Giants sign Joey Lucchesi to Minor League deal

He’s no Tanner Scott.

The San Francisco Giants are pretty short on left-handed relief options, and on Monday made a move to potentially add some depth there. According to a report from Jon Heyman of the NY Post, the Giants agreed to a Minor League deal with veteran lefty Joey Lucchesi. The signing comes with an invitation to Spring Training, and will pay Lucchesi a salary of $1.5 million if he makes the Majors.

Lucchesi, 31, was a fourth-round pick by the San Diego Padres back in 2016. He debuted in 2018, making 26 starts with a 4.08 ERA and looking like a potential quality starter for years to come. Before the 2021 season he was shipped to the New York Mets in a three-team trade with the Padres and Pittsburgh Pirates, which featured some big names like Joe Musgrove and David Bednar.

But in three years with the Mets, Lucchesi struggled to actualize the potential he showed early in his career. Between injuries and poor performance, Lucchese made just 22 appearances for New York, though he did have a 3.78 ERA and a 4.02 FIP during that time. He pitched just twice for the Mets in 2024, compiling a 5.23 ERA in 10.1 innings.

While Lucchesi has been used almost exclusively as a starter thus far in his career, it seems his path towards playing time with the Giants is out of the bullpen, as beat reporter Alex Pavlovic seemed to confirm.

The Giants have a penciled in rotation of Logan Webb, Robbie Ray, Justin Verlander, Kyle Harrison, and Jordan Hicks, and while there’s a good chance that they need a fill-in by the time Opening Day rolls around, it would seem the Giants would want to give those opportunities to exciting youngsters like Hayden Birdsong, Landen Roupp, Tristan Beck, Keaton Winn, Mason Black, Trevor McDonald, Carson Seymour, and Carson Ragsdale, all of whom are on the 40-man roster. So it’s hard to see Lucchesi cracking the starting pitcher depth charts.

But the bullpen is a different story. The Giants have just two southpaw relievers on the 40-man roster: Taylor Rogers and Erik Miller. The situation is even grimmer when you consider that their two most exciting left-handed relief arms in AAA last year, Reggie Crawford and Juan Sánchez, are both out for the foreseeable future with significant arm injuries (shoulder labrum repair surgery for the former, Tommy John for the latter). Add in the fact that manager Bob Melvin didn’t seem to trust Rogers last year, and that Rogers has a large enough contract that Buster Posey might try to dump it on another team, and you can see plenty of reasons for wanting some veteran lefty depth in Scottsdale.