Well, it\u2019s finally happened. The San Francisco Giants have backed into the perfect opportunity to recall their top hitting prospect, left-handed hitting DH\/1B Bryce Eldridge, along with one of their more intriguing ones, right-handed hitting C\/3B\/1B\/DH Jes\u00fas Rodr\u00edguez. It\u2019s desperation season already for the Giants and we\u2019re all about to find out if these youngsters will sink or swim.<\/p>\n
Buster Posey didn\u2019t have very many levers to pull to try to improve a moribund lineup, but Eldridge\u2019s .963 OPS in 30 games and Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s .840 in 24 games for Triple-A Sacramento are solid. It\u2019s also the obvious move at this point, as the chances of the team making the postseason seem to be on the verge of transitioning from \u201cprobably not\u201d to \u201clongshot.\u201d They need more and better contact, more on base-ability, and, of course, more power. In theory, both players check all three boxes.<\/p>\n
Of course, they\u2019re not without their flaws. Our managing editor, Brady, doesn\u2019t feel that Eldridge is quite ready at this point for a very simple reason: a 30% strikeout rate. It is the result of plenty of swing and miss in his game (22nd percentile in Whiff rate). The rest of his Statcast profile reminds of Rafael Devers, too. Plenty of swing and miss in the strike zone, Does that make this recall premature? Probably. But the Giants are desperate. And the fans out to be, too. At this point we\u2019re watching a really bad Marvel movie and only some random cameos are going to rescue the feeling of wasted effort investing in this team. The Giants will be playing at home against the Padres, who will be throwing three straight right-handed starters and, as a staff, are middle of the pack in terms of strikeouts per game. So, Eldridge is getting a nice setup.<\/p>\n
Rodr\u00edguez doesn\u2019t make consistently hard contact (33% Hard Hit rate \u2014 32nd percentile) despite making lots of it (90% zone contact rate \u2014 89th percentile). It also remains to be seen just how versatile he is as a catcher and corner infielder and whether or not Tony Vitello will deploy him in that way (he can just ask Christian Koss what good being a Swiss Army Player has done him).<\/p>\n
This might be a downbeat post about what should be some exciting news. On the one hand, the Giants have two promising prospects to call up; but, on the other hand, those players will be expected to give a team filled with All-Star veterans a season-saving transfusion of talent. It\u2019s far from the front office\u2019s plan they devised in the offseason, but maybe the ones being made out of necessity will prove better in the long run than these best laid ones through which we\u2019re presently suffering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Well, it\u2019s finally happened. The San Francisco Giants have backed into the perfect opportunity to recall their top…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":298695,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,102878,102879,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-298694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-giants-news","tag-san-francisco-giants-roster","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298694\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}