By Brian Murphy
Six. Days. Away.
Giants baseball, sports fans. Get ready to start your angst.
The Giants host the New York Yankees — heard of them? — on Wednesday night, March 25 and Logan Webb will throw the first pitch at 5:05 pm at Oracle Park and it’s all so cool and thrilling that Netflix is going to stream it for all the paid subscribers out there, on the stream alongside ‘Squid Game’ and ‘Stranger Things’. (Jock Blog idea: craft season themes in forms of Netflix shows. Start with ‘Orange is the New Black’, because orange and black. Discuss.)
If you don’t want to pay, it’s free on the airwaves of The Sports Leader, don’t ya know.
There are so many exciting things afoot: a brand-new manager who will fascinate on a daily basis, a full season of Rafael Devers, a new center fielder who runs around and catches it, a new second baseman who hits it, a new home for Jung Hoo Lee and the endless Bryce Eldridge discussion.
And there are so many things that will churn your gut and send you to the KNBR text line to vent: a brand-new manager who may miff you on a daily basis, a bullpen with pretty much zero definition, a back end of the starting rotation that does not fill you with 90-win confidence, and the endless Bryce Eldridge discussion.
One week out, let’s focus on big, bad Bryce.
He’s the Giants’ most thrilling home grown slugging prospect since — Matt Williams? Will Clark? Brandon Belt?
(Yes, Buster Posey may go to Cooperstown, but he wasn’t a slugger, per se. Same with Brandon Crawford and even Pablo Sandoval. The Panda had pop, but only topped 20 home runs twice. Same with Buster.)
So Eldridge is on a very short list of homegrown products who can hit lots of taters. That is why we love the idea of Bryce Eldridge. He doesn’t hit baseballs. He scalds them. He’s 21. Belt debuted at 23. Clark at 22.
Williams debuted at 21, and therein may lie some instruction.
Baseball did not come easy to sluggin’ Matt Williams at 21. In 266 plate appearances in 1987, the Big Marine hit .188 with a .578 OPS and began a three-year odyssey of on-again, off-again production — his OPS never crested .700 and he hit .205 and .202 in 1988 and 1989. Williams did not sort himself out until his age-24 year in 1990. Voila, we finally had Matty: 33 dingers and 122 ribs, leading the National League in runs driven in.
Now. We understand they are two different human beings, Matt Williams and Bryce Eldridge. Thank you for pointing that out. But the challenge of arriving in the big leagues and becoming productive right out of the gate and staying so remains an eternal quest, as I was just saying to my good friend Joe Charboneau.
Let’s look at Eldridge’s spring, if you’re into that kind of thing: The Giants have given him some rope. His 39 at-bats are fourth on the team. With that, his 19 strikeouts are the most on the team. OK, fine. If you say that Eldridge is always going to strike out, even when he’s 40, you look for other markers. His nine walks lead the team. Nice, nice. He’s hitting .231. Meh. He has four doubles (trailing only Matt Chapman), a triple and a bomb. OK, we’re interested again. His defense at first base is darn near passable. Impressive, he’s come a long way.
And yet, after all that — should he be on the Opening Night roster?
It would be a thrill, undoubtedly. We’d all get the adrenaline rush. And it’s easy to love.
But I’m OK with starting it nice and easy, and letting Eldridge break some more sweat down in Triple-A.
There are roster reasons. Starting Eldridge in the state capital will allow the Giants to keep bench players like Jerar Encarnacion and Luis Matos, who are out of options. It may allow them to keep both Casey Schmitt and Christian Koss, giving Tony Vitello more toys to play with — albeit all right-handed batting toys.
Bryce Eldridge will be a Giant for a long, long, long time. He will be 21 until October. The tantalizing talent will blossom, eventually. But it’s OK to start slow. There are options, players who can help the team win, while he stacks more at-bats.
It’s a long season, y’all. We have plenty of days to angst it out together.
