Your 2026 Giants: A Giant Among The Giants

Bryce Eldridge just hit a walk off grand slam at age 21, the youngest to do so in MLB history (just beat out Roberto Clemente), so I thought I would write a follow up on how Eldridge is doing in what appears to be his breakout season. 

I have been keeping track of his batting line for this breakout period, where he has mostly started, unlike the early start and stop, which, to me, made sense because he was struggling, and needed to work on cutting his strikeouts (I covered this is a recent post). 

Your 2026 Giants: Eldridge Usage

There has been a lot of talk about mishandling Eldridge after his promotion. I didn’t share that opinion, but didn’t keep detailed track of his usage, so I decided to look into this, see whose impression is correct.

Your 2026 Giants: Rebuilding While Not Officially Rebuilding

A Giants beat writer thinks that the trade of Bailey signals a rebuild, but not a rebuild in a traditional sense.

Your 2026 Giants: Posey Boldly Trades Bailey

The Giants traded Patrick Bailey to Cleveland for a AA pitcher, Matt “Tugboat” Wilkinson and their 29th overall pick in the upcoming draft.  Here is one of NBC’s accounts of the trade and this is MLB’s report.

Your 2026 Giants: Webb vs. Winning Teams

One complaint I’ve seen about Logan Webb over the years is that he’s unable to pitch well against good teams. Which is nonsense, much like what used to be directed at Matt Cain.  And his opening day clobbering at the hands of the Yankees brought that up again.  I thought I would look into it again.

Your 2026 Giants: Rookie Error for Vitello

Obviously, it is a huge deal hiring Tony Vitello as the manager of the San Francisco Giants, and his every move and words are scrutinized minutely.  I like the hiring, but he recently pulled what I would call his first mistake, a rookie mistake.

Your 2026 Giants: Opening Day Roster

The roster has been released: 

• Alex Pavlovic tweet
• Andy Baggarly BlueSky

Your 2026 Giants: Big Six Prospects

As I am wont to do, I sometimes cover the top prospects of the Giants.  I call it the Big Six in honor of Giants great Christy Mathewson, as well as because, as much as I would like every prospect to be stars, there are at most six prospects, generally, who look like they can be regular major leaguers.  

MLB Pipeline has published their Giants Top 30 list, and I will be pulling some interesting quotes from there that supports what I think about each prospect.

Giants Draft Analysis: 2025 Update of the End of the Sabean Era Drafts (fourth in a series)

In early 2020, I was finishing up my series of draft analysis articles, using my updated draft odds results in analyzing Sabean's performance up to the 2019 season.  Now that the 2025 Season is over, I thought I would review which players can be updated to be good or great players, or dropped off the possibility list.

You can read what I wrote in the link above, but the players I reviewed were:

• Joey Bart
• Heliot Ramos
• Tyler Beede
• Seth Corry
• Connor Menez
• Logan Webb
• Bryan Reynolds
• Zack Wheeler (he was mentioned in the second article)

As you can see, most have dropped off, but Ramos, Webb, Reynolds, and Wheeler have looked like good players who either reached or potentially should reach, if he continues to play as well.  

Your 2026 Giants: ZiPS Projections

Happy St Patrick’s Day!  Had my corned beef, cabbage and Guinness for dinner, yum!!!

Every season, Dan Szymborski publishes his ZiPS projections, and his system is honed pretty well, for when he examines after each season how his system does, roughly half exceeds their 50th percentile projection.  It even works roughly by percentiles, thus 10% of the players fail to meet their 10th percentile projections and 90% of the players (again, roughy) fail to meet their 90th percentile projections (which means 10% beats them).  

I thought I would review his Giants annual, and see what looks interesting to comment or report on, especially as Opening Day is approaching.  I have been using his projections the past couple of seasons because the Giants have been relying on pitching prospects, and the Giants under Zaidi had stockpiled a bunch of pitching prospects who are projected to pitch as well as the average MLB pitcher. 

He Ain’t Having That: Buster is Bold and Decisive

Buster Posey hasn’t been too bold in this offseason, other than boldly doing nothing much, but his leadership so far has been marked by decisive moves that shows his need for speed, when he can step up.

Your 2026 Giants: Bullpen Angst

I see a lot of comments about the bullpen, as well as articles concerned about the bullpen.  

Your 2026 Giants: Lineup Roster-bations

I like ZiPS projections for doing analysis for the upcoming season for the Giants.  For about a dozen years, I would collect a variety of projections from sources, and I found that ZiPS generally were in the middle.  Baseball Forecast would often be on the higher side, while Steamer would be on the lower side.  The ZiPS methodology is pretty rock solid as well, as it calculates decile percentile projections, and his reviews of prior year percentile projections find that roughly 50% of players projected beat their 50th percentile projections, and so on, up to 10% beating their 90th percentile and down to 90% beating their 10th percentile projections. No wonder pro teams pay him for consulting services.

Another tool I like is the Lineup Analyzer that Baseball Musings designed based on research from others.  It utilizes the regression analysis of long term batting lineup data that the researcher provided (I was able to confirm the analysis still worked by inputting the NL lineup data and comparing it with the actual, and it was always close back then), to calculate the runs scored by the OBP and SLG of each hitter of the lineup, and after you input a lineup of hitters with their projections for the new season, it can analyze which lineups maximizes the runs scored by this particular lineup.  

That’s how the concept of batting the pitcher 8th came about, as this analysis showed that to maximize runs scored, placing even your worst position player hitter 9th would improve scoring by placing additional runners for the top of the order to drive in.  Tony LaRussa was one MLB manager who took this to heart and batted his pitchers 8th.  

I thought I would take the expected Giants position starters (since there is not much competition there this year), input their projections, and see what the best lineup would be.

Your 2026 Giants: Heliot Phone Home

Heliot Ramos had an up and down season in 2025.  What most remember is his down offensive season and horrendous defensive performance.  He discusses when it went downhill in an interview with the Chronicle (Subscription required), noting a play in the July 20th game against Toronto.  I thought I would look into before and after, to get a picture of what we might expect in 2026.

Your 2026 Giants: Pivotal Analysis

Now, I am with most Giants fans that it has been an underwhelming Hot Stove season, it wasn’t even mildly lukewarm.  Hentges, Foley, Houser, Mahle, Bader, Arraez.  I was expecting a big signing of an ace level starting pitcher, to go with all their investments in Chapman, Adames, Devers, Lee, and Webb.  

Still, I was underwhelmed sometimes by Sabean, then looked at his changes by seeing how he is pivoting his roster, even if the moves don’t look like they moved the needle much, and found improvements, whether by addition by subtraction or adding a minor addition where it is still a huge improvement over the previous season.  So I will go over some examples of pivots I have seen so far in moves this offseason.

Your 2026 Giants: Signs Three Time Batting Champ, Luis Arraez

Per reports (MLB, NBC) three time batting champ, Luis Arraez, has signed with the Giants for one year at $12M. He will start at second base.

Your 2026 Giants: Harrison Bader Signing

Per reports, Harrison Bader agreed to two year contract with the Giants for $20.5M, and incentives could raise that to $21.0M.  Posey reported that Bader will play CF, where he has won a gold glove before.

Posey also noted that Jung Hoo Lee took the news of moving to RF well, and Lee was also told that he would still get starts in CF, which fits what Vitello said in a recent interview, that the starters in the outfield will be fluid. Apparently Lee has played a lot of RF in KBO, and his StatCast physical stats compared well with other MLB RF, so they expect him to be good defensively there. 

To clear space on the 40 man, they traded pitcher Kai-Wei Teng to the Astros, for a catcher, Jameel Vlattoel and international a lot money. 

Your 2026 Giants: Don’t Trade Bryce Eldridge

With the lackluster offseason, many Giants fans are desperate to boost the roster by trading away Bryce Eldridge for a better starting pitcher and improve the rotation, under the rationale that with Rafael Devers, another power hitting left-handed first baseman, the Giants could afford to trade Eldridge for someone like Joe Ryan.  Some also note the poor success rate of top prospects to justify this move.

Here’s a major part of the reason why I do not want to trade Eldridge:  he’s an extremely rare position player.