
In this week’s podcast with Andy Baggarly, we talked a little about whether the Giants would use September to try to get a look at some young talent. Baggs wasn’t too optimistic, based on the things the club had said Wednesday. And then before I could even do a little audio editing and press publish, they went out and acquired a former Top 20 prospect in baseball and immediately called him up to the big leagues!
Of course, since the days when he was a Top 20 prospect and the anchor of the Christian Yelich deal, Lewis Brinson has failed over and over to hit major league pitching. But what makes this move so fascinating to me is that Brinson is the opposite of everything we’ve come to think of as the Zaidi-led Giants’ “type.” For several years now, whenever the Giants have acquired a player, you could bet that the terms “control the zone,” “good swing decisions,” and/or “history of good walk rates” would be involved in the press release. Defensive positions have fallen somewhere between “fits on a corner” and “we’ll try him in various places to see what fits.”
Brinson’s calling card terms have always been those classic scouting tropes like “twitchy,” “dynamic,” “rangy,” “athletic,” but, sadly, absolutely no “controlling the zone.” Big chase rates have undermined his ability to hit at the top level, which makes him something of a bellwether acquisition, because he looks very much the opposite of most acquisitions we’ve seen under Farhan. And that feels like the clearest public declaration yet that the Giants’ front office is really doing some self-examining in the wake of this awful year, and starting to rethink how they construct the roster and looking to vary the secret sauce recipe somewhat.
That doesn’t mean that Brinson is going to be a success story — the odds are probably against that outcome, to be honest (though the chance that he might be one is certainly exciting to contemplate). But it does mean that I think we can expect to see changes in the MO over the coming winter. And that, to my mind, is an absolute good.
It’s also somewhat amusing that now with Brinson and Isan Diaz in house, the Giants have effectively completed the Yelich deal without ever having had Yelich. I wonder if we can nab Monte Harrison next?
HITTER of the Night: Casey Schmitt (Rich), 2 for 4, 2 HR (20), 2 R, 4 RBI, BB, K
PITCHER of the Night: Trevor McDonald (Eug), 5.0 IP, 5 H, 3 R, 1 ER, 0 BB, 11 K, HR
Exciting night around the farm, so let’s go around the horn…
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