The Giants have written off Marco Luciano

It’s up to him now to see if he can pull a Heliot Ramos or a Joey Bart and reclaim his career.

Think of Marco Luciano’s career as an investment that didn’t pay off. The San Francisco Giants have now charged him off their ledger so that he doesn’t impact their bottom line. Oh sure, maybe he could ultimately pay it back in some sort of debt collection scheme, but the team doesn’t expect him to be a factor in the future, and I guess neither should we.

Over the weekend, the Giants banished him to the minors to keep Donovan Walton on the roster and clear a spot for Matt Chapman, who was returning from paternity leave (and who went on to have a 2-homer day, which was cool). They’re doing it so that he can begin his conversion to outfield, which I would say is a promotion from DH, where the Giants had planned to put him at the All-Star break, but it’s all a bunch of words to say they moved on.

The San Francisco Giants have spent the decade proving to fans that baseball is hard and that, at the end of the day, nobody knows anything. If replicating the success of 2009-2016 or even 2021 was repeatable, they would have repeated it by now. It’s the same for prospect success. If it were no trouble at all to develop prospects, then they’d have no trouble at all developing prospects. You can’t argue the Giants haven’t developed zero prospects in the past six seasons, they’ve just failed to develop star players.

Luciano was supposed to be an All-Star — the kind of player every roster needs to rise above a sub-average to average roster algorithm that guarantees a floor of 75 wins — but he’s also (probably) not a player the current front office would’ve ever selected, and that might be a part of this equation.

In Shayna Rubin’s writeup of the transaction for the San Francisco Chronicle:

Luciano isn’t the first player in the organization to go through a developmental roller coaster. Heliot Ramos only earned a shot this season because of injuries and had to swing the bat like a literal All-Star to secure his future. Outfielder Luis Matos had one stellar week and fell to the bottom of the outfield depth chart after a slump. Catcher Joey Bart was projected to be Buster Posey’s heir apparent, but never locked in the job. Out of options, he was shipped to Pittsburgh where he has accumulated 1.2 fWAR (Fangraphs’ win above replacement calculation).

The one thing all four of these players have is that they were put on the Giants by the previous baseball executive, someone whose mind for the game was already 5-7 years behind the curve by the time he took over. Austin Slater excepted, the current front office has been more open to the contributions by the prior regime on the pitching side (Logan Webb, Tyler Rogers, Ryan Walker, Sean Hjelle, Randy Rodriguez) over the past few seasons, and that’s mostly because it wasn’t until this year when the new acquisitions started to show flashes of usefulness (Hayden Birdsong, Erik Miller, Mason Black, Kyle Harrison).

Experience has given me the idea that new managers will frequently be more biased against personnel and processes installed by the previous manager and I don’t think it’s a leap to say that happens in baseball. Illogical? Inefficient? Absolutely, but anyone who claims that ruthless adherence to a mathematical model is an inherent act of logic and that there’s no emotion at the executive level of baseball is kidding themselves. In plainspeak, the new guy isn’t going to like a lot of what the previous guy did and will make changes.

All that said, while other execs might be performative with their roster turnover, here it really does seem like the process has been “let’s see what we have and if anyone stands out, let’s see if we can mold them into the type of player we’d like to have,” and — if that’s the actual case — that’s about as fair as one can be after inheriting an organizational roster.

Baseball transactions reminds us that nobody owes nobody nothin’ — it’s every man for himself. Players have to play well and hope they don’t have bad agents so that they can extract the most money from a group who wants to extract as much value as they can for as little cash as possible; and, who will throw anyone and everything under the bus to cover their butt. Bob Melvin and Farhan Zaidi didn’t want the season to spin out of control and they weren’t going to leave the final W-L up to Marco Luciano figuring it out. Fair enough.

I’m sure my view is a minority one, but if you’re a franchise that has largely stunk at developing prospects, doing things different from other teams or how the Giants have done things in the past sure seems like a reasonable path towards possibly generating different outcomes. Instead, the Giants are treating their prospects like waiver claims (this is not my insight; I believe it’s Alex Pavlovic’s) while also talking them up and penciling them in as starters before Spring Training has even begun only to have a leash so short it makes the team look worse than the player’s performance.

Where did it all go wrong? Well, he lost his power this year. A .380 slug in Triple-A isn’t going to do it. His pro career has been marked largely by a power decline just as his walk rate has gone up. There’s been hints that this is because of the organizational enforcement of “swing decisions” as the primary marker for advancement, and maybe that’s the case.

Luciano’s first pro year was in Farhan Zaidi’s first year, and while he began his time with a pretty solid strikeouts-to-walk ratio — 1.41 in 2019, but then 2.54 K/BB in 2021 — it’s the strikeout rate that probably got him in trouble. 22% in 2019 and then 27% in 2021. In 2023, he struck out 31% of the time (but did manage a 14% walk rate) and if this wasn’t the turning point, it was the breaking point. This year in the minors, he raised his walk rate 3% and lowered his strikeout rate 4% but his slugging percentage dropped 14% (.442 to .380).

The “don’t swing first” mentality has undoubtedly kept him in good position on a leaderboard but it hasn’t kept him in the team’s good graces. This is a balance coaching could help with — it just didn’t this year. Heliot Ramos would eventually find help through Justin Viele, and so maybe it will be a right place right time situation with Luciano, be it on the Giants or with another team.

Even if “everyone” saw this position change coming — which, on the other hand, would make the Giants the last to get with the program, as they’d considered him a shortstop as recently as a couple of months into this season! — Luciano would have to really hit to equal the prospect glow he once had. The top 10 outfielders by wRC+, 2021-2024 (min. 1,000 PA):

1. Aaron Judge, 191
2. Mike Trout, 164
3. Juan Soto, 160
4. Ronald Acuna Jr., 146
5. Kyle Tucker 145
6. Mookie Betts, 141
7. Julio Rodriguez, 133
8. Kyle Schwarber, 132
9. Jesse Winker, 131
10. Randy Arozarena, 126

Luciano isn’t going to be the next, well, most of them. Maybe Winker? Maybe Arozarena (who was the Rookie of the Year in 2021)?

Seiya Suzuki (a guy the Giants tried to sign), Christian Yelich, Anthony Santander (a guy the Giants might try to sign this offseason), and Teoscar Hernandez (another guy the Giants could try to sign) are in the group just below Arozarena — basically a batch of players in the 20% or better than league average. Maybe they’re a touch more realistic in terms of aspirations? Still, Luciano has a looooooooooong way to go to even suggest he could hit mirror this type of batter profile. Even if he comes out of redevelopment as a platoon bat, it’ll be a disappointment.

Roger Munter, one of the fairest and even-handed Giants bloggers in the world, who covers the team’s prospects for a living and who rarely takes a negative tone about prospects or the organization doesn’t think the Giants have done right by Luciano:

And I don’t think this situation is an isolated incident. In his last newsletter, Roger talks about how there’s a schism in the front office’s internal evaluations (presumably between the human scouts and the data scouts) that led to even a player like Tyler Fitzgerald getting a short shrift for a chunk of the season.

On that note, Tyler Fitzgerald is hitting .239/.281/.292 over his last 121 PA (30 games), so maybe the data scouts are really good at projecting downside. It’s interesting to see that the Giants have still played him even though the power has disappeared over the last month. Reasonable people might cite his upside (we’ve seen his power) and his positional contributions (they have few up the middle options at the moment), but as a blogger, I’m an inherently unreasonable person, and so I’ll remind everybody that he was drafted in 2019. He’s a Zaidi guy. He’s going to get the longer leash.

It’s entirely possible that Tyler Fitzgerald is the Marco Luciano who was promised. Same position, same power potential. Same adjustment period. Sure, it’s a bummer that he’s already 26 and so only has maybe 2-3 great years left in him (if the league hasn’t already figured him out beyond the point of adjusting back), but maybe we’re seeing the limits of a player with their type of profile (if they’re even all that similar — I’m just guessing).

So never fall in love with prospects. Or pencil them in. They break hearts, they disappoint, they cause one to question the abilities of the front office, and we can’t have that. The front office has done nothing wrong. They’re just looking at numbers and making decisions that project to help the team win. The Giants have won as much as they could with the talent they’ve had and the talent they’ve had is the best they could get thanks to the numbers they’ve had. It’s a perfect system that can only be let down by the players.

It’s important to keep all this in mind when you hear the noise about Bryce Eldridge. Player development isn’t linear, nobody knows anything, and the Giants have a pretty healthy track record of not developing star position players. Over the past 40 years or so it’s basically been the mid-80s (Clark & co.) and the mid-aughts (Posey & co.). If the pattern holds, then maybe they’ll get lucky again in 2-3 years. That could mean Eldridge is the face of the next wave, but why expect it? You have better odds of winning the lottery. Go buy a scratcher.

So, rest in peace, Marco Luciano’s star prospect label. At least, he won’t be that with the Giants. He is prospect non grata — wait-wait, let me type this into the Google translate feature — no, ingratum prospectum. It’s not a big deal, though. Happens to most of them.