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If you’re a Giants fan, MLB.com’s Jim Callis provided a lot of optimism during his KNBR interview on Tuesday. Callis, an expert on MLB prospects, pointed to three of the Giants’ top prospects who are likely to get the call-up in 2021. One of those, Joey Bart, was with the big league club last year and will start this season in the minor leagues. The other two, Heliot Ramos, recently ranked as the No. 32 prospect in baseball by Baseball Prospectus, and Sean Hjelle, widely considered the Giants’ best pitching prospect, are also expected to make their major league debuts according to Callis.
“Bart kind’ve arrived ahead of schedule with Posey not playing and I think you’ll see Joey in San Francisco, probably not to start the year because he had so little time in the major leagues, cause he’d been hurt a little bit,” Callis told Rod Brooks and Larry Krueger on KNBR. “I think there’s a good chance you see him and Ramos in the big leagues this year. I think you probably will see Hjelle to be honest with you now that I think about it. I think teams are going to go through a lot of pitchers this year going from 60 games to 162 this year. I think it’s going to put a huge strain on pitching. I think you’ll probably see all three of those guys.”
Callis then heaped praise on the Giants’ top prospect, and the No. 7 prospect in baseball according to ESPN, Marco Luciano. Callis believes his hitting potential is second to none.
“The guy who is really, really special, I think better than all those guys is Luciano. I talk to people outside the organization about him and they just rave about how good he is. He might have the best bat speed and best power potential of any infield prospect in all of baseball. I mean you guys have probably seen some video clips of him too. This guy might be a 35 homer shortstop. If he slows down a little bit and moves to third base that bat is going to play everywhere.
“He’s a special one. It’s interesting, with guys like that who are super young, you can make the argument that boy it really hurt him to not play last year because he only played in rookie short-season ball, and he would’ve made his full season debut in 2020. But I know talking to the Giants about Luciano, and talking to other teams about players in similar situations, they don’t see it as a big loss last year. Yes you’d like to have game situations, but by going to alternate camp, he was probably one of the youngest players in any alternate camp. He faced much more advanced pitching, than he would of in low Class A. Now he wasn’t playing games, he wasn’t seeing it on a daily basis, he wasn’t dealing with travel but he’s seeing Triple-A and big league caliber pitchers that he would not have seen during 2020. Maybe all in all it ends up becoming a push for 2020.”
Callis also believes we might not have to wait all that long to see him.
“We put ETAs when we write up prospects on our site. I’ve got a 2023 ETA on him, but I also think the elite prospects and I think he’s one of them, tend to write their own timetables. It really won’t surprise me if we see him in 2022 before he turns 21 in September that year.”