Putting a face on cuts by Giants

Pitcher among 20 just released

Brandon Lawson was doing all right financially at home in Tennessee — not great, but better than many. He was augmenting his $400 weekly stipend from the Giants with another $300 a week coaching kids ages 8 to 13 to pitch and hit.

Now, more than half that income is gone. The 25yearold righthander was one of 20 minorleaguers the Giants released Thursday in an industrywide job slash.

Ultimately, more than 1,000 wannabe bigleaguers will be sent into a void that promises no income and no shot at landing with another organization this year during the coronavirus shutdown.

“Now it’s time for me to look for a realworld job,” Lawson said by phone Friday. “Obviously I don’t think there’s going to be a minorleague season. The majors are in jeopardy with how far they’re apart right now in talks. I’m going to keep throwing, get my bullpens in and take video, but I’m going to have to start providing for my little family now.”

Lawson called his release a surprise. He thought he made a huge leap in the second half last year for DoubleA Rich

mond, earning a promotion to TripleA Sacramento for the playoffs.

“There’s really nothing I can hang my head on,” he said. “I can’t say the cut was performancebased. It’s salarybased because of what’s going on at this time.”

Still, the Giants might have released Lawson in March if not for the shutdown, along with his 19 former compatriots and hundreds more throughout baseball.

Majorleague teams routinely cull their vast rosters of minorleaguers toward the end of spring training, to save money, to make room for a new wave of players they might sign as minorleague free agents and to clear space for truer prospects they will select in the June amateur draft.

The customary trims did not happen in 2020 as the entire sport was thrown into uncertainty. Also, Major League Baseball was not keen on the optics of mass layoffs at the start of a pandemic.

Before this week’s mass layoffs began, Baseball America reported that the 30 teams had released 113 minorleague players between March and last week, far fewer than a normal year. Over the same period in 2019 they released 301.

That suggests that nearly 200 players who otherwise might have been forced to hook on with new teams or call it a career instead benefited from the $400 weekly stipends that MLB guaranteed through May 31, totaling some $3,400 per player for April and May.

But with May turning to June, no minorleague baseball games in sight and the amateur draft less than two weeks away, most of the 30 teams have chosen this time to cut the cord with players they considered “fillers” and no longer prospects.

The reasoning might be sound on paper, but many within and outside the industry have publicly called the moves heartless.

In announcing their 20 cuts, the Giants also said they were extending the weekly stipends for the minorleaguers who remain at least through June 30.

Keeping these 20 players another 30 days would have cost the Giants roughly $34,000, not a huge sum even for an organization being crushed financially with no television or gate revenue for April, May and June at least.

The optics got no better for the majority of teams when two smallmarket clubs, the Royals and Twins, announced Friday they would not cut anyone and will pay all minorleaguers the weekly stipends through what would have been the end of the minorleague season, around Labor Day.

Asked whether his release from the Giants was emotionally tough, Lawson said, “No emotion, but I am disappointed seeing today how the Twins and Royals are not going to be cutting anyone and will still pay them, and other organizations just want to cut money, especially when the Giants are one of the higherend organizations in all of baseball.”

Lawson’s story is fairly common.

He grew up in Florida and was best buds with former Giants firstround draft pick Christian Arroyo. They played against one another in youth leagues from age 10, then together at Hernando High in Brooksville, Fla. Arroyo signed with the Giants out of high school while Lawson chose to play at the University of South Florida. The Rays drafted him in the 12th round in 2016.

But he did not progress beyond DoubleA, and Tampa Bay cut him in March 2019. He hooked on with a Pennsylvania team in the independent Atlantic League before the Giants signed him to a minorleague deal in April. He finished the season with a 3.70 ERA and said he got mostly positive feedback from Giants officials, who said his groundball rate was elite, which is what you want from a sinkerballer.

Still, Lawson is 25 with two TripleA stints on his resumé, which puts him well beyond prospect level. The average age of the 20 players the Giants cut is 25, with only a handful reaching TripleA.

While the Giants have not commented on specific cuts — in fact, they did not release the names — they have said that it’s best to be honest with players about their futures rather than provide false hope. Lawson had not been too worried about his fate.

“This year I felt I had a really good chance to stick based on my year with Richmond and my callup to TripleA at the end,” he said.

He had one sinking feeling, though, that he was not an original Giant and the organization had nothing invested in him.

Lawson got the news at the house he shares with his wife and mom, and now he has to accelerate his thinking on what’s next. He said that while he looks for that “realworld” work, he is not ready to search for a career that might put his criminology degree from South Florida to work. He hopes at least to try again with an indyball team if those leagues restart.

“It’s definitely going to be hard,” he said. “I’m going to have to sit here and wait it out a little bit.”

Courtesy of Brandon Lawson 2019 Righthanded sinkerballer Brandon Lawson, shown pitching for DoubleA Richmond last season, was one of 20 Giants minorleaguers who were cut Tuesday.