Matt Carasiti and Sam Delaplane highlight six pitchers who have been reassigned.
The San Francisco Giants have just four preseason games left between now and their April 8 season opener against the Miami Marlins. Which means it’s really time to start making roster decisions.
That was evident looking at the box score for the team’s 9-5 Spring Training win over the Kansas City Royals on Wednesday. The players the Giants used were mostly Opening Day locks, with a good handful of fringe roster players thrown in, and just a few players who clearly won’t be in San Francisco when the season begins.
It was especially true with the pitchers, as the Giants used six on Wednesday — five of which spent almost the entirety of the 2021 season on the MLB roster.
So it wasn’t surprising, then, that after the game the team announced six more camp cuts, all to pitchers who faced an uphill battle to make the Opening Day roster, in part because none of them are on the 40-man roster yet.
Here are the six (Spring Training stats in parenthesis):
RHP Matt Carasiti (2 innings, 3 hits, 3 walks, 2 strikeouts, 4 earned runs)
LHP Enmanuel De Jesús (4 innings, 4 hits, 2 walks, 5 strikeouts, 3 earned runs)
RHP Sam Delaplane (hasn’t pitched)
RHP Raynel Espinal (5 innings, 4 hits, 2 walks, 6 strikeouts, 2 earned runs)
RHP Wei-Chieh Huang (3 innings, 6 hits, 3 walks, 1 strikeout, 6 earned runs)
RHP Mauricio Llovera (4.1 innings, 2 hits, 3 walks, 5 strikeouts, 3 earned runs)
It’s likely that we’ll see a few of these players pitch for the Giants this year, as we know how much the team likes to churn … they used 31 different pitchers last year, in addition to three position players who took the mound.
With the latest cuts, the Giants now have 43 players in camp, and need to trim that to 28 by Opening Day. The current 43 features the entire 40-man roster save for Jaylin Davis, Sean Hjelle, Yunior Marte, Heliot Ramos, Randy Rodriguez, and Gregory Santos, plus nine non-roster invitees. At this point it seems overwhelmingly likely that all 28 players will come from the current 40-man roster.