PicoBlog

Photo Credit: Sacramento River Cats

Previously, on Way Too Early Roster Previews:

Perhaps I hallucinated this in some sort of fever dream, but I would swear that at some point last season, the River Cats fielded an all-Giants’ prospects lineup. Maybe not quite an all “originally signed or drafted” lineup, perhaps Will Wilson’s brief time in Anaheim could interfere with that, or maybe a Michael Gigliotti appearance could have snuck into the “nine former Flying Squirrels” category. Yet I’m sure there was a lineup that included nine players who had worked their way up the system — affiliate to affiliate before finally arriving at Sacramento together.

But I can’t find it. My quarry eludes me. I just wasted my entire morning clicking through every damned 2023 Sacramento box score. I get to six players, even seven….but there’s always a Trenton Brooks, an Armando Alvarez, or a Clint Coulter and Ford Proctor mucking up the works before I can make it to nine. My perfect lede is ruined.

But that is something of a dream for this Sacramento squad: an all homegrown, home developed lineup. Oh, I don’t want to get too dogmatic about things. Everybody stocks a little depth in their Triple-A roster, and talent is talent, after all. It’s not like anybody is getting judgy about the fact that “The Mayor of Bowie,” Mike Yastrzemski, was taking at bats away from “real prospects” back in 2019, or Thairo Estrada in 2021. There are many different paths to the waterfall, after all, and a high-functioning organization takes advantage of all of them.

But we know how important player development is to modern baseball, and what a priority it is for the Giants to excel at it, and it just figures that when the PD machine really gets to humming — when organizations get better at helping their players avoid the pitfalls that cause them to stall out in Double-A or High-A or even the complex levels — that ultimately that wave rises to the top and starts to fill every roster crack, and there are simply fewer at bats to be handing out to the Jakson Reetzes of the world. That’s where we hope this is all heading.

So, good news…depending on how exactly things shake out with the major league roster, we can do a pretty decent job of filling out a lineup AND a rotation with homegrown players, and maybe have a few less lineups this year that look like this:

…and maybe a few more that look something like this:

…at least until the call ups begin.

Let’s see what we can put together at this, the penultimate level, where hopefully an exciting year is finally in store for the Sacramento faithful.

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