Perhaps surprising, but somebody had to be sent down.
This morning, the San Francisco Giants reassigned 8 of their players to minor league camp. Per Andrew Baggarly’s post on Bluesky, 2 of the 8 included noted prospects, Marco Luciano and Bryce Eldridge. The rest:
RHP Mason Black (optioned)
LHP Raymond Buros
LHP Migel Del Pozo
LHP Ethan Small
RHP Kai-Wei Teng
RHP Cole Waites
This is Luciano’s last option year (Black has one more year), so, while it’s perhaps not a great situation for the guy, as Baggarly notes in the aforementioned post, this is the same situation that Heliot Ramos found himself in last season.
As Brady pointed out a couple of days ago, Luciano is just 2-17 with 5 strikeouts and an error. He needs work, and the major league roster is better off without him right now. Jerar Encarnacion’s hot spring coupled with the relative health of LaMonte Wade Jr. and Wilmer Flores has created a bit of a corner dude traffic jam, and there are more athletic outfielders the team absolutely needs to give a longer look to — Luciano might never develop into the player that was hoped for, but getting him back in a development situation today and focusing on the position switch is the best way to answer that question for tomorrow.
Now, what’s only surprising as a headline but not in reality is Eldridge being reassigned to minor league camp. You’d like to imagine that with such a headline prospect (who’s 2-for-11 with a home run and a walk against 8 strikeouts) the team would want to milk his presence a bit more from a gate perspective, but then again, maybe not. That corner dude glut is basically a veterans’ only party, and so it makes sense that the prospects get pushed aside to let that trio cook. Eldridge is still working on his first base defense.
The Giants basically moved off two high profile development cases so that they could focus on that rather than worry about making the team. And the major league roster looks like it’s solidifying itself quite nicely.
Erik Miller looks set to return to the mound very soon, which clears up some of the left-handed reliever flotsam that had been building up. As Shayna Rubin notes in the latest There R Giants Podcast with Roger Munter, certain players have stepped up at times before receding into the amorphous blob of non-roster invitees the team is considering to pair with Miller from the left side of the pen.
Mason Black’s spring has been rough in a very small sample, and Waites hasn’t been great either. The Giants seem to like something about Kai-Wei Teng, but there are plenty of interesting arms ahead of him that it makes sense to push him back to development.
None of the other players were on the 40-man roster and so major league options weren’t used. There are now 52 players in major league camp.