Who is the 2nd-best prospect on the Giants farm?
The fix is in! In a clear bout of election interference, the community has named Bryce Eldridge as the top prospect in the San Francisco Giants organization.
I’m joking, of course. Well, not about Eldridge being named the top prospect in the organization. In our very first round of voting in the 2024 Willie McCovey Memorial Community Prospect List, in which we’ll rank the top 44 Giants prospects, Eldridge was exactly what he should have been: the overwhelming choice, amassing well over 90% of the vote in a seven-player race.
Eldridge, the team’s first-round pick in 2023 and Farhan Zaidi’s best chance at having his tenure remembered more fondly in hindsight, had the best Minor League season in recent Giants memory in 2024. After arriving at Spring Training and announcing that he was so focused on hitting that he wasn’t only giving up pitching, but also moving from the outfield to first base, the former two-way player proved why that was a good decision by hitting the stitches off of the baseball.
He began the year with Low-A San Jose, where he slashed .263/.323/.478 with 10 home runs in 229 plate appearances, good for a 107 wRC+, numbers that were likely hurt by a minor injury. While the Giants had publicly proclaimed that he might spend the whole year in San Jose, he was promoted to High-A Eugene, where his star status was cemented: in a league where he was nearly three-and-a-half years younger than his average peer, he slashed an obscene .335/.442/.618 with 12 home runs in 215 plate appearances, good for an other-worldly 187 wRC+.
That earned him a second promotion, this time to AA Richmond, where he stayed only briefly before a late-season promotion to AAA Sacramento, where the season goes a little longer. Eldridge slashed .270/.325/.459 with one home run and a 116 wRC+ in 40 plate appearances with Richmond, and .226/.314/.226 with no home runs and a 46 wRC+ in 35 plate appearances with Sacramento. He looked remarkably comfortable at both stops.
After the season, the Giants sent Eldridge to the Arizona Fall League, where he hit .289/.348/.512 with two home runs in 46 plate appearances while celebrating his 20th birthday.
While Eldridge is the consensus top prospect in the system, and now a consensus top-50 prospect in baseball (as well as one of three finalists for Baseball America’s Hitting Prospect of the Year award), there’s still work to be done. He’s played a mere 17 games above A-Ball, and his defense at first base is exactly what you would expect of a bat-first teenager learning the position on the fly.
Still and all, he’ll almost surely make his MLB debut in 2025, and the Giants view him highly enough that they seem to have no interest in acquiring a long-term solution at first base this offseason, but rather giving the spot to a placeholder until the 6’7 Eldridge is ready to start putting ball after ball into McCovey Cove.
Now that the one obvious pick has been made, let’s move on to harder decisions!
The list so far
Note: Clicking on the above names will link to the CPL where they were voted onto the list.
No. 2 prospect nominees
Rayner Arias — 18.6-year old CF — .735 OPS/98 wRC+ in ACL (105 PA)
Josuar de Jesus González — 17.0-year old SS — yet to debut
Jhonny Level — 17.7-year old SS — .909 OPS/140 wRC+ in DSL (215 PA)
James Tibbs III — 22.1-year old OF — .455 OPS/31 wRC+ in High-A (74 PA); .941 OPS/154 wRC+ in Low-A (42 PA)
Carson Whisenhunt — 24.0-year old LHP — 5.42 ERA/4.66 FIP in AAA (104.2 IP)
Joe Whitman — 23.1-year old LHP — 4.96 ERA/3.56 FIP in High-A (52.2 IP); 4.29 ERA/4.05 FIP in Low-A (50.1 IP)
Note: Each player’s first name links to their Baseball-Reference page, and their last name links to their Fangraphs page.