San Francisco Giants Farm System Will End Up Being Great

The San Francisco Giants have spent the entire off-season trying to fix their problems in their lineup and their outfield and have hit several roadblocks because of their minimal talent in their farm system.

The farm has been ranked consistently one of the lowest in all of baseball by every major outlet this year and the Giants traded away their top prospect Christian Arroyo to land Evan Longoria earlier in the off-season.

However, the Giants are going to be just fine in a few months once the June draft begins. With the #2 overall selection and four picks in the top 106, the Giants will be adding four of the best players in all of amateur baseball.

Combine that with their first round pick last year Heliot Ramos, along with Jacob Gonzalez and Seth Corry. The team also has power hitter Chris Shaw and top pitching prospect Tyler Beede.

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While San Francisco won’t vault to the top of the prospect lists, the Giants will quickly be more respected.

While the Giants do not have top 100 prospects like some organizations do, they still have many homegrown talent on their major league roster.

Buster Posey, Brandon Belt, Joe Panik, Brandon Crawford, and Madison Bumgarner lead the 2018 Giants and all were drafted by the team. While Posey, Panik and Bumgarner were 1st round picks, Crawford and Belt were not.

This is where pitchers like Andrew Suarez, and hitters like Steven Duggar, Aramis Garcia and Bryan Reynolds become more valuable. While the league doesn’t value them as top flight prospects, they have shown flashes that they can contribute at the major league level. Duggar and Suarez may end up in San Francisco before the end of 2018.

While the Giants rushed several prospects in 2017 to help out the major league club, they did not bring up Shaw, Duggar, Beede or Suarez.

This was deliberate, as they felt each was close but not quite ready. The Giants expect a big future from Shaw’s bat and Duggar’s glove while seeing both Beede and Suarez as options for the rotation.

In the meantime, the Giants brought up players like Kelby Tomlinson, Mac Williamson, Jarrett Parker, Austin Slater, Miguel Gomez, and Ryder Jones, among others.

While most of them struggled, the Giants saw the potential and versatility in a guy like Slater and the options for a competitive team in 2018 and beyond will certainly include some of these current and former prospects.

We saw in the 2016 and 2017 World Series that while big money can help you build a roster, the foundation must be laid by homegrown products. The Houston Astros and Los Angeles Dodgers began thriving when their best prospects flourished. The same happened for the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians.

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Meanwhile, the Giants know all too well how this formula can work as they were led to three championships by Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, Posey, Bumgarner and others.

Will it happen again in 2018? It will take strong years from that homegrown core.

Can it happen after 2018? Ramos and the #2 pick would likely lead the way if that happens.