Ninety Days On The Roster Was The Price Of Daniel Susac, And The Giants Cleared It Friday

The San Francisco Giants owed ninety days on Daniel Susac. Not ninety games. Ninety days on the active major league roster, the toll a club pays when it takes a catcher in the Rule 5 draft and wants to keep him afterward the way it keeps everybody else.

They finished paying on Friday.

On Sunday, in the bottom of the fifth against Detroit, Susac fouled the first pitch of the at-bat back off his own left knee. The next entry in the game's log is an injury delay. He stayed in the box after it, took five more pitches, struck out swinging, and caught two more innings before Drew Cavanaugh finished the afternoon for him. An X-ray that night found a contusion and no break. An MRI on Monday found the break. Susan Slusser of the Chronicle reported the sequence and quoted manager Tony Vitello on the scan: "there's definitely something there, which is not a surprise."

He went on the injured list Monday. Zach Morgan came up from Sacramento about an hour before first pitch to catch a game.

The arithmetic nobody publishes#

MLB's own glossary is blunt about it. A Rule 5 pick can be put on the major league injured list, but he "must be active for a minimum of 90 days to avoid being subject to the aforementioned roster restrictions in the next campaign." Fall short and the whole apparatus follows him into 2027: no sending him to Triple-A without first offering him back.

So here is Susac's season, counted off the league's transaction record rather than estimated.

He broke camp on the roster, was on it for Opening Day on March 25, and stayed on it through April 19. The next day a right elbow nerve problem put him on the injured list. Twenty-six days. Activated on May 15, he caught through June 25 and went back on the list the following morning with a strained lower back, which is forty-two more. The third stint ran July 17 through August 9. Twenty-four.

Twenty-six, forty-two and twenty-four. Ninety-two.

The ninetieth was August 7 against the Tigers, a game in which he went 0 for 4 and struck out twice. Nobody at Oracle Park knew they were watching a deadline get met, because it is not a deadline anyone announces, and because a man going 0 for 4 does not look like a man completing anything.

(Count it a different way and you can shave two off, one for each activation day, and he lands on exactly ninety. There is no arrangement of the calendar that puts him under it. That is the only part of this the Giants get to feel good about.)

What they gave up to be in this position#

Minnesota selected Susac in the Rule 5 draft on December 10 and traded him to San Francisco the same day for catcher Miguel Caraballo and cash. That is a club deciding it wants a player badly enough to assume somebody else's roster obligation before he had caught a single inning for it.

Then, on May 9, the Giants traded Patrick Bailey to Cleveland for left-hander Matt Wilkinson and other considerations, and the Rule 5 catcher San Francisco was obliged to carry became the catcher San Francisco was going to play. Thirty-nine starts. Three hundred fifty-one innings behind the plate. Two errors and one passed ball in all of it, and thirteen runners thrown out of the thirty-nine who tried, a third of them.

The bat did not follow. He hit .243 with a .289 on-base percentage and three home runs in 161 plate appearances, and the last week of it was 0 for 8 with four strikeouts against Detroit. Vitello went out of his way Monday, in comments Alex Pavlovic carried at NBC Sports Bay Area, to say the glove was the real thing and the rest was coming: "I think what he did was incredibly impressive, and it really started right out of the shoot in spring training. He was great, but I think back [behind the plate] is where he really, really developed."

Managers say that about hurt rookies. This one has a caught-stealing rate to point at while he says it.

Behind him there is not much#

Cavanaugh is the catcher now. He is twenty-four, he was playing at Richmond in Double-A in April, and the Giants selected his contract on June 26. Twenty starts behind the plate since, three errors, four passed balls, and five runners thrown out of the twenty-six who tried, or nineteen percent against Susac's thirty-three. No home runs, but a .342 on-base percentage, which for a rookie catcher nobody planned on is a real thing to have. At the moment he is also the experienced one.

Behind him is Morgan, who is twenty-six, from Stockton, and has been in the organization since San Francisco signed him in 2022. He has played 253 games in the minor leagues across four levels and none in the major leagues. He did not get into Monday's game either, so the number is still none.

Jesus Rodriguez, the third catcher, is on the injured list himself. Slusser reports the Giants are calling around for a fourth from outside the building. A depth chart reading "a man who was in Double-A in April, a man who has never played, and the injured list" tends to produce phone calls.

There is one spot open on the 40-man roster. Forty-five names sit on it, six of them on the 60-day injured list and therefore not counting against the forty.

The part that will not read as consolation but is one#

San Francisco is 49-70 and twenty-two games behind the Dodgers with forty-three to play. Nothing in those forty-three turns on whether Susac is healthy for them, and nothing in them turns on whether Cavanaugh catches all of them or half.

What the ninety days bought is 2027. The restriction is discharged. Next spring the Giants can option him to Sacramento if he needs at-bats, or keep him, or do whatever a club normally does with a 25-year-old catcher who can throw, and none of it requires offering him back to anybody. That was the entire point of the December transaction, and they collected on it forty-eight hours before the kneecap.

Anyway. The bill came to ninety days and San Francisco paid ninety-two. You only notice a margin that thin when it nearly goes the other way.