For those of us counting down to Opening Day by marking our calendars with a big red X each morning, Thursday will mark three weeks until the Giants season opener in Cincinnati on March 27. Slowly but surely, the orange and black are getting their feet wet in the cactus league spring sun. SF has racked up six wins in its first nine spring contests.
But as Opening Day draws near, First year President of Baseball Operations Buster Posey has begun the difficult process of whittling down the Major League roster. On Wednesday, the Giants announced the first of what will be a wave of cuts before the team leaves Scottsdale. Marco Luciano and golden goose prospect Bryce Eldridge were optioned to minor league camp.
The move is a prudent one for 20-year old Eldridge, who may have had an outside shot at making the big league team if he’d simply dominated big league competition, but his numbers weren/t special. He wowed with a 450 foot blast early on, but a pile of strikeouts allowed the Giants to breathe easy and not be faced with a tough decision. Eldridge will do well with some more minor league polish this season before likely making his debut in August or September.
Luciano on the other hand, can’t have planned for this demotion. The once heralded prospect logged significant big league service time for the first time in his career in 2024. He showed flashes with the bat, but struggled mightily on defense. After a quiet first week of spring training, Luciano has been sent packing to Papage and the Giants minor league facility which he’s surely learned his way around quite comfortably over the last half decade.
Other Giants youngsters, specifically those who pitch, should be excited for the expanded role of Justin Verlander as a leader in the twilight of his career. Verlander’s Hall of Fame Career is highly decorated, and at 41 he enters his first spring as a Giant with a herd of young starting pitchers eager to learn from him. Kyle Harrison and Hayden Birdsong are especially young. Harrison is coming off his first full season, a campaign in which he was good at times but struggled to sustain throughout the grind of 162. His velocity and production dipped significantly in the latter part of the year.
Birdsong burst onto the scene with electrifying stuff in the early summer. Although it’s a much smaller sample size, he seems to have some upside that Harrison is lacking as the Giants head into 2025. Both will be able to absorb wisdom from a legend like Verlander, who is relishing in his role as a mentor.
He sat down with KNBR’s Austin Scott last week and detailed how he will go about imparting wisdom.