Your 2024 Giants: Your Big 6 Prospects

Annually, if I remember in time, I produce a Big 6 List of Giants Prospects.  The 6 for this post are:

• Kyle Harrison
• Marco Luciano
• Jung Hoo Lee
• Carson Whisenhunt
• Hayden Birdsong
• Bryce Eldridge
• Landen Roupp is the bonus

I usually pull a lot of information from websites like MLB Pipeline, but you can easily read from there, and I don't have time to get all my research done as well as pull information in from other sources and get it out before more of the season goes by.  

ogc thoughts

I'm just going to go with what I have off the top of my head for each prospect, and some will be long, and some will be basically bullet points.

Kyle Harrison

Harrison has been an ace in training since he started pitching professionally for the Giants.  While it's true that he has had control problems in the minors, if you dig deeper, what happens is that this is usually a result of his early issues with beginning a new level, and by the end of the season, his K/9 stays great, but his K/BB becomes incredibly better because of the drop in BB/9. But because it takes a while for him to figure out the level, and he's pretty bad early on, his seasonal numbers make it look like he has control problems. Which is why he has been the top ranked LHP prospect by MLB Pipeline for two seasons straight. 

And getting to the majors at age 21 is a pretty great achievement, only the best prospects do that. Even more amazing is that he came up to the majors and at 21 YO, he had 9.1 K/9 and 2.9 BB/9, for a good 3.14 K/BB, all above average for a pitcher. His WHIP was good as well, and basically the only problem he had (but it was a huge problem) was that he gave up the long ball way too much.  

But given that he has figured out each level at some point, and still dominated to the tune of double digits all the way up the minors, I expect Harrison to join Webb atop the rotation and be a co-ace, a la how Cain and then Lincecum became co-aces for the Dynasty Giants teams, as short as that pairing was.  Hopefully he has his blast off season in 2024, because that could earn him the Rookie of the Year Award, which would earn the Giants a draft pick, as a reward, since he was on the Opening Day roster.

Marco Luciano

I would have been okay with the Giants having Luciano as the starting shortstop. His projected batting line was not that far off from what the average NL SS hit in 2023, and his defense, while not all that good, the projections still had him roughly as an average SS in terms of WAR, including that subpar defense, if he played a full season.  But, admittedly, that would have been pushing him hard, and could have been risky, if it derailed his confidence.

Instead, he gets to prove himself at the AAA level, which is okay as he hasn't had a lot of upper minors experience anyway, before, and it is not like he's been a totally dominating hitter so far either.  And this helps the pitching staff be better this season, as last year, the team's pitching earned the #3 ranking in ERA in the NL, but because of poor defense, the team only ranked 6th in Runs Allowed/Prevention.  And Luciano likely would not be anywhere near as good defensively as Ahmed.

But I expect good things from him too.  He was ranked in the top 10, from what I recall, in hitter's Exit Velocity, in all of the minors in 2023, and he had a number of hits among the Giants leaders in EV, as well, even though he barely played any games.  He is probably being saved for 2025 Giants Opening Day roster and hopefully earn the Giants a pick by winning the Rookie of the Year Award next season.

Jung Hoo Lee

Jung Hoo Lee is another competitor for the Rookie of the Year Award in 2024.  I happened to find a few reports on him from the off-season:

• Baseball America
• Sports Info Solutions
• StatCast (not from off-season, but good source of up to date MLB hitting stats)

I've addressed some common mistakes some fans make about him in comments on The Athletic. The most common ones are talking about KBO like it is an unknown league with transitions and about how a journeymen former MLB player hit as well as Lee when he had one of his great (and he had multiple) seasons.

The league is definitely not MLB quality, but that's okay.  There are many analysts using Major League Equivalence techniques to create projections of how good a player's minor league season would look like in the majors. They would translate that batting line, incorporate all their adjustments their technique requires, in order to make a projection. They do that all the time with the minor and the KBO is no different. 

And the projections provided on Fangraphs all project Jung Hoo Lee to be slightly above average (roughly 2.5 WAR). This aligns with the contract he received from the Giants, which values him at roughly 2 WAR.  Also, one could say the same about all the top prospects in the minors, as well, that it's not MLB quality, and yet many come up and become good major league players.

Another is about a journeyman hitting as well as Lee. If you look through AAA stats back far enough, you will find many instances of 30+ YO journeymen AAAA players who are among the leaders in hitting, alongside the young twenty-something year olds, and that didn't make those young prospects any more suspect.  Of course the older more experienced player will be a top hitter, he's facing younger less experienced players, even if he's a journeyman. That's how the AAAA label got created.

What's more interesting is when very young prospects, despite being younger and less experienced, still beat the pants off their older more experienced players. Like Lee when he led the KBO in hitting when he was only 23 YO. Heck, at 18 YO, he hit well even, better than the average player, though he was just out of high school with no pro experience.  

Also, the one key to hitting in the majors that shows the ability to hit there is a hitter's ability to make contact.  As one of the links above noted, Lee is like the classic bad ball hitters, Manny Sanguillén, Vladimir Guerrero, Pablo Sandoval, for examples.  Lee has made great contact (85% contact rate, which basically means he doesn't strike out in many AB's) all through his KBO career.  That's why Belt and Meckler rose up the minors in one full season, reaching the majors so quickly.  And what Sandoval did through most of his minor league seasons, before reaching the majors.

Carson Whisenhunt

Whisenhunt was noted by MLB Pipeline as having the best change-up in the minors and he was ranked 7th among LHP prospects in their top ranking of players.  He showed prospect credentials by rising to AA at age 22 (which the best prospects do) and he pitched well there, as well.  He also was ranked in the Top 100 by some evaluators, too.

Hayden Birdsong

Birdsong has a great name, but also has accomplished a great thing, by reaching AA at age 21, which is unusually fast.  He didn't do well there, but so far he's handling AA well this season.  

Bryce Eldridge

After spending most of the year in High School, Eldridge was drafted by the Giants, and in his short time playing for them, he ranked in the Top 10 in Exit Velocity, beating out Marco Luciano in the Top 10 ranking.  His hitting impressed the team so much that they put on hold his dreams of being a two-way player (so no pitching this season), and instead of playing the OF, he's playing 1B and concentrating on his hitting. The Giants noted that this is a critical time to get quality experience with hitting, and continue that growth, and that then they can revisit his desire to pitch at a later point of his career. I'm keeping a sharp eye on what he does this season (unfortunately, he recently injured himself and there is no reports, only that he's no longer in the lineup).

Landen Roupp

Noted as having a killer curveball, Roupp had the best ZiPS projected ERA of any Giants rookie starting pitchers (4.11 ERA), except for Jordan Hicks (3.90 ERA), but, of course, Hicks is a very experienced MLB pitcher (just not in starting pitching).

Giants Farm System Depth is Deep in Pitching

I see a lot of complaints about the Giants farm system, and usually they note how low they are ranked.  The thing is, most of these ranks only look at how many Top 100 (that is, high end, star projected) players in the farm system.  But the Giants, even during the Dynasty era, never operated with a ton of stars.

Also, these rankings often miss things and the team end up better than one might think, given the low ranking. For example, Pablo Sandoval was a key player for the Dynasty Giants, but the year he reached the majors, not only was he not on any Top 100 ranking, he wasn't even on Baseball America's Top 30 Giants ranking either!  Similarly with last season, Patrick Bailey wasn't on any Top 100 rankings, and Baseball America had Joey Bart as the future starting catcher in the preseason, but he ended up the catcher of the future, and produced 2.9 fWAR with his great Gold Glove caliber catching defense. These rankings rely a lot upon the prospect pedigree (meaning, if they are high first round picks, and has had mostly pretty good seasons rising up the minors) and neither of the two had that, both stumbled badly and then blasted into the majors.

Now, to be clear, I do like the rankings, but they are not be all, end all, sources of prospect information. It misses players like the above, and also does not look into the depth of the farm system.  It is here that I think the rankings are missing something huge happening with the Giants, which is the depth of pitching prospects and players who are projected to be average NL starting pitchers or better.

The average NL SP ERA is 4.56, and here are the Giants pitching prospects who project to be about average or better, plus I included other promising pitchers:

• Landen Roupp:  4.11 ER
• Kyle Harrison:  4.15 ERA
• Keaton Winn:  4.20 ERA
• Mason Black:  4.23 ERA
• Carson Whisenhunt:  4.25 ERA
• Tristan Beck:  4.46 ERA
• Sean Hjelle:  4.50 ERA
• Kai-Wai Teng:  4.51 ERA
• Spencer Howard:  4.52 ERA
• Ethan Small:  4.55 ERA
• Daulton Jefferies:  4.55 ERA (all at or under NL SP average of 4.56 ERA)
• Carson Seymour:  4.64 ERA
• Ryan Murphy:  4.72 ERA
• Hayden Birdsong:  4.78 ERA
• Jack Choate:  5.12 ERA
• Carson Ragsdale:  5.13 ERA

I was pretty shocked when I compiled the list. That's eleven pitchers who are at the average or below (with four significantly below, which I would remind, is a great thing), plus another three very close. And the thing I discovered recently about ZiPS projections is that the 50th Percentile production is presented and historically, across all the players in the ZiPS database, roughly half beat their projection and half does not.  So this mean, on average, roughly 5-6 of the 11 pitchers (and 2 of 4) will beat their projections, and same for the remaining five pitchers.  And I haven't even mentioned Reggie Crawford yet, who looks to be a pretty good pitching prospect, and we'll see how high he goes in his first full pro season.  That's 7-8 good pitchers to be expected out of this list.

Then there are interesting hitters in the system as well, which I covered above:  Luciano, Lee, Eldridge.  I also still believe in Heliot Ramos and Luis Matos, and Meckler is very interesting, as well.  I also like Rayner Arias, but he's still very young so he'll take a while to develop.  Grant McCray is also interesting, as well as Vaun Brown.  There are interesting hitters from the last draft, too, in Walker Martin and Maui Ahuna.

No team is built off of homegrown hitters. There will be a mix of experienced and homegrown, then the homegrown becomes the experienced.  Since we are still early in the rebuild (despite many Giants fans complaints, even though we are now five years into the Zaidi era, the rebuild is still early), we don't have many homegrown or young players, other than Bailey and Estrada, and Estrada is already getting on the older side.

Still, with Webb, Walker, and Doval, we have two key young pitchers already. And Harrison, Winn, Roupp, Black, Whisenhunt, Birdsong are all very interesting prospects who can be productive, above average starting pitchers, and some will fail and become good setup relievers, and there is that mass of roughly NL SP average ERA pitchers above, eleven in total, who could be the final pieces in the bullpen or trade pieces to fill the gaps in the roster that we will undoubtedly have in the lineup.  League average SP on the cheap is a rarity (see the lousy pitching most teams have in their 4th and 5th spots) that is valuable. For example, if Winn continues to pitch well, he should yield a good player in return in a trade.

Right now, I think the OF is set, with Matos in LF, Lee in CF, and Ramos/Meckler in RF. Plus, of course, Bailey as catcher.  Eldridge is maybe the future 1B, but the big question is when.  Luciano could also be the 1B or 3B, once he eventually moves off of SS. Schmitt could be the SS for a while, but hopefully the Giants can pick up Jung Hoo Lee's buddy, Ha-Seong Kim, as SS in free agency.  Then Schmitt could be 3B also, but perhaps 2B fits his hitting profile better.

Not all will be great hitters, nor do we need them to be, despite the complaints of many fans.  What we need, most of all is good, average hitters, and the average NL hitters are roughly in the mid-to-high 700 OPS for batters 1-5, and roughly 700 for batters 6-9.  People have. been dunking on Yaz, but his .775 OPS from 2023 works anywhere in the lineup except 4th.  

I see Lee and Matos as good OPS hitters, because of their ability to make contact, and they might also bring some power with some adjustments.  Ramos, Eldridge and Luciano would be the power hitters, and hopefully get on base enough to be middle lineup hitters.  Schmitt likely falls into the 6-7 spot, with power but not getting on base much.  Bailey hopefully can stay in the 5-6 spot type of hitting, but we'll see.  The future lineup looks like it can support the good pitching we should have, with all these pitching prospects.