Stanford product to start spring opener
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The first week or two of spring games, the San Francisco Giants will highlight many of their top minor leaguers and nonroster invitees. It helps manage the workload for the big league team while offering a glimpse of players you might have read about only on draft day or in prospect reports.
In Saturday’s Cactus League opener against the Cubs in Mesa, the Giants will have one of their top-flight minor leaguers on the mound, with Tristan Beck, the former Stanford righthander, getting the start.
“We see him as a future piece of our rotation, and this is a good opportunity for him,” manager Gabe Kapler said.
Kapler sees Beck “in the Ross Stripling, Merrill Kelly mold,” a starter who will throw quality strikes with multiple pitches.
“Command is kind of a lost art,” Kapler said. “It is still, in my opinion, the best way to get hitters out.”
Long look: Sam Long, who has bounced between the Giants and Triple-A Sacramento the past two years, is scheduled for two innings against the Cubs, and he’ll be showing off a better slider and what is in essence a new changeup that Kapler called “a work in progress.”
Long said he changed the grip on the pitch in January to try to get it to drop more sharply, and he’s starting to get a better feel for it. The slider gives him a good option against lefthanded hitters, especially because opponents started to lay off his big curveball.
“You need something to get a batter to chase,” he said. “The changeup is that pitch for me.”
Long is being considered as a long man/bulk-innings type for the big-league roster, but he’s capable of a spot start. He, Beck, Sean Hjelle, top prospect Kyle Harrison and Keaton Winn, an addition to the 40-man roster, could join the rotation in the next year or two.
Winn’s ways: Winn hasn’t pitched beyond Double-A Richmond, but last year, at the suggestion of the Giants’ pitching brain trust, he added a split-finger fastball that’s a game-changer.
“It’s an excellent pitch,” Kapler said. “I think the split is such an important pitch when a guy has it, and we have a chance to really focus in on it and develop it. It makes a huge difference. So when you advance opposing teams, and you go through the toughest hitters in the lineup, and you look at how they do against various pitches, almost without fail, the split is a great equalizer for those guys.”
Winn has picked Alex Cobb’s brain about his top-notch splitter, he said, and Cobb emphasized the importance of keeping your body in lanes while delivering it.
Winn also has a sinker and a slider, giving him almost a triangle of breaking pitches; the sinker and slider break opposite ways and the splitter down. His fourseam fastball has hit 100 mph.
The righthander, who turned 25 on Monday, struck out 125 batters and walked 32 in 108 innings at three levels last year.