Player development isn’t linear, but it also involves a lot of luck. It appears the luck is finally turning for the Giants.
Hopefully, most of the regular readers of this site have already made the internal switch, but for the casual reader, here is the formal declaration that The Narrative Has Changed: The San Francisco Giants can develop prospects.
Disclaimer: this statement only applies to the current season.
The meanest possible thing that could’ve been said about the Giants up until, like, May 1st of this year was that in the Giants’ San Francisco era, they’ve had three hiccups of player development success: the early 60s, the mid 80s, and the mid aughts. Last season saw the team desperately try to keep the plane in the air with any piece of junk they could find, including minor leaguers who probably weren’t ready for the show. The mathematical odds of every highly touted prospect flaming out were such that the Giants figured that if the desperation didn’t work out in 2023, it just might in 2024. Lo and behold, it has!
Let’s start with last night’s hero, Brett Wisely. In 141 plate appearances last season, he slashed .175/.231/.267 with 40 strikeouts against 9 walks. This was after the team had traded for him from another organization (Tampa Bay). “Look at that — they ruined him!” one might have thought, were that person being wildly ungenerous to an organization that, oh, has largely proven bad at developing prospects, particularly on the hitting side. But he had a nice minor league season in 23: .285/.417/.466 in 280 plate appearances.
A trio of coaches helped him out in his journey. According to reporting from the wonderful Shayna Rubin at the Chronicle and Justice delos Santos of the Chico Enterprise Record, Justin Viele (!), River Cats hitting coach Damon Minor, and former major leaguer Daniel Murphy (yes, that one) helped him make adjustments he recognized needed to be made last season. Wisely discussed making a change last year with Giants hitting coach Justin Viele, but he didn’t want to alter his mechanics in the middle of a season. Upon returning home in the offseason, Wisely incorporated a more upright stance.
Among those Wisely worked with in the offseason was Murphy, the National League’s Silver Slugger winner at second base in 2016 and 2017. Murphy was also named the MVP of the NLCS in 2015 when he hit a home run in a postseason record six straight games.
“He dives deep into hitting,” Wisely said of Murphy. “He dives deep into a lot of the approach stuff. He’s a really good hitter. He said, ‘The taller you are, the more force you have going into the ground, so the harder you’ll hit the ball.’”
Wisely didn’t immediately see results, hitting .188 during spring training. He admitted there was a temptation to revert to his old stance but Wisely stuck with the tweaked mechanics. That decision is bearing fruit.
Before being recalled on May 11, Wisely had a slash line of .311/.403/.487 with four home runs in 32 games with Triple-A Sacramento. Wisely’s underlying numbers show improvement as well. The sample size is too small to be conclusive, but Wisely’s average exit velocity (88.9 mph), expected batting average (.280), and expected slugging percentage (.427) are among the metrics that are up.
Factor in his defense (two outs above average at shortstop), and Wisely has been plenty productive in recent weeks.
Along with a new stance, Wisely possesses a new mindset, describing his rookie year as “humbling.”
Working with River Cats hitting coach Damon Minor, Wisely worked to make his swing less of an upper cut by keeping his chest up and swinging more flat in the zone.
With that change, Wisely took pressure off himself to hit for power while making more quality contact and chasing less.
“He dives deep into hitting,” Wisely said of Murphy. “He dives deep into a lot of the approach stuff. He’s a really good hitter. He said, ‘The taller you are, the more force you have going into the ground, so the harder you’ll hit the ball.’”
Wisely didn’t immediately see results, hitting .188 during spring training. He admitted there was a temptation to revert to his old stance but Wisely stuck with the tweaked mechanics. That decision is bearing fruit.
A lot of coaching and a commitment to improvement is what it has taken for Wisely to boost himself from a bench guy to a Forever Giant — a term we typically throw around with reckless abandon. But he bit the Dodgers, so, he’s automatically in the club.
Then we’ve got Heliot Ramos, perhaps the most important figure of the group. He’s having a remarkable season mainly because of how far he’s had to come. Highly touted by the previous regime and practically locked away in a cellar by the next, it seemed like he was destined for DFAland. Instead, unless Logan Webb is unavailable and declines to attend, he’s probably the Giants’ sole All-Star Game representative this year. While he’s cooled off quite a bit of late (.152/.220/.304 over his last 11 games), he still registers as the 10th-best hitting outfielder in the NL.
Luis Matos has won Player of the Week honors in the big leagues and minor leagues already this season, and since being recalled after an extended slump, he’s back to hitting well: 8-for-his-last-20.
Patrick Bailey is a switch-hitting catcher who is performing well at the plate in his sophomore season (.284/.357/.432). He, like everybody not named Wilmer Flores, suffered a tremendous decline in offensive production last season and you wondered if the projections of him being a below average hitting catcher were his ultimate destiny. In the first half of this season, he’s showing that the younger players on the Giants are hitting pretty well overall.
The 29 and unders for the Giants — where really only Thairo Estrada could be labeled as a non-prospect and somebody who still managed to blossom a bit away from their previous organization — are hitting .260/.313/.405 as a group, which measures as a 106 wRC+, or 6% better than the league average. Now, here’s the kicker: that’s 6% better than the league average for this split, meaning that the Giants’ 29 and unders are hitting better than the league average of 29 and unders. Their 30 and overs are hitting .232/.315/.370, which is league average (100 wRC+).
Tyler Fitzgerald and Blake Sabol are two more guys who’ve hit well in limited time up, and we might be seeing Jung Hoo Lee’s turnaround at this point in the season had it not been for his grotesque and shocking injury. And all of this has been on the hitting side.
The pitching side just saw Hayden Birdsong get to the big leagues and look solid. Ryan Walker’s late in career blossoming has been a wonderful sight to behold. Logan Webb was already a development success and he’s having a very solid season even now, when the Giants’ two generations-old coaching staff is helping him along. Jordan Hicks’ conversion to a starting pitcher should be considered a success, and whatever they’ve done to make Sean Hjelle the new Jakob Junis is to be applauded.
I’m not qualified to get into the weeds with minor league development, but exciting things continue to happen on the farm and you should check Brady’s reporting every day to keep abreast of them. At the major league level, if Bryan Price, Bob Melvin, and Ryan Christenson had something to do with any of this good news, let’s hear about it. That would be quite a surprise to me, a skeptic of this coaching group, but it wouldn’t spoil the bottom line: the Giants have — despite all odds and decades of history — developed some prospects.