Photo Credit: Christian Petersen | Getty Images
Running through the camp progress of Giants prospects last week, one player I didn’t mention at all was reliever and Rule 5 pick Dedniel Nuñez. Rule 5 guys are something of a blind spot with me, I’ll admit. Their “lease to own” nature always makes them feel like they’re not quite one of “our guys” yet. Generally, I’m always waiting for the news line that the Giants have returned a Rule 5 pick to hit the wire and generally they always do.
Without a doubt, the greatest, most successful Rule 5 pick in Giants history was Max Venable — you may know him as Molly’s husband. Plucked out of the Dodger’s system — and having never played above the Cal League — Venable spent parts of five seasons with the Giants, hitting .222/.292/.308 over 302 games. The development of Venable, a tremendous athlete, was almost surely impeded by keeping him in the majors that first year (1979), and he never really delivered on his promise. That’s the success story! Beyond that, the most storied Rule 5 careers in Giants history belong to guys like Kim Bastiste, who posted a .558 OPS in 54 games with the Giants in 1996, and Fran Mullins, who hit .175 over 44 PA a decade earlier. Both of those guys had actually seen time in the majors before being selected by the Giants.
You can see why I stand somewhat aloof. It’s not a storied history. The Giants have now made four Rule 5 picks in the Farhan Zaidi era, and, of those, Travis Bergen saw the most action with the team, getting into 21 games in 2018 before going on the IL and ultimately getting returned to Toronto (who later used him to acquire Robbie Ray last year). Dany Jiménez got into two games with the Giants last year before being returned. Jiménez became a two-time Rule 5 loser when he was selected by the A’s the winter and returned to Toronto once again.
But having said all of that, there were signs that Nuñez might have been different. He might have been the one that stuck. And the question du jour is: will he still be the one that sticks despite straining his UCL and undergoing Tommy John surgery?
Not surprisingly, Nuñez’ story with the Giants is one that involves the analytics and our advancing understanding of what makes a fastball work. Witness Eric Longenhagen’s writeup of Nuñez immediately following the Rule 5 draft:
Nunez was among the 2019 leaders in fastball spin rate, which is impressive considering he doesn’t throw all that hard. Unlike Campbell, Nunez’s fastball actually misses bats, generating a 15% swinging strike rate even though as a starter he sat just 89-93
Jason Parks (former prospect writer for Baseball Prospectus and now part of the Cubs organization) once told a story of an old scout telling him to put his radar gun away and scout by watching the batters’ swing, saying “the batter will tell you how hard he’s throwing.” And we now know that that bit of veteran wisdom held a lot of truth in it. Velocity, though important, isn’t all that makes a fastball miss bats. Spin rate, effective spin rate, spin access, release point, and plane of the pitch can all contribute to an effective fastball. Many 2019 observers of the Sally came away from seeing Nuñez pitch thinking they’d seen one of the deadliest fastball in the league, even if radar guns reported something more pedestrian.
Those pitch characteristics particularly made Nuñez’ fastball play well up in the zone. And that probably raised a flag for someone in the Giants’ R&D office even before he showed up at Instrux last fall throwing in the upper 90s. With reports of increased velocity combined with his effective pitch characteristics, the Giants were officially intrigued. They scooped Nuñez up in the Rule 5 draft in December, figuring that a move to the bullpen would allow him to keep the deadly combination of high velocity/effective pitch characteristics.
As soon as Nuñez arrived in camp he started making a strong impression.
After two weeks of camp, manager Gabe Kapler was glowing his praise of the young right-hander (as quoted in Alex Pavlovic’s piece above):
"I think at this point we feel more confident than we did last year at this time with Dany Jimenez, and that's just honest, it's no knock on Dany," manager Gabe Kapler said. "It's just that Nuñez has come out and attacked with strikes and he's kind of showing us the stuff that made him attractive to us in the first place."
And the good work didn’t get left behind in the bullpens. Nuñez quickly showed how effective he could be in game action as well:
Aside from Kapler’s and Casali’s glowing reviews, Nuñez also got some encouraging words from his fellow Dominican Johnny Cueto: “He has told me that it is the same kind of baseball that is played here with one exception: that the hitters here are more disciplined, they know their strike zone. [He has said] to have confidence in myself.”
From very early on, it appeared that Nuñez had punched his ticket onto the major league roster. And then, suddenly, as happens with pitchers, everything went sproing. Facing the Rockies again on March 12, Nuñez walked three straight batters and his velocity had dropped precipitously, down to 90-91. When Kapler came and removed him from the game there was obvious concern.
From there the news came out in dribs and drabs, getting increasingly severe with each day. He had some wrist pain (March 12). There was some posterior inflammation in his elbow (March 13). He had a UCL sprain and would seek a second opinion (March 15). A UCL sprain and a second opinion is virtually never good and the subsequent story that he would be undergoing Tommy John surgery was almost a foregone conclusion at that point. Truly terrible news for a pitcher who had been doing everything he needed to do to capture his dream with a big league debut. Campmate Silvino Bracho, who himself lost most of two years to TJ, spoke movingly in the locker room about the tough news Saturday after the game.
That could be where the story ended. In many cases, teams might have looked at a Rule 5 pick facing surgery and a long rehab and said “tough luck, kid,” then returned him to his original team. But the Giants are there yet with Nuñez. Instead, they placed him on the 60 day IL, and he’ll undergo his surgery and rehab as a member of the Giants organization. For the next 12-15 months he’ll be a sort of Giants’ Pinocchio — an object of great hopes, but not quite a real Giant yet. Andrew Baggarly summoned up the name of former Rule 5 pick Julian Fernandez, who spent a similar year on the 60 day before going on the standard Rule 5 waiver wire dance.
As Baggarly notes, in one sense this move is great for Nuñez — he’ll be boosted from a standard minor league salary to a major league minimum for 2021 and, quite possibly, a significant part of 2022 without actually having to stick on a big league roster with his performance. But, of course, Nuñez, like all competitors wants that salary to come with the challenge of holding his own against big league competition and, sadly, he now faces a long road before he’ll be able to try that again.
Still, the Giants showed a commitment to the pitcher (and a love for his stuff) by holding onto him for now. And, in some respects, the surgery and rehab could make it a little easier for them to hold onto Nuñez for the long run. The rules that govern here are pretty simple:
the Giants can hold him on the 60 day IL as long as he needs to recover
they’ll get a full rehab stint for him (30 days) before having to move him from the 60 day back onto the 40 man roster. If, before the end of those 30 days, he is determined to not be fully recovered, the rehab can be ended and he can continue on the 60 day IL. He can be placed on a subsequent rehab assignment later for, again, up to 30 days.
once he is pulled back from the 60 day IL onto the 40 man roster, he cannot be optioned to the minors but must spend the rest of the season on either the active (26 man) roster or the major league 10 day IL.
in all, he needs to spend 90 days on the active major league roster in order to satisfy the rules of a Rule 5 draft pick.
if, at the end of the 2022 season he has not reached 90 days on the active roster, he can be held in the organization until the following season, at which point the Rule 5 clock picks up again where it left off (ie, if he was at 78 days on the active roster at the conclusion of the 2022 season, he’d still need another 12 days on the active roster the next year).
With that said, it’s not too hard to see how the Giants could massage things to keep Nuñez in the organization over the next couple of years. The standard rehab time is around 14 months, so next spring he’ll be into his throwing program and sometime around May he may be able to get back onto a mound. Perhaps in June we’ll see him take some rehab assignments in the minors.
If he’s looking good at that point, it wouldn’t be too hard for the Giants to use the 10 day IL as a sort of “maintenance rehab” throughout the 2022 season to get him to the magic 90 day mark. The Blue Jays did something like that in 2019 with a 19-year-old pitcher they’d plucked out of A ball in the Rule 5 draft, Elvis Luciano. Using three separate IL stints stretched across the year, they held Luciano out of action for most of the season, keeping him on the active roster for exactly 90 days. With a pitcher coming back from TJ, nobody would look askance at the need to go gentle on a still-recovering arm with the occasional IL stint to stay fresh.
That said, they won’t be able to use the 60 day during the offseason. Nuñez will have to survive next winter holding on to a precious 40-man spot, and, when he gets back on a mound in 2022, he’ll need to keep showing the Giants the kind of stuff and command that have excited them so much, so briefly, this spring. If they like what they see from him as he works his way back, it shouldn’t be too difficult to work him back to health in a manner that doesn’t put too great a stress on him during recovery and fits the Rule 5 regulations.
But there are a lot of “ifs” in that plan. Rehab from Tommy John isn’t as cookie-cutter simple as it’s often made out to be. Many pitchers never quite recover to full strength, or don’t do so immediately. You’ll sometimes hear about a post-TJ boost in velocity, though, according to medical professionals, there’s nothing about the surgery itself that will cause this — it’s likely the result of many gym hours spent during recovery and rehab before the pitcher is allowed to throw. But there are also many pitchers who come back with decreased stuff, and a year of iffy command is fairly typical.
So we’re a long way yet from knowing whether Nuñez will break the Giants streak of failed Rule 5 picks. He has a long, lonely trip ahead of him and will need to survive many difficult roster decisions over the next 18 months. But we do know that the Giants are enamored of him enough to hold onto him for now, and likely for the rest of this year. And that’s definitely a good sign that Dedniel might just become one of “our guys” yet.
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