From 2020 to 2024, Marco Luciano was one of the best prospects in baseball, regularly ranking in the top quarter of most top-100 prospect lists. He had everything: youth, exit velocity, power, bat speed and more bat speed. Considering the disastrous history of the organization’s international program over the last few decades, you weren’t wrong to think Giants fans were owed a success story.
The Giants announced on Friday that Luciano was claimed off waivers by the Pittsburgh Pirates. There was no corresponding move, and the 40-man roster now stands at 39. This means the Giants decided that it was time for Luciano to go. This wasn’t like a longtime prospect leaving as a minor-league free agent, and it wasn’t him getting traded at the deadline. It wasn’t even him getting designated for assignment to make room for someone acquired at the deadline. This was the 24-year-old former future cornerstone of Giants baseball, on the curb, with a “FREE” sign taped to him.
The move itself isn’t much of a surprise. Luciano was — barring a spring miracle — a dead roster spot walking. He was out of options and unlikely to make the Giants’ active roster on Opening Day. The likeliest outcome was always for him to get DFA’d or waived in the spring, with the Giants getting very little or nothing in return. It’s not impossible for him to reach his All-Star potential one day, but it wasn’t going to happen with the Giants. The rest of the league knew this, and his trade value was negligible.
Still, the surprise isn’t that Luciano is gone, or that he’s on the Pirates, where he’ll join Joey Bart and Bryan Reynolds to form a Voltron of Giants regret. The surprise is how the two parted ways. It wasn’t a minor trade during the Winter Meetings. It wasn’t an ignominious Cactus League cut. It seemingly wasn’t in reaction to any particular event, news item or roster move. It certainly wasn’t to make room for an exciting new free agent. It was an early pink slip for no obvious reason other than it was going to happen eventually.
Patrick Bailey (right) is still with the Giants but Luciano will now join former Giants top prospects Bryan Reynolds and Joey Bart (back center) in Pittsburgh. (Charles LeClaire / USA Today)
If there’s a working theory, it has to do with the Rule 5 Draft, which will be held next Wednesday at the Winter Meetings. The Giants need to build a bullpen, and it wouldn’t be surprising if they had big plans for the draft. To be eligible to participate in that draft, they needed a roster spot open, and Luciano was always going to be one of the players to go when a roster spot was needed.
Fair enough. But no trade value? Zero? Not even a PTBNL or some cash considerations? Even after acknowledging that Luciano’s prospect days are long, long over, it’s hard to fathom that he had absolutely no value. And if you look at the Giants’ 40-man roster right now, there are at least a couple of players who are unlikely to be there when the season begins, if not a few of them. A strong Cactus League could have boosted Luciano’s stock a little, maybe even internally.
The Occam’s Razor explanation for this is that Luciano really didn’t have any trade value, at least not when every team in baseball is scrambling to open up roster spots of their own. In a different month, you could see a team like the Rays, perhaps, liking his bat speed enough to make a trade for him, but not right now. And as to the other point, that there are different players on the Giants’ 40-man roster who might not be there when Opening Day starts, that’s certainly true. But maybe when the Giants ranked them all by expected contributions or value, Luciano was still 40th. The Giants might not expect Justin Dean or Joey Wiemer to make the team, but they still might like their chances a heckuva lot more than Luciano’s.
This kind of roster minutia is interesting for only so long, though. The larger story is that the Giants had one of the best prospects in baseball, and they got exactly nothing out of it. Less than nothing, if you believe in his negative bWAR over 41 career games.
The regrets stack up. Now that he’s gone, it’s hard not to wonder about the opportunity cost. The Giants could have dealt Luciano for the pitcher who shut down the Dodgers in Game 2 of the 2021 NLDS, or they could have traded him for the utility player who helped the Giants win a wild-card spot last year. All trades look that perfect in hindsight. You don’t actually know who the Giants could have gotten for Luciano over the years, just that it would have been better than nothing.
The bigger what-if has to do with Luciano’s development in the first place. Is this the same outcome he would have had with the Brewers? The Padres? The Dodgers? It’s possible. There are some tools that can’t be turned into production, no matter which team is in charge. Hitting a baseball is just that hard. But it’s true that the Giants were deeply, deeply strange about Luciano, loudly announcing him as the starting shortstop during the 2023-2024 offseason, only to sign Nick Ahmed a couple days after spring training began. It was strange to think Luciano could play shortstop. It was strange to assume it throughout the entire offseason. And it was strange that they were surprised by whatever they saw defensively from him in the last week of February. All of it, deeply strange.
Then there’s his bat, which was always supposed to be his path to stardom. The Giants bent and reshaped his approach to make him more patient, but they could never figure out a way to help him make contact. His strikeout rate in Triple A (30.6 percent) would have been the third-worst mark in the National League as-is, and it was a jump from his rate in Triple A the season before. He was regressing, not improving.
That doesn’t mean it feels great for Giants fans, though. First-round picks Hunter Bishop, Reggie Crawford and Will Bednar aren’t on the 40-man roster ahead of the Rule 5 Draft because nobody is going to pick them. Bart is already on the Pirates, where he’ll combine with Luciano and Reynolds to drive in nine runs over a three-game series against the Giants next season. The Giants have developed Heliot Ramos and Patrick Bailey into everyday players, so it hasn’t been a barren wasteland, but the success rate of the team’s top prospects has been appalling over the last decade.
Here’s another reminder: Luciano might or might not have a long successful major-league career, but either way, it won’t be with the Giants. For five straight years, it was impossible not to think about him when pondering the team’s future. Now he’s gone, with nothing in return. It’s a conclusion that’s been building for a while, but that doesn’t mean it’s easier to accept.