Four home runs in six days ends Bo Davidson's drought

Bo Davidson had gone eighty-three Triple-A at bats without a home run. Then he hit four in six days. This report spent three consecutive weeks describing a twenty-four-year-old outfielder who had hit nineteen home runs at Double-A and could not find the barrel at Sacramento, insisting each time that the walk rate meant it was an adjustment rather than a collapse. On August 16 he went four for five with two doubles, two home runs and eight runs batted in, capping a week of fourteen hits in twenty-five at bats and a 1.767 OPS. His Triple-A line moved from .205/.295/.241 to .287/.366/.454 in six days. Twenty-five at bats is a small sample and this report will keep saying so. It is also the entire reason he was docked, and it is gone.

The two rankings this report promised to revisit both got revisited. Jhonny Level pushed his High-A line across .300 and takes the number two spot from Luis Hernandez, exactly as last week's entry said would happen if it stopped being defensible to hold him back; nineteen years old, fifty-four games, .300/.369/.480, one full level above the seventeen-year-old ranked ahead of him. And Henry Lalane climbs from 11 into the Top 10 at the expense of Luis De La Torre, on the simple grounds that two twenty-two-year-old left handers at the same level have thrown roughly the same number of innings and one of them has walked forty-six fewer men. Elsewhere: Josuar Gonzalez hit three triples in five games and walked in every one of them, Ramon Marquez finally pitched for Eugene and struck out eight in four innings, and Bryce Eldridge broke a fourteen-day homerless stretch with two in four days.

The bad news is smaller than last week's broken kneecap and still real. Trevor McDonald was moved to the sixty-day injured list on August 13, which is how a season ends when nobody wants to announce it. Blade Tidwell walked five men in four and a third innings and finally settled the question of which of his two wildly different samples was telling the truth; it was the Triple-A one. Dakota Jordan has now gone twenty-three days without a game and Richmond has played thirteen of them, with no transaction posted and no explanation offered. And a housekeeping note that matters: last week's window closed before August 11's games were played, so this edition covers August 11 through August 17 to make sure nothing fell through the crack. Carson Whisenhunt's best major league start was in there. Onward.

The drought is over. He homered on August 11 and again on August 14, his first two since July 28, and while four hits in eighteen at bats is not a hot week by batting average, a .556 slugging percentage is the first evidence in two weeks that the swing still has thump in it. This report spent last week arguing that the two-week homerless stretch was a book being written on him rather than a collapse. Two home runs in four days does not close that book, but it does suggest he read it. Eighty-one major league games at twenty-one, thirteen home runs, a .341 on-base percentage. That is a rookie season worth having, and it is not over.

Second consecutive week of actual damage, and this one came with volume: five hits in fifteen at bats, a home run, three walks, a .977 OPS. That is back to back weeks slugging .500 or better from a player whose season slugging percentage is .373, which is either the start of something or the best four-game stretch he will have all year. The honest position is that nobody can tell yet, and that a corner outfielder needs roughly two months of this rather than eight days. But he is playing every day now that Heliot Ramos is in New York, and the only way to answer the question is to keep handing him at bats.

Five hits, two walks and, remarkably, zero strikeouts in four games. Also zero extra-base hits, which means his week and his season now rhyme: seventy-six major league at bats, nineteen hits, all nineteen of them singles, a slugging percentage identical to his batting average. There is no precedent joke to make here that is funnier than the number itself. What keeps him useful is that he refuses to expand the zone even when pitchers are daring him to, thirteen walks in thirty-one games, and with Susac's kneecap and Rodriguez's elbow both shelved he is the everyday catcher on a major league team whether the extra-base hits arrive or not.

Activated from the ten-day injured list on August 11, his first major league action since July 9, and he moves out of the Deep Cuts and into this section on the strength of three games and twelve at bats. Two hits, no walks, five strikeouts, and he has not appeared since August 14. The season line is the more interesting artifact: .271 with four home runs in seventy at bats and exactly one walk, which is a swing-at-everything profile that produces a perfectly respectable .486 slugging percentage and a .282 on-base percentage sitting eleven points above the batting average. Pitchers do not have to throw him strikes and they have noticed.

Finally. The Giants sent him on a rehab assignment to Sacramento on August 13 and he played three games that week, going five for fourteen with a double and a home run, his first competitive at bats since June 25. Two weeks of this report writing that a trade cannot be evaluated until the player appears in a game can now stop. Seven strikeouts in fourteen at bats is exactly what a hitter looks like seven weeks off, and nobody should read anything into it in either direction. What matters is that the left ulna is holding up under real swings. The rehab clock for a position player is twenty days, so San Francisco should see him before September.

Second week on the ten-day injured list with the fractured left patella he suffered August 10, and no timetable has been announced. He has not been moved to the sixty-day list, which is the only thread of optimism available and a thin one; Trevor McDonald got that transfer this week and Susac did not, though with roughly six weeks left in the season the distinction may end up academic. The fifty-three-game line he leaves behind is .243/.289/.375 with all three home runs bunched into a single early-August week. It is a strange, unfinished season and this is a rotten way for it to stop.

Third week on the ten-day injured list with right elbow neuritis, last game July 31, still no rehab assignment. Eighteen days of nerve irritation in a catcher's throwing elbow with nothing announced is not a hopeful pattern, and the fact that the Giants signed Andrew Knizner off the street on August 11 and shuttled Zach Morgan up and back the same week says how thin they are behind the plate. His major league sample stands at twenty-two games of .235/.316/.412, which read as a fair approximation of the Triple-A book on him. It has now been frozen there for two and a half weeks.

Well, that answers it. For a month this report has been pointing at a split it could not explain, five walks in twenty-two major league innings against thirty-five in seventy-two at Triple-A, and asking which sample was lying. On August 16 he walked five men in four and a third innings, struck out one, and gave up six earned runs. His major league ERA went from 2.78 to 4.33 in an afternoon and his major league walk total doubled in a single start. The Sacramento version showed up. That is disappointing rather than damning, because one start is one start, but the theory that he had solved his command in the majors is dead and it died in the least ambiguous way available.

Five and two thirds innings, four hits, one earned run on August 11: the best major league start of his life, and this report nearly missed it. The August 11 games fell into the seam between last week's window and this one, which is a good argument for the seam being closed. Three walks is still three walks, and his season rate of eighteen in twenty-eight innings remains the thing standing between him and a rotation spot. But he went deeper than four innings for the first time in three starts and he did it against major league hitters. The changeup was always real. This is the first outing where the rest of it kept up.

Last week his major league ERA was 81.00 and this report said the one out was not more predictive than the forty innings behind it. Two appearances later he has thrown two and a third innings with five strikeouts and one earned run, and the 81.00 has come down to 13.50, which is still a comically bad number attached to a pitcher who is doing fine. Five strikeouts in seven outs is a genuinely good rate. Three walks in the same span is not, and it is the thing to watch. He is twenty-seven, he is the oldest player in this report, and he is going to finish the season in a major league bullpen.

On August 13 the Giants transferred him from the fifteen-day injured list to the sixty-day, which is the transaction that ends a season without anyone having to say the words. His last appearance was July 20. Four weeks of official silence about a right elbow strain resolved itself into the outcome that silence usually points at, and he will not pitch again in 2026. Fourteen starts and seventy innings of 5.12 ball from a pitcher who was never supposed to be in this rotation is a real accidental rookie season, and it is now the whole of it. The good news, such as it is, is that the transfer opened a forty-man spot.

Three triples in five games. Not three doubles, three triples, on August 13, August 14 and August 16, plus another double, plus a walk in every single game he played. Six hits in twenty at bats is a pedestrian batting average and a 1.090 OPS anyway, which is what happens when the extra-base hits are loud and the plate discipline never blinks. Sixteen games into full-season baseball he is hitting .339/.455/.613 with thirteen walks and fourteen strikeouts, at eighteen, against pitchers four years older. He has now been better at Low-A than he was in the complex across two separate weeks, and the sample is no longer trivially small. Nothing to discuss at 1.

Last week this report wrote that he sat behind Luis Hernandez by preference rather than production, and that if it stopped being defensible the report would say so. It has stopped being defensible. Seven hits and five walks in six games pushed his High-A season line across .300, and he is now at .300/.369/.480 through fifty-four games at nineteen years old, one full level above the player ranked ahead of him. That is a large, sustained, age-appropriate body of work rather than a projection. Hernandez still has the higher ceiling and is two years younger, and that argument may win again by October. It does not win today. He moves to 2.

Nine hits in twenty-five at bats, which sounds like a good week until you notice the rest of the row: zero extra-base hits, zero walks, eight strikeouts. A .360 batting average and a .360 slugging percentage are the same number because every hit was a single, and a .360 on-base percentage matches both because he never took a free pass. He is seventeen years old in a full-season league, so none of this is alarming; eighteen games is nothing and the .298/.382/.535 complex line with nineteen doubles is the real scouting document. He slides one spot because Jhonny Level earned it, not because anything here broke. Check back in three weeks.

Still no professional innings, and with roughly three weeks left in the minor league regular season the question has quietly changed from when he debuts to whether he debuts at all in 2026. That is the normal and correct handling of a college starter who threw a full spring at UC Santa Barbara before going fourth overall, and it is the same holding pattern Carson Bolemon, Kaden Waechter, Peyton Bonds and Carlos Martinez are in. Instructional league in the fall is the realistic first look. 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 that counts.

Five and a third innings, three hits, one walk, six strikeouts, two earned runs. It is the third straight start of two earned runs or fewer and it moved him past the hundred-strikeout mark: one hundred and four in eighty-eight innings, against fifty-six hits allowed. A twenty-one-year-old left hander with a 2.76 ERA who has surrendered thirty-two fewer hits than he has thrown innings is the most reliable thing in this organization, and reliability is a strange word to attach to a pitching prospect, which is the point. He holds at 5. The only real question left this season is whether Eugene shuts him down in September, and they probably should.

For three consecutive weeks this report described a player with zero Triple-A home runs and a .241 slugging percentage and kept insisting the strike-zone control meant it was an adjustment rather than a collapse. Here is the adjustment: fourteen hits in twenty-five at bats, four home runs, three doubles, eight runs batted in on August 16 alone, a 1.767 OPS. His Triple-A line went from .205/.295/.241 to .287/.366/.454 in six days. Twenty-five at bats is a small sample and this report will say so out loud, but the reason he was docked to 7 was a power outage, and the power outage is over. He moves back to 6, past Gavin Kilen, and he is the closest bat in the Top 10 to a major league at bat.

Two doubles, two triples and five walks in six games, which is a .901 OPS built without a home run and without a good batting average. Regular readers will recognize what just happened: the nitpick this report has run for a month, six walks in his first twenty Double-A games against thirty-two in seventy-eight at Eugene, got answered with five walks in one week. The Richmond line is now .313/.368/.495 through twenty-six games and he has been better at every level than the one below it. He slips a spot only because Bo Davidson hit four home runs in six days. Nothing here got worse. Almost everything got slightly better.

He finally pitched. August 11, four innings, three hits, one walk and eight strikeouts, which is a strikeout rate of eighteen per nine innings, alongside four earned runs, which is not good. Both of those facts belong to the same twelve outs and the strikeouts are the ones that travel. Two of the three hits did real damage and a twenty-year-old making his first appearance in a new organization after ten days off is allowed one of those. The two-level body of work is now sixty-three innings, one hundred and one strikeouts, twenty walks. He holds at 8, and this report is delighted to be citing a Giants box score instead of a Phillies one.

Six innings, four hits, one walk, one earned run in his second Giants start, and he enters the Top 10 at the expense of Luis De La Torre for reasons that are not subtle. Across two organizations and two levels he has thrown eighty-eight and two thirds innings with a 2.60 ERA, one hundred and five strikeouts and twenty-eight walks. De La Torre, the same age and the same handedness one locker over, has thrown ninety-one and two thirds with a 5.20 ERA and seventy-four walks. When two left handers are twenty-two years old at the same level and one of them has walked forty-six fewer men, that is not a close call. He moves to 9, and he has yet to allow more than one earned run in a Giants uniform.

Twenty-three days. His last game was July 26; Richmond has played thirteen games since without him, seven of them in this window alone, and there is still no posted transaction and no announced injury. Last week this report held him at 9 on the grounds that it had already docked him once and charging twice for the same missing information would be lazy. Three full weeks changes that arithmetic: an absence this long is itself the information. He falls one spot. The .290/.346/.533 High-A season with eighteen home runs is unchanged and remains the reason he is still in this top ten at all, and the ninety-eight strikeouts are unchanged too.

Joniel Hernandez is the biggest riser on the board and almost nobody is watching, because he is a seventeen-year-old shortstop playing in the Dominican Summer League. Eight hits in nineteen at bats with two home runs pushed his season line to .321/.439/.539 across fifty-two games, and the number that should make you sit up is forty walks against thirty-seven strikeouts at that age. He came over from San Diego in the Robbie Ray trade and he jumps from 17 to 12. Scott Bandura had the best week of any Sacramento hitter not named Bo Davidson, eleven for twenty-seven with three doubles and a four-hit game, and moves to 13. Lisbel Diaz hit three more home runs, his second consecutive week doing exactly that, and finally forces his way out of the Deep Cuts to 25; the thirteen walks in eighty-seven games are still an argument against him and twenty-one home runs at twenty-one in High-A are a louder argument for. And Nate Furman rejoins this section after being optioned back to Sacramento on August 14, having gone six major league at bats without a hit. He is hitting .286 with fifty walks at Triple-A, and that is the version of him worth tracking.

Robert Hipwell is hitting .174. He has eighty-eight strikeouts in fifty-three games. He also hit two home runs in four days this week and posted a 1.072 OPS, which is his first genuinely good week of the entire season, and it moves him up seven spots to 40 because a .174 hitter finding the barrel twice is worth more attention than a .250 hitter doing nothing. The thirty-five walks are the reason anybody is still looking. Hunter Dryden resolves last week's mystery in the most boring way possible: the skipped rotation turn was a skipped rotation turn, he threw nine and two thirds innings across two starts with three earned runs, and he was never hurt. This report flagged it as unannounced rather than guessing, which turned out to be the right call. Sabin Ceballos walked seven times in six games for a .464 on-base percentage while hitting .250, which is the single most Sabin Ceballos week imaginable and pushes his season walk total to fifty-nine. And Tyler Switalski gave back last week's progress in one outing, eight hits and six earned in four and a third, leaving his Double-A ERA at an even 9.00.

Two entries cleared and two got worse. Trevor McDonald went to the sixty-day injured list on August 13, which ends his season without the club having to say so, and Dakota Jordan is now twenty-three days into an absence nobody has explained, which is why he falls a spot. On the other side, Marcelo Mayer is finally in games at Sacramento and Miguel Mendez threw a hitless rehab inning-plus at San Jose. Hunter Dryden, flagged here last week as unannounced rather than assumed injured, simply made his next two starts. That is the value of flagging a gap instead of guessing at it.

A 51 and 73 team twenty-three games out of first is playing for nothing in particular, which is exactly when a farm report becomes the more interesting document. What it says this week is that the top of this system is very young and holding up: an eighteen-year-old and a seventeen-year-old in San Jose, a nineteen-year-old in Eugene hitting .300 at High-A, a twenty-one-year-old left hander who has allowed thirty-two fewer hits than innings, and a twenty-year-old who struck out eight in his first four innings as a Giant. What it also says is that almost everything within one phone call of the majors is hurt, wild, or twenty-four years old and figuring it out in public. Bo Davidson figured it out this week. Back next week.

Stats sourced from the MLB Stats API for August 11 to August 17, 2026, with every roster move verified against the official transaction feed and affiliate game counts checked against the league schedule (Sacramento seven games, Richmond seven, Eugene six, San Jose six). This window deliberately begins August 11 rather than August 12: last week's edition was generated at 5 AM on August 11 and therefore could not include that day's games, so covering August 11 here closes the gap rather than losing a day of box scores. The ACL Giants finished their season July 23, which is why four players in the Deep Cuts carry final lines. Ramon Marquez's and Henry Lalane's pre-trade lines were compiled with Philadelphia and New York respectively and are labeled as such; Marcelo Mayer's major league line was 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, unchanged: Victor Bericoto moved to MLB Rookies on his activation and Nate Furman moved back to the board on his option. No Recent Promotions section appears because there were no level promotions in this window. 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 and those on rehab assignments from it.