The Giants have promoted prospective promotion Joey Bart to the Majors, per a club announcement. The No. 2 overall pick in the 2018 MLB draft, Bart will make his debut a day after the 2018 No. 1 overall pick Casey Mize debuted with the Tigers.
Bart, 23, spent most of the 2019 season in Class-A Advanced, hitting .265 / .315 / .479 (116 wRC +) before a 22-game stint in Double-A where he finished on a tear : .316 /. 368 / .544 (163 wRC +). Bart advanced to the Arizona Fall League and hit .333 / .524 / .767 with four homers appearing in 42-yard line before a broken thumb cut his AFL stint short. Its 6.2 percent interest rate does not jump immediately, but Bart’s strike of 21 percent is also not particularly alarming.
Defensively, there’s not much doubt about Bart’s abilities behind the dish. Scouting reports on MLB.com and FanGraphs place a 60 and potential 70 class on his craft, and Bart was named ACC Defensive Player of the Year in his final season with Georgia Tech. Scouting reports praising his capabilities and pitch-blocking, and Bart led a career with a 31 percent catch-steal rate in the minors before nine of the 13 sent base attempts against him in last year’s Arizona Fall League defeat.
All in all, Bart is a career .284 / .343 / .532 hitter in the minors, and he has the defensive tools to make him one of the premier all-round backstops of baseball. He’s yet to see a pitch in Triple-A and has only 87 appearances of Double-A records under his belt, so it’s far from certain that he will immediately thrive against pitching from the big leagues. However, with the Giants hitting just .250 / .314 / .415 as a team (17th in the Majors in wRC +) – with much of that coming from Mike Yastrzemski Bart does not have to be an offensive juggernaut to deliver an impetus.
San Francisco catchers, in particular, have floundered at the dish. The trio of Tyler Heineman, Chadwick Trump en Rob Brantly (who only saw three plate phenomena) combined for a slash .180 / .227 / .270 in the absence of stalwart Buster Posey. Veteran Posey took off from the 2020 season, with indications about health care, after he and his wife adopted twin daughters who were born prematurely.
Bart ranks as the base number in baseball in the 2020 season, per Kiley McDaniel of ESPN. He is currently no. 8 on FanGraphs’ top 100, no. 15 on MLB.com and no. 33 by Baseball America. Athletic’s Keith Law finished 44th for the season. Baltimore’s Adley Rutschman, de nr. 1 overall pick in 2019, is the only catch prospect that is generally ranked at the same level as Bart, who is the heir to the aforementioned Posey and expected to be a contender on the Giants roster for years to come. come.
By waiting until this point in the year to promote Bart, the Giants have ensured that he cannot become a free agent after the 2026 season (at least), and they have probably avoided Super Two status as well. There are only 39 days left in the 2020 season, and each of those days counts for about 2.77 days of Major League service in this year’s prorated system. That leaves Bart with about 108 days of MLB opposition time to possibly retire in 2020, which should leave him comfortably ashamed of Super Two designation as he approaches his arbitration years.
Andrew Baggarly of The Athletic report just before the Giants announced that Bart was on his way to the big leagues.
