San Francisco Giants: Final 2019 Top 10 Prospects

With the regular season now over and a busy offseason fast approaching, we break down the top 10 prospects in an improved San Francisco Giants farm system.

It’s time to unveil the 10 best prospects in the San Francisco Giants farm system in our final top 30 prospects update of the year.

If you missed the No. 30 to No. 21 prospects, you can check those out here. The No. 20 to No. 11 prospects can be found here.

The farm system has improved by leaps and bounds in the past year. Surprisingly, it didn’t take a massive sell-off from president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi to do it. Instead, it seems that a revamped player development staff led to breakout seasons for prospects up and down the organization.

Entering 2019, most outlets considered the San Francisco Giants to have one of the five worst collections of prospects in baseball. Now they are a consensus mid-tier system.

While the system is hitter-heavy, guys like Seth Corry and Tristan Beck are capable of shooting up prospect rankings as well.

Prospects are grouped by their grades on the scouting 20-80 grade scale. For those not familiar with the scale, check out this primer. Here’s a quick rundown for reference:

80: Top 5 player in baseball (8+ WAR per season at peak)
70: Top 10 player in the baseball (5-8 WAR)
60: All-Star (3.5-5 WAR)
55: Above-average everyday player (2.5-3.5 WAR)
50: Everyday player (1.5-2.5 WAR)
45: Platoon player (0.5-1.5 WAR)
40: MLB backup (0.2-0.5 WAR)
35: Quad-A player (0-0.2 WAR)
30: Triple-A player
20: Organizational player

Two important notes:

1. The grades next to the players are current expected values, meaning you can think of those grades as the 50% outcome. Obviously, most prospects have a wide range of potential outcomes so those grades are an attempt to quantify the average expected outcome.

2. Some players will have grades with + signs next to them (40+, 45+, etc.). This has to do with the way player grades work. Probably 70-90% of top 30 prospects in each organization fall somewhere from the 40-50 grades. So it can get difficult to differentiate prospect No. 11 from No. 23. Part of this is on purpose, but some 40-grade players are closer to moving up to a 45-grade than others. Hence, the plus. A strong half from a 45+ player will almost definitely jump them up to a 50 grade. Same with a 40+ player going to 45. You get the idea.

With that out of the way, let’s kick things off for the final installment of the Giants prospect rankings.