Four promotions including a first major league game at twenty-seven

Four promotions in seven days, and the best of them belongs to a twenty-seven-year-old. One week after the deadline emptied the major league roster, the organization spent this one moving people up: Diego Velasquez to Triple-A, Jose Astudillo to Double-A, Cam Maldonado to High-A, and Trent Harris, a twenty-seven-year-old reliever with twenty-nine Sacramento appearances behind him, to a major league mound for the first time in his life on August 8. A 49 and 70 team that is twenty-two games out of first is a bad baseball team, and it is also the exact circumstance under which doors open. Four of them did.

The two best weeks in the system came from an eighteen-year-old and a nineteen-year-old. Josuar Gonzalez went nine for eighteen with a home run, a triple and two doubles and is now hitting .357/.462/.595 in his first eleven games of full-season baseball, which is not how this is supposed to go for the youngest player on the field. Jhonny Level answered a bad week with three games of seven hits, two home runs and a 1.801 OPS. Jacob Bresnahan threw six shutout innings and moves up to 5, past Gavin Kilen, on the strength of two dominant months. Lisbel Diaz hit three home runs and had a five-hit game. Blade Tidwell struck out six in five and two thirds big league innings and has a 2.78 major league ERA that nobody, including this report, can reconcile with his Triple-A line.

And then the bad news, which is genuinely bad. Daniel Susac fractured his left kneecap on August 10 and went on the injured list, four days after this report spent a paragraph on the three home runs he hit in a week. No timetable has been announced; a broken patella on a catcher in mid-August is not the kind of thing that gets one. He joins Jesus Rodriguez (elbow), Trevor McDonald (elbow), Marcelo Mayer (who has still never played a game as a Giant) and an unannounced group now three deep. Meanwhile Ramon Marquez, the best arm the Giants acquired at the deadline, has been an Emerald for a week and has not thrown a pitch. Onward.

Third consecutive quiet week and the quietest of the three: three hits in twenty at bats, one of them a double, two walks, five strikeouts. The season line has now bled from .256/.351/.444 down to .248/.342/.426 over three weeks, which is what happens when a hitter goes eighteen days without a home run. Here is the number that keeps this from being a crisis: he is twenty-one, he has seventy-six major league games, and he is still getting on base at a .342 clip. Here is the number that makes it a conversation: eighty-two strikeouts in two hundred and seventy at bats, and the league has clearly adjusted. The next adjustment is his. That is the whole job.

Two weeks ago this report was celebrating three home runs in six days. On August 10 the Giants placed him on the ten-day injured list with a fractured left patella, and a broken kneecap on a catcher in the second week of August is not a ten-day injury in any real sense. No timetable has been announced and this report is not going to invent one, but the honest read is that his season is probably finished. He hit .243/.289/.375 in fifty-three games with all three of his home runs arriving in a single week, which is a strange season to have stop this way. Zach Morgan had his contract selected the same day.

Two hits in fourteen at bats, and this report is obligated to note that both of them left the infield: a triple and a home run, which is more extra-base production than he managed in the previous three weeks combined. Regular readers will recall the recurring complaint here, that a .355 slugging percentage from a corner outfielder is a problem no amount of on-base skill fixes. A .500 slugging week does not solve it either, but it is the first evidence in a month that the swing can produce damage. With Heliot Ramos gone, the playing time is his to lose, and five games is not enough to lose it.

Sixty-two major league at bats, zero home runs, and a slugging percentage of .242 from a catcher who slugged .571 at Triple-A and .515 at Double-A this same season. That is now a large enough sample to stop calling it a fluke and start calling it a book: pitchers have decided he cannot hurt them and they are throwing accordingly, and he is walking a lot (eleven in twenty-seven games) because of it. With Susac's kneecap and Jesus Rodriguez's elbow both on the shelf, he is now the primary catcher on a major league team. The at bats are here whether the power is or not.

Two games, one at bat, one walk. There is nothing here to analyze and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise; a rookie second baseman on a 49 and 70 team is getting the leftovers of a platoon that keeps changing shape. The Sacramento season remains the case for him: ninety-five games, .284/.370/.405, forty-eight walks against fifty-four strikeouts, eighteen steals. Six major league at bats spread over eleven days is not a trial. It is a seat on the bench with a good view.

Week two as a Giant and he still has not worn the uniform. His last game in any organization was June 25, which is now forty-seven days ago, and the bone stress reaction in his left ulna that Boston put him on the injured list for on June 26 has produced no announced rehab assignment and no return date. The line above is still Boston's. The Giants traded a twenty-one-year-old center fielder off this board for a former fourth overall pick they have not yet seen swing a bat, and that trade cannot be evaluated until he does. Patience is the only available response and it is running on somebody else's clock.

Second week on the ten-day injured list with right elbow neuritis, last game July 31, no rehab assignment announced. Nerve irritation in a catcher's throwing elbow does not respond to a calendar, which is why nobody has put a date on this. The twenty-two-game major league sample he left behind (.235/.316/.412 with two home runs and eight strikeouts in fifty-one at bats) was perfectly consistent with the Triple-A book on him: contact, patience, a little pop, no panic. The Giants now have two catchers hurt and one twenty-four-year-old with zero major league home runs catching every day.

Five and two thirds innings, four hits, one earned run, one walk, six strikeouts on August 10. That is his second straight competent major league start and it drops his big league ERA to 2.78 across twenty-two and two thirds innings. The split that this report keeps circling has now gotten sillier rather than less silly: five walks in twenty-two major league innings, thirty-five in seventy-two Triple-A innings. There is no pitching theory that explains a man having command in San Francisco and none in Sacramento, which means one of the two samples is lying. He is about to get eight more starts to tell us which.

Another start he could not get out of: three and a third innings, five hits, three walks, four earned. That is two consecutive outings shorter than four innings, and his major league line is now fifteen walks in twenty-two and a third innings, which works out to a walk every inning and a half. The changeup is still a legitimate major league pitch. Everything around it is not, and the pattern is identical to the one he ran at Triple-A (thirty-eight walks in eighty-two innings), which means this is not big-league nerves. It is the pitcher. He will keep getting the ball because there is nobody else.

The debut line is genuinely funny in the way only a first major league appearance can be: one out, three hits, three earned runs, an ERA of 81.00 that will follow him around in the box scores until he throws three more innings. He is twenty-seven, which makes him the oldest player anywhere in this report. The Sacramento season that got him here (3.12 ERA, fifty-two strikeouts in forty and a third innings across twenty-nine outings) is a real reliever's season, and there is no reason to think the one out is more predictive than the forty innings. Welcome to the big leagues, which is a sentence worth more than the ERA.

Third full week on the fifteen-day injured list, last appearance July 20, still no rehab assignment announced. Twenty-two days of silence on a starting pitcher's elbow strain is the kind of quiet that usually means either the team is being cautious or the news is worse than the original announcement, and there is no way to tell which from outside. Fourteen starts and seventy innings with a 5.12 ERA was a perfectly respectable accidental rookie season for someone who was not supposed to be in this rotation. It may also turn out to have been the whole of it.

Nine hits in eighteen at bats, with a home run, a triple, two doubles, seven runs batted in and three walks. He is eighteen years old, he has been in full-season baseball for seventeen days, and he is hitting .357/.462/.595 against pitchers who average roughly four years older than he is. The bookends: a three-for-five, four-RBI night with a home run on August 6, and a three-for-five with two doubles on August 9. There is no caveat to add here beyond the obvious one about eleven games. The best prospect in this organization has responded to his first real professional challenge by hitting better than he did in the complex, which almost never happens, and he stays at 1 without discussion.

Last week he struck out twelve times in twenty-one at bats and this report said it did not mean anything. This week he hit .280 and cut the strikeouts nearly in half, which also does not mean anything, and that symmetry is the whole point of sample-size discipline. What is real: he is seventeen, he is the youngest player in the California League, and thirteen games into the hardest assignment of his life he is hitting .193 with a .333 slugging percentage. What is also real: a .298/.382/.535 complex line with nineteen doubles. The organization pushed him here on purpose to see what breaks. Nothing has yet. He holds at 2, ahead of Jhonny Level on ceiling and age, which is a judgment call this report will keep making until somebody gives it a reason not to.

Three games. Seven hits, two home runs, a triple, four walks, two strikeouts, and a 1.801 OPS. He opened with a two-for-three that included a triple, a home run and two walks on August 5, then went four-for-five the next night. This is the second time in three weeks he has posted a start-to-finish demolition of a week, and the interceding week (three for eighteen with eight strikeouts) is now clearly the outlier rather than the trend. A nineteen-year-old shortstop hitting .296/.358/.490 in his first forty-eight High-A games is one of the better age-relative performances in the entire minor leagues. He is behind Luis Hernandez by preference, not by production, and if that stops being defensible this report will say so.

Still nothing, and at this point in August the silence is the answer. The fourth overall pick signed in July and has thrown no professional innings, which is the correct and boring handling of a college arm who worked a full spring at UC Santa Barbara. Carson Bolemon, Kaden Waechter, Peyton Bonds and Carlos Martinez are all in the same holding pattern, four of them position-neutral high schoolers or short-season arms. Expect the first meaningful look in instructional league or next spring. He holds at 4 on draft slot and scouting grade, which remains the only honest basis available and will be until he throws a pitch.

Six innings, two hits, no runs, two walks, five strikeouts on August 5. It is the third consecutive start in which he has allowed one earned run or fewer, and the season is now ninety-eight strikeouts and fifty-three hits allowed in eighty-two and two thirds innings at twenty-one years old with a 2.72 ERA. Read the hits number again: he has allowed fewer hits than he has thrown innings, by thirty. He moves past Gavin Kilen to 5, and the case is that he has been the most consistent performer in this system for two months while Kilen has been very good in twenty games. The remaining question is a fifty-five-inning workload jump and whether Eugene shuts him down in September.

Eight hits in twenty-four at bats with his first Double-A home run, and the Richmond line is now .329/.365/.487 through twenty games. He has been better at Double-A than he was at High-A, which is the third consecutive level where that has been true, and there is no version of this profile that is not working. The nitpick from last week persists and has now had twenty games to resolve itself: six walks at Richmond against thirty-two in seventy-eight games at Eugene. He slides to 6 because Bresnahan earned the spot, not because anything here got worse. A contact-first middle infielder hitting .329 in Double-A at twenty-two is a big league player.

Two doubles. After sixteen Triple-A games and sixty-six at bats without a single extra-base hit, he hit two doubles in five games, and if that reads like faint praise it is because the alternative was writing the same paragraph a third time. Twenty-one Triple-A games, zero home runs, a .241 slugging percentage from a player who hit nineteen home runs at Double-A. The strike-zone control has not gone anywhere (ten walks against twenty strikeouts since the promotion) which is what keeps this in the adjustment column rather than the collapse column. Holds at 7. The doubles are the first crack of daylight in a month.

Assigned to Eugene on August 3 and activated August 4, and he has not thrown a pitch since August 1, when he gave Jersey Shore five innings of three-hit, seven-strikeout shutout ball on his way out of the Philadelphia organization. Eugene played five games in this window without using him, which is entirely consistent with a twenty-year-old who has been pitching once every seven to ten days all season and is almost certainly on an innings budget. The body of work stands: fifty-nine innings, ninety-three strikeouts, nineteen walks, twenty-nine hits across two levels. He holds at 8 and this report would very much like to stop citing another organization's box scores.

Sixteen days now. His last game was July 26; Richmond has played six more since this report last ran and he has appeared in none of them. No transaction has been posted, no injury has been announced, and this report is still not going to guess at a diagnosis. What it will say is that two full weeks of a healthy affiliate playing without a player is not ambiguous about whether something is wrong. He holds at 9 rather than falling further, because the report already docked him for this absence last week and charging him twice for the same missing information would be lazy. The .290/.346/.533 High-A season is unchanged and so are the ninety-eight strikeouts.

Five innings, five walks, three strikeouts, four earned. The season walk total is now seventy-one in eighty-eight and two thirds innings, which is a rate of 7.2 per nine and is, to be direct about it, getting worse rather than better: he has walked eleven in his last ten innings. One hundred and nine strikeouts says the stuff is a genuine major league weapon. A 5.28 ERA says none of it matters if he cannot find the plate. He holds at 10 on age and raw ability, and this is the last week that holding him there requires no explanation. If April arrives with this walk rate intact, he is a reliever, and everyone involved will have known it since August.

Jose Astudillo is the story of this section and possibly of the week: promoted to Double-A on August 7, six for thirteen in three games there, and now the owner of a season that has touched four levels (two Triple-A at bats in May, forty-seven Low-A games, fifteen at Eugene, three at Richmond) with a batting average that has not dipped below .333 at any of them. He jumps from 24 to 18. Henry Lalane made his first appearance in a Giants uniform on August 6 and it was a good one, four and two thirds innings with one earned run and five strikeouts, which is a considerably better welcome than Ramon Marquez has managed (still no debut) or Kaeden Kent and Miguel Mendez have (both still injured). Keyner Martinez is the fall of the week, down four spots after an August 9 start that lasted one inning and cost seven earned runs; his season ERA went from 4.62 to 5.40 in a single afternoon, which takes some doing.

Lisbel Diaz had the loudest four days anybody in this section has had all season: eight hits in eighteen at bats with three home runs, including a five-for-six night on August 6, which pushes him to eighteen homers in eighty-one High-A games and up to 27. The permanent asterisk on him is still eleven walks all year against fifty-five strikeouts, a .308 on-base percentage propped up entirely by a .283 batting average, and that is a profile with no margin for a slump. Walker Martin hit two home runs in the same game on August 5 and moves to 28; he also has one hundred and nineteen strikeouts, so read those two facts together. Maui Ahuna has now put two good weeks back to back for the first time this year and jumps six spots to 36. And Marty Gair, one of the eight deadline arrivals, threw one and a third perfect innings with three strikeouts in his Eugene debut, which for a reliever with fifty-eight strikeouts in thirty-three Low-A innings is exactly the expected outcome and still fun to watch.

The one that matters most is Daniel Susac, and it is the worst piece of news in this report by a wide margin: a fractured left kneecap on August 10, four days after the report last praised his power surge. The Giants now have two catchers on the injured list and Drew Cavanaugh, who has zero home runs in sixty-two major league at bats, catching every day. The unannounced group has grown to three: Dakota Jordan (sixteen days), Jakob Christian (twenty days) and now Hunter Dryden, whose case is the mildest of the three and could be nothing more than a skipped turn. One piece of good news: Victor Bericoto started a rehab assignment at Sacramento on August 4, his first game action since July 9.

A week after the deadline, the shape of what is left is starting to resolve, and it looks like this: the two most interesting players in the organization are seventeen and eighteen and hitting in San Jose, the best pitching prospect is a twenty-one-year-old left hander in Eugene who has allowed fewer hits than innings, and the best arm they acquired still has not appeared in a game. Everything above Double-A is either hurt, adjusting, or twenty-seven years old and having the best week of its life. That last category is the one worth savoring. Back next week.

Stats sourced from the MLB Stats API for August 5 to August 11, 2026, with every roster move verified against the official transaction feed and affiliate game counts checked against the league schedule (Sacramento five games, Richmond six, Eugene five, San Jose five). The ACL Giants finished their season July 23, which is why four players in the Deep Cuts carry final lines. Ramon Marquez's stat lines were compiled with Philadelphia and are labeled as such; Marcelo Mayer's were compiled with Boston. Rate stats in the Last 7 rows are recomputed from summed game logs, not averaged; innings pitched are converted from the API's decimal notation before any ERA or WHIP arithmetic. Player ages pulled live from the Stats API this week. Rankings: Prospects1500 2026 board plus the 2026 draft class, the deadline acquisitions and prior merit additions, adjusted weekly on performance and roster moves. Board depth is 55 this week, down one from 56, because Trent Harris moved to the MLB Rookies section on his call-up. Draftees are marked "not yet debuted" until they report. Hot/Warm/Stable/Cold by L7 OPS for hitters; composite ERA, WHIP, K, BB for pitchers. MLB Rookies carries tracked players whose most recent games are at the major league level, including those currently on the major league injured list.