John Bertrand LHP. DOB: 2/8/1998. 6'3", 205 lbs. Drafted 2022 Round 10.
2024(AA): 7-9, 4.32, 146 IP, 7.34 K/9, 2.47 BB/9, 1.96 GB/FB
2024(AAA): 1-0, 1.80, 10 IP, 5.40 K/9, 4.50 BB/9, 3.33 GB/FB.
Another 5-year college pitcher when drafted. You won't find him on many top prospect lists but all he's done in pro ball is pitch really well. He's a polished lefty with a low-90's FB, slider and changeup. He makes up for a lower K rate with dominant GB rates. Should start 2025 at AAA and wait for an opportunity at the MLB level. He's a throwback and you don't see many MLB pitchers with his profile anymore. Whether Buster Posey is more inclined to give guys like him an opportunity to prove they can or can't do it remains to be seen.
That's #21.
ReplyDeleteNow you will do the Top 20, the guys that will hopefully supply a few MLB players along with some some of the 6 pitchers included, at least one of which will probably be a Carson, and probably McDonald and likely Black.
We want to think Eldridge is for sure, and McCray seems to have the tools at least to make it, but there are very few sure sure things in baseball.
Is there enough there for you, Doc, to be excited?
Will Luciano and Matos follow Ramos, or be Gary Browns?
How good will Fitzgerald, Ramos, Lee, Eldridge, McCray (?), and someone else unnamed be to complement Bailey, Adames, & Chapman?
Assuming the pitching will be their strength (like 2011, maybe) is there enough to squeeze into the wild card anytime soon?
I am actually quite bullish on the farm system and think is is grossly underrated by popular ranking systems which is causing a lot of unwarranted weeping and gnashing of teeth on some other Giants oriented blog sites.
DeleteI feel the Giants have a deep and underrated group of pitching prospects spread throughout the farm system. Given their organizational ability to develop pitchers this bodes well for the future. Back in the day the Giants were adept at identifying the pitchers to keep and those who could be traded for hitters. Hoping Buster and the FO can replicate that strategy to build a winning team again.
DeleteFan: I share your frustration with ownership but not for being cheap with player salaries. The ownership going all the way back to the Bob Lurie days has ignored the international market for decades and probably since the 60s. Brian Sabean made this comment about the Felipe Alou Academy: "“It’s long overdue,” Brian Sabean, the Giants’ executive vice president of baseball operations, said Monday. “I hate to say it; I think we’re the last ones in. This has been a work in progress for a long time. … We weren’t lacking for a place (for international prospects) to play, but we never had the full facility.” There is a similar thing happening in Asia. Half the teams are already in while the Giants were dipping their toes in South Korea. They are scrimping on things like scouting, infrastructure, and PR but building up these relationships internationally can take years, if not decades.
DeleteThanks for another great comment Attabit. I agree. It just never made sense to me why the team would cut the core infrastructure of an organization. Like the roles you suggested, which all together cost less than a middle reliever. Putting every single dollar on the field at the cost of all else does not make sense to me as a strategy.
Delete- Fan
It is penny wise and pound foolish. They save a few hundred thousand cutting things like scouts and analysts which could save millions on the field. It’s a brain drain.
DeleteI just want to make it clear Attabit expresses his/her own opinion here. I personally don't feel I have enough information to know all the reasons why scouts and analysts have been cut or even if they have. Yes, a couple of analysts left the organization including long time analyst Yeshiya Goldfarb but they also recently added a couple from other organizations. There is also an industry-wide trend toward using fewer scouts on the ground so if the Giants downsized their scouting, it's hardly unique to them. All indicators point to the Giants Latin American scouting effort to be more robust than ever so maybe it's just a reallocation of resources.
DeleteThank you for letting me express my opinion. The news is hard to follow because the team is really not obligated to disclose the back end. The last I heard was that four scouts were fired by Zaidi in September and I believe these were pro-level scouts. Also, Buster downsized the analytics department. Where it gets confusing is that there is consolidation of tasks where scouts or analysts become scout-analysts or there is a renaming of positions. I see that there are a number of internal promotions but I'm not sure if all the old positions were back-filled. I would prefer more of the old fashion scouts who can see things like feet movement, family interaction, etc with their own eyes but I think Buster is moving toward a model where the scout would incorporate more analytics. I hope you are right DrB in that its a re-allocation or consolidation of resources. I have worked for thirty five years in a major corporation and I've seen when companies do this kind of shuffling, its usually for the sake of meeting certain metrics or budget and there tend to be a brain drain in the area of experience.
DeleteThe Giants seemed to have dismantled the pitching lab they set up under Brian Bannister last season and here is a McCovey Chronicles link:
Deletehttps://www.mccoveychronicles.com/2024/10/16/24237944/jp-martinez-to-become-pitching-coach-per-susan-slusser-report-will-sfgiants-bring-back-pitching-lab
Last year, Zaidi did not replace Bannister and Bailey was replaced by Price and pitching ended up ranked 20th. The article infers that gutting the pitching lab helped to pay for going over the CBT last season but the pitching regressed a bit. I think a few weeks ago that "Fan" observed that there was a reduction of infrastructure. I cannot bring up the articles about the scouts and analysts. I think the scouts were let go in September and the analysts were let go in November. I don't like the way it looks like its going.
Again, I don't think we have enough information to judge. Regarding analysts, I think a strong case can be made that the Giants had too many analysts providing too much information for players/managers/coaches to absorb and resulted in diminishing returns. I don't think there is any evidence that traditional scouting is better than industry consensus when it comes to first or even second round draft picks. I do think scouting with "boots on the ground" helps uncover talent deep in the draft. How much to crosscheckers and multiple layers of scouts add to area scouts IDK, but am skeptical of. And again, Latin American scouting appears to be more robust than since the 1960's.
DeleteAnother great post about under the radar but high quality potential.
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