It's rare for a Giants fans to have the chance to celebrate a prospect quite like Josuar De Jesus Gonzalez. The Giants announced his signing on Wednesday, and Baseball America opened their description of Gonzalez with "For some scouts, Gonzalez was their No. 1 prospect in the 2025 international class." MLB Pipeline had him ranked as the No. 1 amateur available, comparing him to Francisco Lindor, and he was also at the top of FanGraphs' list.
The Giants have never had the No. 1 pick of the MLB Draft, and they've had only five picks among the top five selections in the 59-year history of the draft, so it wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that Gonzalez will enter the farm system with nearly as much hype as any player before him. Will Clark (No. 2 pick, 1985) is almost certainly the all-time franchise leader in immediate expectations for a player after turning pro, but we're still talking about an exclusive group.
So you should be excited. But you should also remember what it means for a team to have one of the best international prospects in a class. Clark hit a home run on Opening Day 1986, just months after he was drafted. Gonzalez might hit an Opening Day home run one day, but it will be in, oh, 2030 or 2034, and that's if everything works out. Which is never an assumption you should make about an international prospect.
We can still talk about why the news is already important, though. It's a proof of concept that the Giants have been waiting for for a long, long time.
The Giants were pioneers of international baseball. They were one of the most exciting teams of the 1960s with the help of the Dominican Dandy and the Cha-Cha Kid. They fielded an entire outfield of Dominican brothers, and they were the first team with a Japanese player. One of the biggest reasons Japan grew to love baseball in the first place was when San Francisco-born Seals and Giants star Lefty O'Doul led exhibition tours to the country, both before and after World War II, and it's why he was the first American inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. It's impossible to tell the history of international baseball without beginning with the Giants.
And then ... almost nothing. If not for Pablo Sandoval, the Giants would have had the saddest international legacy in baseball over the past 50 years. Even with Sandoval, they probably still hold that claim, and that's including the expansion teams that have only been around since the 1990s. You can check my notes here, but the top-10 list since Juan Marichal retired includes Francisco Peguero and Kensuke Tanaka. They went from pioneers to afterthoughts overnight, and that's where they've remained ever since.
The problem with this is that it's impossible for anyone, even if they're desperate, hungry and focused, to turn around an organization's international efforts. It takes years. No, it takes decades. It's something that requires so, so much more than gobs of money. It requires investment and attention on an almost geological timeline. In 2016, the Giants opened the Felipe Alou Baseball Academy in the Dominican Republic. Here's what Brian Sabean said about it at the time:
"It's long overdue," Brian Sabean, the Giants' executive vice president of baseball operations, said Monday. "I hate to say it; I think we're the last ones in. This has been a work in progress for a long time. ... We weren't lacking for a place (for international prospects) to play, but we never had the full facility."
It wasn't Sabean's idea to ignore international amateurs. That was on ownership, going back to the Bob Lurie days. It was about money, sure, but it was more about infrastructure and relationships. It was how the Marlins could do so much better without having even close to the same financial resources as the Giants. It's why they're still signing some of the most coveted international prospects today.
Investing in international amateurs takes time, and urgency can't speed the process up. There's no Steve Cohen-like spending that anyone can make to turn an organization's fortunes around immediately. If you want a hamfisted analogy, think of it like farming. Heck, you can call a collection of prospects a "farm system" if you'd like. You can spend gobs of money on land and equipment, and you can announce your intention to grow the best darned soybeans in the world. You can just imagine the teriyaki sauce, miso and tofu you'll enjoy after a good harvest. It doesn't matter if you're famished when you plant the soybeans, though. You can stare at the dirt and thumb through a Farmer's Almanac all you want, but it's gonna be awhile.
Gonzalez isn't the first indication that things are turning around, either. The Giants' 2018 class, two front offices ago, was an early example. That was the one with Marco Luciano, Luis Matos and Alexander Canario, and while the on-field results are to be determined, the investment has already paid off. Canario helped a division-winning Giants team acquire Kris Bryant. Matos just had an outstanding, award-winning season in the Venezuelan Winter League, and he's still young enough to dream on. Hey, maybe he absorbed as much as he could from teammate Yasiel Puig and manager Ozzie Guillen. You can only hope.
This brings us to Luciano, who has been a prospect with an uncertain future for almost seven years now. Like Matos, he's still young enough to dream on, with enough potential to make an All-Star Game or seven. He also might not ever become a major-league regular. The international market isn't the place for quick fixes or guarantees. Sometimes there are locusts, and they like soybeans, too.
But when you type "Luci" into Baseball-Reference's search bar, the second suggestion after Luciano is Lucius Fox, which is a near-perfect example of the difference between the Giants' international efforts then and now. The Giants didn't get Fox in 2015 because their scouts were entrenched in the Bahamas, following him closely for years. They got him specifically because he didn't have those sorts of ties. He played high school ball in Florida before moving to the Bahamas, and he did it specifically to make more money than he would have in the draft. The Giants gave him $6 million, at the time the largest bonus for an international free agent who wasn't from Cuba, because it was a top-bidder situation. It was one of the few options for them to spend their World Series money on a prospect.
If the Giants had a larger foothold in other countries, they might have spread that money out to players they had a better read on. Other players from that class included no-names like Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Fernando Tatis Jr. and Juan Soto, all of whom signed for bonuses that were less expensive combined than Fox's bonus.
So you can rattle off the misses if you'd like, from Rafael Rodríguez to Daniel Carbonell, but they came from a different era, with the Giants throwing money at them because they had to throw money at somebody. And even if you want to scoff and point to Angel Villalona as a reminder that can't-miss international prospects miss all the time, don't forget that the Giants could have traded him before the 2009 season for the offensive weapon they needed. Someone like Cody Ross or Pat Burrell, if you could imagine such a thing. Building up prospect depth is never a bad thing for an organization, and continual improvement there isn't just desirable but necessary for any team that wants to contend.
What kind of career will Gonzalez have? Friend, I have no idea what kind of career Luciano will have, and I've actually watched him play with my own eyes over the past couple of years. When the Giants signed Camilo Doval as an 18-year-old, Baseball America wrote that he had "an 86-90 mph fastball that will have to tick up." We don't know anything and won't for years.
The Giants coming out ahead in a too-early ranking of teenaged prospects -- despite having the lowest bonus pool to start with, along with the Dodgers -- is a good sign regardless of the results, though. This wasn't how they attacked the international market in years past. It took years to get this far, even if there's still a long, long way to go.