SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The San Francisco Giants’ lineup is mostly set. Let’s get the season started.
OK, perhaps the lineup isn’t set in terms of the actual batting order, and the DH spot gives them options to mix things up. Once Luis Arraez and Harrison Bader signed, though, the lineup needed a lot less micromanaging, and platooning should be the exception, not the rule. Even the left-handed hitters are everyday guys. The Giants have come a long way from Mark Mathias pinch-hitting for Brandon Crawford.
It’s a steady everyday lineup on paper, and we’ll see how kind the Cactus League is to those plans. Don’t mistake this as being the same thing as a roster that’s set in stone, however. There will be spring battles, and they’ll be important ones, too, the kind that can make or break the entire season. No pressure.
Let’s break these battles down in order from “least compelling” to “most compelling,” starting with one that’s not really a position battle at all.
5. Designated hitter
The Giants are back to where almost every team begins, with a DH spot that’s more of a concept than a defined role. A list of players who could get time at DH includes Jerár Encarnación, Heliot Ramos, Arraez, Rafael Devers and whichever veteran needs a day off his feet. Heck, you could even see a scenario where Patrick Bailey is in an offensive groove and uses the DH to have his cake (keep the bat fresh) and eat it too (watch a baseball game without squatting even once).
It’s not unthinkable for Bryce Eldridge to win the job outright, but that could be tricky for an organization that wants him to face as much left-handed pitching as possible … but not necessarily in a season where a postseason berth might come down to a single game. It’ll be hard to keep him in Triple A if he lights up Cactus League pitching, but it would be a mild surprise if he broke camp with the team.
4. Utility infielder
While the exact order might fluctuate and change over the coming weeks, it’s still somewhat noteworthy that the Giants rolled out this lineup for live batting practice on Tuesday:
1. Luis Arraez
2. Willy Adames
3. Rafael Devers
4. Matt Chapman
5. Harrison Bader
6. Heliot Ramos
7. Casey Schmitt
8. Jung Hoo Lee
It’s safe to slot Bailey into the final spot and call it a lineup, although it’s likely that this is just one of the permutations the Giants might use.
Your eyes likely went to the bottom of the lineup, where the biggest surprise is. Lee profiles as a traditional No. 1 or 2 hitter, but perhaps they’re looking for a second-leadoff type at the bottom of the order. It would be a fascinating tweak, but, again, this is a lineup for live BP before games even start. Maybe don’t read a single thing into it.
It’s the presence of Schmitt that should catch your attention more, though, and not only because he was taking live BP after offseason wrist surgery. He could be something like an everyday player, getting plenty of time at second base, even after the Arraez signing. Schmitt has an option remaining, but that doesn’t have to mean anything if the team wants him on the roster, which it almost certainly does.
Casey Schmitt looks like an early leader for the backup infielder job. (Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
It’s possible that Schmitt would be the only backup shortstop on the roster, but at the risk of repeating myself, Christian Koss looked like a major leaguer by the end of last season, and he definitely didn’t do anything to play his way off the team. He’ll have the advantage over Tyler Fitzgerald because of their respective performances last season, but they both have options.
Koss and Fitzgerald also might not be battling each other at all. The organization might want an extra outfielder on the roster instead, so it could be Schmitt as the jack-of-all trades. If he’s something like an everyday player, though, it would be likelier for the team to carry another infielder, just to be sure.
3. Backup catcher
In one respect, backup catcher is the most fascinating battle in camp, because all of the candidates have such different profiles. Daniel Susac has to make the team or be offered back to the Athletics. Eric Haase is the major-league veteran with a chance to hit slightly better than the average backup. Jesús Rodríguez is the future more than the present, and he’s more of a hybrid-type right now than a pure catcher. Diego Cartaya is still young and talented enough to dream on. Logan Porter is the only one of them who caught a single inning for the Giants last year, so even though he isn’t on the 40-man roster anymore, you can’t completely rule him out.
In another respect, it’s hard to see this being the pivot point for the season. The last time the Giants’ hopes were almost entirely placed on the shoulders of a backup catcher was 2011. There wasn’t a backup catcher the Giants could have stashed away for the scenario, a better move to make in the offseason. The replacement for Buster Posey that season wasn’t going to carry the Giants over the finish line, whether it was Chris Stewart, Eli Whiteside or any of the best backup catchers around the league. Even if the Giants could have magically copied a backup catcher from any of the other 29 teams and pasted him into the lineup, it still wouldn’t have saved the season.
Still, whoever wins will get roughly 15 to 20 percent of the starts, so let’s not pretend the job is without value. If the Giants can get anything — anything — out of their backup catcher, it would be a big deal. It’s been seven years since Stephen Vogt hit .263/.314/.490 behind Posey. The Giants aren’t likely to get that again, but that’s always the dream. They’d take a slugging percentage 100 points lower and still do cartwheels.
2. The last outfielder
One might assume that Drew Gilbert has a lock on this spot, considering his collegiate ties to the new manager and his prominent MLB debut last season. Perhaps. But the odds might be against him.
There are reasons to have Gilbert on the Opening Day roster, to be sure. He’d be a left-handed complement to help balance out an outfield with two right-handers in the starting lineup (Bader and Ramos), and he would give the Giants a true backup center fielder behind Bader. And it’s always, always fun to have a player who might take a bite out of a light bulb for no apparent reason.
Still, he has minor-league options, and he struggled mightily in his major-league debut. There’s no rush, no obvious reason why the organization would want him on the bench unless he’s clearly the best option. There’s over a month to get there, to be sure, but it would have to be extraordinarily convincing.
Even then, there would be complications. Luis Matos is out of options, so not only would Gilbert have to beat him out for the job, but also he would have to do so in the most convincing manner possible. Gilbert would have to be the better option for the 2026 season, and he’d have to be so much of an upgrade that it would be worth losing Matos on waivers or via trade to make. Now consider that Matos is a full year-and-a-half younger than Gilbert. They’re both prospects, roughly speaking. One of them can get everyday time in the minors, and the other will be on another team if he’s not on the Giants.
It’s also not a binary decision. Encarnación should be something like a 4.5th outfielder, getting innings in a corner if he’s needed. New addition Will Brennan will be on a split contract and will likely be depth with Triple-A Sacramento, but that’s what a lot of folks thought about Koss last spring before he stuck around until Opening Day. Grant McCray also has options, and he’s also a true center fielder with tools.
All of this makes it a hard position to pick an odds-on favorite. The good news is that with the Giants’ entire starting outfield playing for their respective countries in the World Baseball Classic, there will be even more spring innings for the other outfielders than usual.
1. Bullpen
If the Giants don’t make the postseason, the bullpen will be to blame. The FAFO method of bullpen construction is tried-and-true, and it goes something like this: You start with a bunch of relievers, and then you find out which ones you want to keep. By the end of the season, the Giants will probably have found eight relievers they’re comfortable with. Mission accomplished. That’s the FO part.
It’s the FA that gets teams. If you do too much FA’ing, you FO that bullpens can make you really sad. And it won’t do the Giants much good to have eight relievers on Oct. 1 if they’re home because of blown saves on May 1. This is by far the most important — and most precarious — position on the team.
That isn’t to say the Giants should have traded their best prospects for a free-agent reliever or allocated more money toward one this offseason. There aren’t a lot of practical ways to acquire relievers you’ve heard of. It’s typically something that’s better saved for the trade deadline, when you know who’s healthy and which teams have fallen out of the race. The Giants have given themselves plenty of low-risk options to sort through, which is standard operating procedure.
That doesn’t make you feel better, though, and it shouldn’t. The bullpen is always lurking in the background in the regular season, waiting to tick you off. This many unproven arms feels like a defiant dare shouted by someone staring into the eyes of a baseball god. We’ll see how that works out for them.
So it’s your responsibility, your sacred duty, to freak out over every blown lead in spring training. It’s much healthier, though, to watch how everyone is throwing. Carson Seymour ranked pretty low on my personal bullpen rankings before Tuesday, and then he showed up throwing smoke and complementing it with a tight slider. He got Arraez swinging to start the session, which is a more effective way of describing his stuff; if you can throw one of the 100-or-so pitches that Arraez will miss this season, you’re probably throwing the ball well.
The Giants will need to find those types of stories before the league makes them look for new ones. You can crumple up the rest of the position battles and file them in the wastebasket. To paraphrase James Carville, it’s the bullpen, stupid. That’s what the season is likely to come down to, and there won’t be answers for a long time. All you do between now and then is panic, early and often.