Out In Front: Post-Trade Deadline Opinions + Something Extra

For what it's worth, the Giants didn't made any deal at the trade deadline and opting to wait it out and evaluate the waters in the offseason. I think that's pretty fair considering what the Dodgers got for Yu Darvish which is like swapping 75 cents for a dollar. We could've seen some of the core players like Joe Panik, Brandon Belt, Johnny Cueto, Jeff Samardzija, and Hunter Pence get dealt to playoff contenders but based on the value that the prime cuts of meat received, it's a fair decision to stand pat. But, the Giants did trade one of their decent players in Eduardo Nuñez to the Red Sox for minor leaguers Shaun Anderson and Gregory Santos.

Out In Front: Short Season Prospect Notes

Hello! I'll be back in my blog posting my stuff until some procedures regarding Giants Farm will be sorted out. This time, I'm going to take a look at the debut of prospects in short season ball, the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes and the Arizona League Giants. 

Out In Front: Evaluating the Melancon Deal + Something Extra

When I told people that I have plenty of unfinished posts, I did have plenty of unfinished posts at hand. This is one of a few that I have left unfinished before I hibernated.

With the offseason in full swing and the Winter Meetings just recently concluded, the Giants made a notable acquisition signing Mark Melancon to a 4 year-$62 million deal. The deal looked like an slight overpay to a guy entering his age 32 season in Opening Day but when Aroldis Chapman and Kenley Jansen to $80+ million deals, Melancon now looked like a fair deal. This is one of the most obvious signings in the offseason as the Giants was meant to sign one of the top-shelf relievers available after they had an awful bullpen corps this year, blowing more saves than I have ever seen from a Giants team in recent memory. I am digging deep on what the Giants going to get on Melancon.

OIF: Tyler Beede Interview

Hello everyone! It's not the even year that Giants fans have been hoping for as the Giants playoff run ended in the NLDS as the Cubs beat them 3-1 highlighted by the Game 4 bullpen collapse that has been the story of the season. I'm not that mad or disappointed as the Giants already had 3 titles in the past 5 years and the remaining teams have been waiting for their taste of the championship as late as more than 100 years. The bullpen issue must be addressed for next season in which I will write up in the offseason.

Meanwhile, I am planning to release my Augusta scouting reports soon but this came fresh from my personal e-mail account today and it's my interview of Tyler Beede. For those who doesn't exactly know him, he's a 2014 1st round draft pick by the Giants and he won the Eastern League ERA title this season. I got the opportunity to interview about stuff his 2016 season and some slice of Beedah. I have copy pasted the contents of the mail but edited some parts for clarity. I hope you enjoy the interview!

Out In Front: Review of the Futures Game + Something Extra

The 2016 Futures Game is done and the World Team won by a score of 11-3 on an impressive offensive performance by Yoan Moncada and defensive gems by Manuel Margot and Eloy Jimenez. But for me, that's not what I am concerned at the most. I'm more concerned on the performance of the two Giants prospects that played in the Futures Game, Phil Bickford and Adalberto Mejia. In this edition of Out In Front, I'm here to talk about the performances of Mejia and Bickford and in Something Extra will be the performance of some interesting prospects.

OIF: Interview with Steven Duggar

In this edition of Out In Front, I have the chance to interview Steven Duggar, the 6th round pick in the 2015 draft. He will play for the San Jose Giants in his first professional season. The interview was actually scheduled almost a week before today, right around the end of the spring training camp. Unfortunately due to conflicts in schedule, the date was pushed back but thankfully, the interview got through. I had a lot of fun talking to him about stuff and I hope that the topics in the interview will be informative and insightful.

Transcript that's already edited is below:

Out In Front: Latest Thoughts on Giants Prospects + Something Extra

Good day Giants fans! In this edition of Out In Front, I will be sharing my thoughts on many of the Giants prospects that are in the minor league camp. Roger Munter (follow him on Twitter @rog61 if you aren't) is unleashing videos and reports of several prospects on the camp, where some Dominican prospects have arrived to begin their American adventures and some draft picks last year are showing off their tools. GPT and Mr. Andrew Baggarly also has clips that I watched. I will talk about the prospects that have videos and gave my own thoughts on them. In Something Extra, it will be baseball from my home land. 

Out In Front: Comments on the Prospects on SF-MIL Game

It's the first Out In Front in 2016 and it will feature several comments about the Giants prospects that are tasting playing time in Spring Training. Most of them will be sent down to the Minors for more seasoning but the experience to face hitters or pitchers that they can soon face and learn something from it is incomparable. This will be pretty short as it will be mostly comments on prospects mostly the pitchers in their game versus Milwaukee.

Out In Front: Why The Giants Should Take A Shot at Kenta Maeda

He pitched in AT&T Park before in the WBC in 2013. Is there a chance that we'll watch him again on cream & orange home uniforms next year?

                             

Foreword: Finally a blog post!

With Zack Greinke shocking the whole baseball world (including me) as he accepts the Diamondbacks' gargantuan contract offer pending physical, this looks like the time to move on from him and improve the rotation on another way. While some are thinking for the Giants to pursue Mike Leake and Jeff Samardzija up to the point of even pursuing Johnny Cueto, I am thinking that the Giants should consider another direction, coming from the far east.

According to the news, Japanese ace Kenta Maeda is going to be posted this offseason by his team in the NPB. Maeda won the Sawamura Award (NPB's equivalent to Cy Young Award in MLB) in 2015, his second of his decorated career in Japan that I will further talk about later on. Teams who will pursue the right-hander are expected to pay the full posting fee of $20 million to acquire the right to negotiate a contract with Maeda (in which I think is a bad idea, I am more inclined to do a full contract negotiation then pay 35-50% of the contract value to the NPB team as the posting fee). 

A lot of teams that missed on the big ticket pitchers like Greinke and David Price are expected to join the bidding war for Maeda which brings us to this. The Giants have missed on the big ticket guys and should explore other ways to try to improve rotation depth. The Giants have been known to not pursue Japanese pitchers in the past.

Out In Front: The Eddy Martinez Signing + Something Extra

In a pretty surprising fashion, the Giants, yes, the Giants, not the Dodgers, the Reds, and any other team, the Giants, signed Eddy Julio Martinez, the Cuban outfielder who has been flying off the radar since July 2, with Jesse Sanchez of MLB.com first to report and Mr. ogc first to notify me. 

Martinez signed for $2.5 million, waaaaay less than what I have predicted, Kiley McDaniel of FG and pretty much everybody had expected which is $10-11 million. I was pretty shocked to see him sign to the Giants for so cheap when the Dodgers can offer him triple of quadruple that amount of green stuff. It is even less then half of the money that the Giants paid for Bahamanian prospect Lucius Fox (enough with the Batman puns) of $6 million, penalties not included. I followed Eddy on his Twitter account for about a week ago or so when it was still got like 10-20 followers (MLB Pipeline followed him 2 days ago if I'm not mistaken), and I noticed that you look closely on his profile picture, he's donning the Giants workout shirt and Giants workout shorts, which is some premonition that the Giants are probably the favorites to sign the Cuban defector but there's also the cover photo of him donning a Pirates shirt but reports weren't saying that the Pirates are players for him so there's that. 

Out In Front: Wrap-up of Most Things Giants Farm System

It's another grace period from me (another string of holiday and weekend and the quizzes have just passed by) and I think it's time to run another round of Out In Front but this time, I will not talk about a specific thing or two (because Jordan Johnson thing was yesterday (not literally)) and instead, I'll do this new post like it's Something Extra, tidbits of information like you want to make a fruit salad with all of the fruits inside and out the refrigerator but expect that you'll read good thoughts from me in this one. 

Out In Front: Trade Deadline Special + Something Extra

Before I start I have to say that I'm back after almost couple of weeks of inactivity! I've been into stuffs recently. I've been playing MLB 15 The Show a lot and I'm a lefty pitcher with my legit weight and height (you could say I'm as tall and as heavy as Pedro) where I focused on control and pretty much my dream repertoire (4SFB, CH, CUT, CB) and luckily, I got drafted by the Giants and made their team in 2016 where surprise surprise, the Giants won the World Series.Then in the next season, I got traded to the Orioles for Manny Machado and I'm like what the hell man. I'm going to strive to make the Orioles a winner right now and prove to Bobby Evans that I'm not just a control dude and I'm an ace and will be the Steve Carlton for the deprived Orioles squad. Then there's the enrollment period in college. I was actually making this blog post then suddenly, my grandmother passed away so I have to go far away to visit her and spent days there. Now that I'm finally back on the place where the internet's good that I can watch Pedro's HOF speech (big Pedro fan), I can finally write my latest post.

In this edition of Out In Front, I'll talk about the trade deadline that will come on the end of July that I talked about on Twitter, I also will talk about a lot of something extra that I have missed and will be composed of a lot of other topics that I want to talk about. Let's get this thing started.

Out In Front: The Giants and Tyler Beede Are A Perfect Match

In this edition of Out In Front, I got a chance to talk with a "source in the industry" about the San Francisco Giants right-handed pitching prospect Tyler Beede, the number 1 prospect in my Top 10+10 Prospects list and as well as other respectable prospect lists. We talked about Beede's baseball life, from being drafted in the 2011 MLB Draft by the Blue Jays and passing it up, to pitching in the powerhouse Vanderbilt University, to being drafted by the San Francisco Giants in the 2014 MLB Draft, performance this season and more that you might have never heard before.

Notes before reading my full blog post: My source requests not to be mentioned his name in this blog post to protect my source's privacy and I respect his decision to keep his identity as a secret. I will not also talk about my source in my article and in my comments and instead, I'll focus more on Tyler Beede. I know that I am not a journalist or a reporter to present to you a top-quality article presentation-wise (I'm a chemical engineering student) but I assure you that the information that you'll see here is legitimate and I did my best to deliver the information to the readers of my blog. I edited some of the things the source told me to provide better clarity and is enclosed in a parentheses.

Out In Front: My Franchise Four of the San Francisco Giants + Something Extra

There's two days off after the All-Star Festivities and we need to take some rest off for the big league stuff and some of the Minor League levels are also having their All-Star Festivities but there's some minor league levels are playing and the teams are fighting it all out in their squads. Let's enjoy this break and in this portion of Out In Front, I'll talk about something that's not related to prospecting and the minor leagues.

There's this thing in the All-Star Game called Franchise Four where fans got a chance to vote the four best players for their respective teams, kind of like the Mount Rushmore of different teams and baseball overall. I was one of the fans who vote a bunch of times to vote for my Franchise Four for the San Francisco Giants. I also voted for the greatest Negro League Players where I voted Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and Oscar Charleston and the Greatest Living Players where I voted Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, and Tom Seaver (I almost voted for Pedro in place of Seaver and maybe I'll vote for Pedro sooner than later). But I will talk about my view on the Franchise Four of the San Francisco Giants where I voted for Willie Mays, Christy Mathewson, Barry Bonds, and Buster Posey. 

Stats that you'll see here are courtesy of FanGraphs.

Out In Front: Takeaways from the 2015 Futures Game

The 2015 Futures Game is now over and I didn't really slept really well before waking up at 3 a.m. to watch the Futures Game in MLB.com live stream because I am so excited maybe or I just don't watch to miss it because it's 3 in the morning. I managed to watch the game until Mella's pitching but I wanted to watch the game until Sean Newcomb but my body is failing me and he wants to rest. It ended up as a commanding victory for the Team USA 10-1.

The Giants have two players that's representing the team for the game and they are Tyler Beede and Keury Mella. I'll write up what I saw on Beede and Mella for the first time live. I will write here also the other performances by the other players that I like.

Out In Front: Breakdown of Tyler Beede's Latest Start + Something Extra

Here on the latest edition of Out In Front, I'll talk about Tyler Beede latest start as I covered him on Twitter last night in America (early morning here). I'll provide an inning-by-inning breakdown about his latest start and probably, his last start before the Futures Game where he's included and together with Keury Mella, they represent the San Francisco Giants in the game full of top prospects and future stars in Cincinnati. Here I go.

Out In Front Part 1: What To Make Of Chris Stratton & Martin Agosta This Season

Welcome to the first Out In Front Series, where I express my opinions about the hot topics regarding Giants prospects in a playful but informative way that's backed by data that I have collected from various sites! 

In this first part of the series, I'll talk about Chris Stratton and Martin Agosta, the first and second round selections of the San Francisco Giants in the 2012 MLB Draft. In full honesty, I almost placed this in Something Extra together with the Top 10+10 to make it just a short and quick read but there's just something that tells me that I need to expand this thoughts of mine and that's the reason why I write my first Out In Front series. I will discuss here how Stratton and Agosta are performing this year and how they make my head and your head turn upside down and spin in circles and a lot, lot more.