A longtime San Francisco Giants insider offered some intense criticism toward the team regarding how Bryce Eldridge has been used in his two weeks on the big league roster.

NBC Sports Bay Area reporter Alex Pavlovic has covered the Giants since 2012 and been the TV station’s insider for more than a decade. In the latest episode of the “Giants Talk” podcast he hosts alongside Cole Kuiper, Pavlovic openly questioned how the team has used Eldridge, who is widely considered the best prospect in the Giants system and a top-100 prospect in all of baseball.

After a brief MLB stint for Eldridge at the end of last season, the Giants sent him back to Triple-A to start 2026, saying they wanted to see the 21-year-old’s strikeout rate go down. Eldridge hit the ball well for the Sacramento River Cats, though he was still striking out a lot. But after the big league team lost all six games on a road trip, the Giants called up Eldridge and fellow hot-hitting prospect Jesus Rodriguez in a major roster shakeup.

Eldridge started all three games of the first series after he was called up, against the Padres. But since then, he’s started only four of the Giants’ 10 games and been used as a pinch hitter only once. On top of that, the two starts Eldridge got in the Dodgers series were against their top pitchers, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani. In reciting Eldridge’s usage in that time, Pavlovic concluded, “Not the way you want to handle your 21-year-old top prospect.”

Kuiper said the Eldridge situation is raising “alarm bells” because of the Giants’ recent track record with their former top prospects. In the past half-decade, the team has had three batters be consensus top-100 prospects: catcher Joey Bart, shortstop Marco Luciano and outfielder Luis Matos. All three found it difficult to get consistent playing time at the big league level and were eventually waived by the team, discarded without a serious contribution.

“We’re going to talk about this every podcast, and I think we should, and I think we need to,” Pavlovic said. “You start to, when you say ‘alarm bells,’ I think you start to think about Joey Bart and Marco Luciano and Luis Matos, you could even go down to Wade Meckler. Their inability for most of a decade to develop guys. This is just not … this is just not, this does not seem like a great plan.”

Pavlovic also made it clear he doesn’t think the blame here should fall on new manager Tony Vitello, saying the college head coach-turned-MLB skipper is in “a really tough spot” balancing the team’s struggles on offense with the need to win games. 

“I think [Vitello] is looking at it and going, ‘What is my best path forward today?’ At some point, they also need to have a conversation about ‘What is the best path forward for Bryce Eldridge?’” Pavlovic said. “They have not wanted to ever send him down when he came back up after last year’s cameo, but this is also not working. Whatever this is, this is not a development path.”

Giants fans went into a mini-frenzy last Monday when Eldridge didn’t start against the Dodgers, his third time sitting in four games. It was on that night that Vitello claimed Eldridge would be used as a pinch hitter on most nights and added he felt Eldridge would still get development with those moments. Pavlovic admitted he felt the fans were overreacting last week, but after Eldridge wasn’t used once off the bench this past week, he changed his tune.

“When this first came up, I was a little like, ‘Let’s pump the brakes on the anger’ because I assumed they would still find a way to get him, like, two-thirds of the starts, at least,” Pavlovic said. “People want him playing every day, and I think that’s probably the correct path for him, but I was looking at it like, ‘Well if he is going to pinch hit a little bit and he is going to start two out of three and he is going to do defensive work with Wash every single day, there is development that can happen here.’ But this is a 10-1 game, and they don’t even get him in at the end of it.”

For what it’s worth, Eldridge is in the lineup on Monday night for the Giants, batting seventh as the designated hitter in the first of a three-game series against the Diamondbacks — the podcast was recorded before the lineup came out. Still, Pavlovic concluded the long discussion by saying the situation is “not good for anybody” and is putting Eldridge in a difficult spot.

“This is something I think they need to figure out by the time they get back home,” Pavlovic said.