rewrite this title The Call-Up: Bryce Eldridge | Baseball Prospectus

The Situation: The Giants are hanging around the periphery of the NL wild card race and just lost Dom Smith, one of their more consistent and reliable hitters, for the rest of the regular season to a hamstring strain. Rather than bring up an organizational player, President of Baseball Ops Buster Posey pushed in his chips to call up the best offensive prospect the franchise has had in a generation.

Background: The Giants selected Eldridge out of a Virginia high school with the 16th-overall pick in the 2023 draft. Eldridge had starred the previous year for Team USA as both a hitter and a pitcher, hitting a home run and tossing a scoreless inning in the 18U team’s gold medal game against Taiwan. The Giants called his name on draft night as a two-way player, though Eldridge and the organization agreed almost immediately to abandon any aspirations on the mound. Save for a stint in the outfield in his first few weeks in low-A, the Giants have primarily developed Eldridge as a first baseman, and he’s taken off since then. He hit .291/.374/.516 with 23 homers across four levels—mostly A ball—as a 19-year-old in 2024 and has generally maintained that pace this year against more advanced competition in double-A and triple-A. Had the Giants not traded for Rafael Devers and received found-money contributions from Smith, Eldridge may have been pressed into duty sooner if only for his power potential.

Scouting Report: And there’s quite a lot of that power potential from the 6-foot-7, 240-pound 20-year-old. Eldridge generates ridiculous power, particularly on balls up in the zone, with some of the highest peak and average exit velocity figures among any hitter in the minors, let alone triple-A. Despite some very real whiff concerns (more on that in a moment), Eldridge also has more dexterity with the bat in the strike zone than most hitters his size and sprays the ball around, going the other way nearly as often as he pulls the ball. At his best, Eldridge has kept his strikeout rate in the 20%-25% range, though that number has understandably crept up this year as he’s faced Pacific Coast League pitchers several years his senior. He’s running a strikeout rate right around 31% as of his call-up, and it wouldn’t surprise to see that number get even higher once major-league pitchers try to consistently exploit his primary vulnerability to soft stuff down. And yet even with the underwhelming contact data, and it’s worth pointing out that Eldridge doesn’t turn 21 until next month, he still has pretty easy 35-homer potential at his peak. This is the kind of power that even the chilly night air in Oracle Park can’t easily knock down and the kind of precocious offensive talent that the Giants haven’t been able to develop and call upon since at least Will Clark.

Eldridge is much more of a project defensively than at the plate and has spent most of the summer working intermittently with former Gold Glovers Clark and J.T. Snow in addition to the Sacramento coaching staff to get more comfortable moving around the bag, picking short-hop throws and the nuances of playing the cold corner. No one’s ever going to mistake Eldridge for Paul Goldschmidt or Christian Walker defensively, but he has plenty of room to grow given that he didn’t play much first as a prep and is young enough that he was in pre-calculus classes just over two years ago.

Immediate Big-League Future: The Giants have another first baseman/DH-type player in Devers so it remains to be seen how manager Bob Melvin and company will blend Eldridge into the starting lineup. The chase and contact concerns are such that Eldridge will almost assuredly have a few seasons hitting in the low .200 range with possibly uncomfortable strikeout rates. The Giants will worry about those things later if he pops a few homers over the next two weeks, however.