© Kelley L Cox | 2020 Jul 10
The biggest story out of Giants camp is who will not be on the Opening Day roster.
Top prospect Joey Bart has been turning heads since the restart, and not a day goes by where a teammate doesn’t praise what he’s been doing in spring training 2.0. Yet the club claims he needs more time, even with Buster Posey’s absence seemingly paving the way for Bart to make his major league debut.
But maybe it really doesn’t have anything to do with Bart’s development. Giants beat writer Andrew Baggarly told Tolbert, Krueger & Brooks on Monday afternoon that the only thing holding Bart back is the Giants’ desire to keep him under team control for another year.
“Normally it’s about two weeks that you have to keep a guy down in the minors at some point in their rookie season for it to be less than a full season of service time,” Baggs said. “Then obviously you’re keeping them for that sixth year, instead of becoming a free agent you’ve got their rights for an extra year.”
The good news? We should see Bart on the Giants roster very, very soon.
“A normal season is 186 days, and 172 is considered a full season, so when you prorate that down it’s six days. For the Giants it’s the first five games ’cause they’ve got a day off after the Dodgers series. So they could bring up Joey Bart and he could play in the sixth game of the season and be their starting catcher and start every game, and he would fall short of a year of service time.
“I would be shocked if Joey Bart is not the starting catcher six games into the season or shortly thereafter. There are a couple reasons for that. The only way you can develop him properly is at the big league level. Two, as a catcher, that’s even doubly so, because catchers need game experience. The third thing is, next year you want to enter the season with some certainty at that position, and you’re going to have Buster who’s missed an entire year…I think it’s going to be important that they have Joey Bart developed a little bit more, and they have him ready in case Buster is not going to pull down a lot of playing time at that position.”
Listen to the full interview below.