Will Rayner Arias break the Giants' million dollar UFA curse?
Just because I'm the first person to call it a curse and also made it up doesn't mean it's not one
The Giants signed Rayner Arias to a $2.7 million deal on Sunday (some outlets have it at $2.8 million, and either way, none of it is going to me), and if you haven’t ever heard that name before in your life, that’s because he’s a 16-year-old Dominican, and you probably don’t have a lot of teenage Dominican baseball players on your radar until they make news for receiving multi-million dollar signing bonuses.
It is also possible that you pay close attention to the international amateur market and had heard that Arias was connected to the Giants. In that case, the previous paragraph was not for you and I hope you will persevere.
Would you like to get excited about Rayner Arias? I mean, sure, I can copy and paste the plaudits like a good little content farmer.
The athletic teen displays an advanced baseball IQ, plus makeup and leadership qualities that set him apart because he never seems overmatched in any situation.
Nice!
On the field, Arias has a chance to build at least three above-average tools -- hit, power and arm -- and displays a strong work ethic that wows scouts.
Swell!
He reminds some evaluators of a young Eloy Jiménez.
Fantastic!
Arias moves well enough to be a solid defender in the outfield, and his arm will play at multiple positions.
It’s absolutely bad form to steal pull quotes from multiple consecutive sentences in one article but I’m doing it anyway! But you’ll have to click to see the last reason to get hyped about him, because I’m not giving that one away. I have standards, people.
So, yes, good, Rayner Arias is an unusually good baseball player for someone halfway through his teenage years, and that’s swell for him. The Giants have now hired him as an employee, and that’s swell for them.
But he’s 16, and the team doesn’t have a great recent track record with signing 16-year-olds, and by “recent” I mean “Since LeBron James has been in the NBA.”
Here is a possibly incomplete list of international free agents the Giants have given seven-figure bonuses to over the last 15 years. First, the ones whose Giants careers are over:
Angel Villalona ($2.1M, 2006): Always was decent for the level considering his age, but never a superstar. Then maybe he killed someone. The Dominican legal system cleared him, probably due to a bribe, and the Giants had a legal obligation to bring him back and let him play more in the minors, but he never got good enough to even think about the majors.
Rafael Rodriguez ($2.55M, 2008): Turned out to be not that good. I think I remember some whispers about a poor work ethic, but don’t put too much stock in that.
Gustavo Cabrera ($1.3M, 2012): Accidentally put his arm through a glass table and could never really play at a high level again. Eventually retired, then passed away from Covid.
Lucius Fox ($6M, 2015): Traded in the Matt Moore deal. Has never been particularly good in AAA or the majors. Still just 25 though!
Shout out to Osvaldo Fernandez, by the way, the original Giants IFA Bust. He doesn’t qualify for this list for a couple reasons — he’s outside of my chosen timeframe and he already had some pro experience when he defected from Cuba — but I see him as the godfather of this entire group
Then there are the guys who are currently in the system:
Marco Luciano ($2.8M, 2018): He could still be good! He could still be the chosen one! Sure, there were a couple reasons to worry this year, as he was slowed by injuries and wasn’t exactly as explosive when healthy as we wanted to see, but that’s fine! It’s fine! (With terrified eyes and a desperate need to believe) EVERYTHING IS FINE!
Ryan Reckley ($2.2M, 2022): That’s one year ago, which is far too recently to judge. He doesn’t seem super advanced at the moment, but also he just signed. Not judging! Too early!
Juan Perez ($1.2M, 2022): Everything I said about Reckley also applies to Perez. Still not judging! Still too early!
And then, finally, there is Rayner Arias, and there is Yosneiker Rivas, who got a $1M signing bonus this year along with Arias (Some sources say Diego Velasquez got $1M in 2021, but I also saw $900,000, though if he wants to make some extra cash I bet he could get something for a knockoff version of Las Meninas). The Giants’ recent history of big money international free agents is not good. It is, in fact, deeply bad.
It would be nice if the Giants weren’t bad at developing international free agents, but here we are. Yes, they managed to turn Camilo Doval into something pretty special, but he was the first really good player they got through the IFA process since Pablo Sandoval (apologies to Ehire Adrianza and Hector Sanchez, but not, like, ultra-sincere apologies)
Are the Giants cursed? You have to ask the question, at least if you are trying to drive clicks to your newsletter with the same dumb bullshit everyone else uses. There is, at least, some measure of bad luck involved; Gustavo Cabrera certainly qualifies, and arguably Villalona does too (from the Giants’ perspective, his downfall would have been, uh, difficult to predict).
The rest of it is some combination of attrition and the Giants doing a bad job developing players. Sure, a bunch of top prospects fail, but that’s because top prospects fail all the time in baseball. It’s hard to develop players, and especially when a team doesn’t take that many big swings, missing on a few in a row will make people see a pattern.
That’s clearly not all of it, though. Maybe it’s the people in scouting not evaluating makeup properly or maybe it’s the player development folks not connecting with guys, or maybe it’s the organization not properly motivating young people who suddenly have more money than all of their friends, no matter how well they play baseball. I don’t know. I couldn’t say. I don’t think that even anyone inside the Giants could say for sure.
But you don’t get big hits if you don’t take big swings (baseball metaphor). Even if you’ve failed time and time again, you pick yourself up, spend another couple mil of a billionaire’s money, and give it another shot. The Giants will never figure this thing out if they don’t keep trying to develop top talent. Rayner Arias was a top 10 talent in this IFA class. It’s good the Giants have him now, but let’s hope he turns out better than the last few guys.
Your comment on having more money than all their friends...Maybe a variation of that that is the whole point for a 16 year old in poverty-stricken parts of Latin America. Maybe it is the whole goal, the big-time signing bonus. We'd like to think the goal is to make the majors and excel, and yeah maybe that is for a college player drafted. But just getting out of poverty, maybe the pressure is now off and some motivation is lost. Just musing here.
I get excited every damn year and then Lucy pulls the football away right before the big reveal of a MLB star player. I am ready to be hurt again!
Anyhow...someone said Ehire?
https://twitter.com/TiburonesReport/status/1615862364716531712
https://twitter.com/TiburonesReport/status/1615857039732887553