Much like the big-league club, the Giants’ minor-league system will have a tough act to follow after a 2021 season that exceeded all reasonable expectations. The Giants entered last season with a farm system considered by many pundits to be middle of the pack, but finished with a top-10 farm system despite being buyers at the trade deadline.
A much ballyhooed 2018 international free-agent class made its full-season debut and the top prospects from that class — Marco Luciano, Luis Matos and Jairo Pomares — did not disappoint. The Giants’ pitching development program also flexed its muscles, as their pitching staffs racked up 6,921 strikeouts in 5,830 innings. While a few top prospects ran into unexpected struggles or suffered injuries, most met or exceeded expectations while several less well-known players emerged as potential big leaguers.
But while winning two league titles and posting a .529 system-wide winning percentage may not be repeatable, the Giants very much believe that the player-development processes they’ve built will allow for success stories year after year. While it’s easy for the staff to be confident in the approaches they are preaching, it’s a lot easier to sell those processes to the players when there are results like those the Giants produced from Rookie ball on up last season.
“You can ultimately preach process all you want, but you’re not going to get full buy-in on any process until they start to see that the juice is worth the squeeze,” Giants director of player development Kyle Haines said over the phone last Friday. “I think last year showed a lot of players and also free agents that we signed that with the Giants, we’ve got a lot of good things going on.
