No. 2 overall pick Bart just waiting for his turn
Ten years after the Giants selected Buster Posey with the fifth overall pick in the 2008 MLB draft, a front office led by Brian Sabean and Bobby Evans was convinced it found a worthy successor.
With the No. 2 selection in the 2018 MLB draft, the Giants tabbed Joey Bart out of Georgia Tech with the expectation he would provide the kind of decade-long stability Posey has brought to San Francisco.
Two months before Bart made his highly anticipated major league debut, a Giants front office anchored by president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi and general manager Scott Harris made an unexpected decision. With their first-round pick in the 2020 MLB Draft, the Giants chose another catcher, North Carolina State switch-hitter Patrick Bailey.
The move to add another highprofile catcher to the organization’s depth chart initially raised eyebrows, particularly because Bart was drafted by a different
front office.
Had the Giants’ top overall prospect fallen out of favor?
Not exactly.
“I would say his role is future starting catcher,” Zaidi said recently. “He’s not the starting catcher right now obviously with Buster back, but nothing that happened last year deters our enthusiasm for the player we think Joey is becoming, the progress we’ve seen already and the progress we think he’s going to continue to make.”
One of Zaidi’s top priorities as an executive dating back to his tenure as the Los Angeles Dodgers’ general manager has been to accumulate quality catching depth. Zaidi was with the Dodgers when they used a first-round draft choice on Louisville product Will Smith, who joined the organization at a time when another catcher, Keibert Ruiz, was climbing the top prospect rankings.
There’s an old baseball adage that a team can never have enough starting pitching. That’s how the Giants view the catcher depth chart, too.
Outside of Posey and Bart, the Giants have two other catchers on their 40man roster, veteran Curt Casali and former Reds prospect Chadwick Tromp, who made his major league debut last season. After Posey chose to sit out the 2020 season, Bart took the lion’s share of reps at the catcher position.
With Posey eager to return in 2021, the Giants had openly discussed sending Bart to Triple-A to continue refining his skillset after he hit .233 with a .609 OPS in 104 at-bats last season. When the organization signed Casali to a one-year deal, it practically guaranteed Bart’s return to the minors.
The Giants didn’t want Bart to feel slighted by the move to sign Casali, so manager Gabe Kapler called him to explain the team’s rationale.
“He took a very professional, very accountable position, and feels like this is going to be an opportunity for him to improve and be ready the next time he’s called upon at the major league level,” Kapler said last week.
Bart appreciated the gesture.
“I was actually out of town, and I don’t really keep up a whole lot anyways, he called me and let me know and that’s a lot of respect,” Bart said. “I respect Kap for doing that and that’s professional and building transparency is good.”
With Posey at home caring for adopted newborn twins and the Giants out of better options at the catcher position, the front office had little choice but to see how Bart would fare in the big leagues last year. Zaidi and Kapler have acknowledged it would have been ideal for Bart to continue developing in the upper levels of the minors before facing and catching major league pitching, but they feel the 24-year-old benefitted from his experience and learned a lot about where he needs to improve.
“What Joey is working on is identifying early pitches he can drive and really be aggressive to those pitches,” said Kapler, who detailed how Bart can cut down on a high whiff rate Sunday. “The one thing we don’t want to create when we’re talking about strikeouts and walks, and those two stats come up quite a bit, is any kind of a passive approach at the plate.”
A 33-game stint in the big leagues didn’t necessarily go as planned, but Bart did get the chance to start building relationships with pitchers he’ll work with closely this year.
“You get to the big leagues and everyone worries about hitting, but being a catcher, the most important thing was getting in and getting locked in with the pitching,” Bart said.
With Posey’s contract set to expire at the end of the 2021 season and Bailey yet to play an official minor league game, there will be a window — and perhaps a wide open one — for Bart to assert himself as a franchise catcher. Even if Posey returns on a new contract or Bailey races through the minors, the Giants still view Bart as a future starter and a key part of their next core.