The new NRIs are here! The new NRIs are here!
Bystander: "Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing"
We’re so close to actual baseball content, people! Fanfest was last Saturday, and pitchers and catchers reporting is right around the corner, and then it’ll be Spring Training, and then we’ll all be tired of Spring Training and ready for real games to start, and then after another couple of weeks it’ll be the beginning of the regular season.
What does that mean? It means that we hit one of the biggest milestones of any year: When the Giants announce their non-roster invites!!!
You know what that means: It’s time to come up with an arbitrary way to rank them because that’s how we create #content online. This year’s Arbitrary Ranking will be: How excited should you be about this player’s performance in Spring Training? We’ll start out with:
I have never heard of this player in my life
Raymond Burgos
Nick Duron
Jorge Guzman
Erik Miller
Brett Cumberland
Clint Coulter
Armando Alvarez
I have never heard of any of these players in my life and have no idea how excited you should be about them. However, I will say the odds are high that the answer is: Not Very Excited
Do not get excited
Kade McClure
Sean Newcomb
Ljay Newsome
Drew Strotman
Daniel Tillo
Miguel Yajure
Austin Wynns
Donovan Walton
These players are all different flavors of Minor League Free Agent Who Has Not Distinguished Himself In The Majors. Not all of them have necessarily made the majors, but those of them who did get there didn’t do a lot to set themselves apart from replacement-level players. Perhaps one of these guys will have a nice camp and get some press. Then he will go down to AAA and you will forget about him.
If any of these players end up in the majors this year, it’s probably not going to go well.
Maybe a little excited, I guess?
Melvin Adon
Sam Delaplane
Trevor Hildenberger
Darien Nunez
Joe Ross
Patrick Bailey
Ricardo Genoves
Roberto Perez
Stephen Piscotty
Ford Proctor
Colton Welker
Brady Whelan
Will Wilson
These are players with some level of success in the upper minors or majors that means there’s some possibility that this is his breakout year. Whether it’s Delaplane’s 0.49 ERA in 37 AA innings back in 2019 or the nice starts to the major league careers of Joe Ross and Stephen Piscotty back in 2015 and 2016, there was, at some point, something there. Maybe it’s still there. Maybe it’s hibernating. Maybe it’s gone. We’ll find out this year!
I have also included Will Wilson and Patrick Bailey, who were first round draft picks who have not yet put everything together. But they could!
I have also also included Ricardo Genoves and Roberto Perez, because I don’t actually know what to do with catchers when none of them are particularly exciting.
I have also also also included Melvin Adon, who use to throw the ball extremely hard. I don’t know if he still does, but he used to.
You may experience a reasonable amount of excitement
Mauricio Llovera
Brett Auerbach
Bryce Johnson
Ronald Guzman
Tyler Fitzgerald
Now we’re getting into semi-prospect territory. Llovera was doing a nice job in the majors last year before he got hurt. Auerbach had a rough year in AA last year, but he won the Barney Nugent Award in Spring Training for being the most impressive player in his first big-league camp and his positional versatility (last year, he started games at six different positions) means he could rocket up to the majors. We saw Johnson for a little bit in the bigs last year because of his speed, and as he’s still fast and fast players are fun, he’s easy to root for. I don’t actually know a lot about Guzman except that he’s listed as both a left-handed pitcher and an infielder, so that’s a neat combination. And Fitzgerald had some warts in his offensive game at Richmond just like Auerbach did, but he had a little more power and he was the first Flying Squirrel to ever have a 20-20 season.
GET HYPE
RJ Dabovich
Kyle Harrison
Vaun Brown
Casey Schmitt
Do people still say “Get Hype?” I think I’m old and they don’t.
Anyway, these are the Actual Prospects in big-league camp. Dabovich has already been getting some ink in the run-up to Spring Training, as he was already in Sacramento at the end of last year. Harrison is one of the best prospects in baseball, and after dominating Eugene last year, he moved up to Richmond and had a very strong second half of the year. Vaun Brown was the new hotness in the Giants system (Do people still say “the new hotness?” Or has no one said that since Men In Black?), and all he did was wallop the ball in San Jose and then wallop the ball in Eugene. And Schmitt is probably the best defensive player in the Giants system, and he also had an .854 OPS across the top three levels of the minor league system, which is pretty dang solid.
Now, the one caveat to all this is playing time. We have no idea how much playing time any of these guys will get in the spring. Maybe Vaun Brown will be around for the first couple weeks and then get sent out in the first round of cuts because the team doesn’t have at-bats for him. Maybe Trevor Hildenberger gets a nice, long look, does reasonably well, and is hyped up as the 13th man in the bullpen. I think those are both pretty likely, honestly.
But Vaun Brown is still more exciting than Hildenberger both because he’s younger and more likely to be an important part of the team’s future, and also because he spent last year being a rocketship and rocketships are cool. Spring Training always starts with all sorts of hype and hope and possibilities that this year, things will be very different before becoming, at the end, the team meddling at the margins. But the margins aren’t fun. Kyle Harrison striking fools out is fun. So even if he only gets in four games and pitches 12 innings before being sent to minor league camp, they’ll be interesting, and exciting, and important.
There will be surprises this spring. There will be guys who make strong pushes for the roster who we don’t see coming right now. Maybe a couple of them are in my list of not-that-exciting players. But right now, before the actual start of Spring Training, we’re all dreaming on the bigger-name prospects. And since reality hasn’t set in yet, it sure is fun to think about what could be.