Start with the pitching, though. The Bonds story<\/a> is fun, but the lack of pitching in the Giants\u2019 organization is closer to existential. The 2026 Giants currently have the seventh-worst adjusted ERA in San Francisco Giants history. They\u2019re on pace to have the second-highest ERA in the Oracle Park era, behind only the 2006 team. There\u2019s a very real chance this staff could have one of the worst seasons for the franchise since leaving New York.<\/p>\n None of this is why the Giants drafted Flora. It isn\u2019t why they drafted pitchers with their first three picks. Every team will repeat \u201cbest player available\u201d as many times as they need to, year after year, because that\u2019s the philosophy of every team. You can\u2019t worry about 2026 when you\u2019re focused on 2030 and beyond.<\/p>\n When the best player available happens to be exactly the kind of player you would put on the Giants with a magic wand, though, it sure makes it easier to imagine how it all might work.<\/p>\n Flora was the top college pitcher of the draft. The next college pitcher was selected at pick 19<\/a>. Flora has an ace\u2019s repertoire, an ace\u2019s build and an ace\u2019s work ethic. If he turns into a perfectly decent starting pitcher, he\u2019ll have beaten the odds that most pitching prospects begin with, but the Giants are hoping he\u2019ll be an ace. And soon.<\/p>\n No pressure, kid.<\/p>\n \n Jackson Flora can reach triple-digits with his fastball. (Jeff Liang \/ UCSB Athletics)<\/p>\n Flora has the kind of ready-made stuff that organizations dream of, with all the bells and whistles that modern analysts and scouts like these days, like a high spin rate, a flat approach angle and excellent arm extension. He has two major-league pitches already, with a fastball that can sit in the mid-to-upper 90s and a wipeout sider, and he added a kick-change that should give him a third. He needs to refine his command and control, like almost every other 21-year-old pitcher \u2014 so he\u2019s not close to where, say, Paul Skenes was when he was drafted \u2014 but he\u2019s still ahead of most of his peers in that respect.<\/p>\n But wait: There\u2019s even more urgency. The Giants\u2019 farm system is currently in the top third of baseball, but that\u2019s mostly on the strength of position players in A-ball and below. The upper levels are starting to spit hitters out, though. Bryce Eldridge has the highest profile of the recent graduates, but he should be followed in short order by a variety of infielders and outfielders. All that\u2019s left is the pitching.<\/p>\n No pressure, kid.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s where Flora might not have only been the best player available, but also the player who made the most sense for the Giants right now. It\u2019s not as if the Giants are without pitching prospects \u2014 Roger Munter from There R Giants recently wrote<\/a> that if 21-year-old Keyner Mart\u00ednez were draft-eligible, he\u2019d have the kind of stuff that might have put him in consideration for the fourth pick \u2014 but it\u2019s hard to identify another Giants pitching prospect you can practically guarantee will be in a major-league rotation soon. Carson Whisenhunt has a chance, but it\u2019s possible that he follows Keaton Winn into the bullpen, with Blade Tidwell and Carson Seymour likely taking a similar path.<\/p>\n Before Flora was selected, that left open the possibility of a gap between the first and second waves of hitting prospects and any young starters in the majors to support them. While Flora is still a young pitcher, and you should never, ever trust those things, he\u2019s not a high school infielder who needs to be polished and perfected at every step along his developmental path. While the competency and effectiveness of every organization\u2019s player-development team can vary wildly, Flora feels like a pitcher whose success will have more to do with his body holding up than anything his organization does or doesn\u2019t do. He should in the majors at the same time as Jhonny Level, Gavin Kilen, Bo Davidson and\/or Dakota Jordan, a foundation that ideally would be followed shortly by a second wave of prospects who are still teenagers right now, like Luis Hern\u00e1ndez and Josuar Gonzalez.<\/p>\n Will the Giants need pitching when that happens? No idea. Never draft for need. In two years, the Giants might have the best group of pitching prospects in the country, and all of the hitting prospects might have stalled.<\/p>\n Using all of the available evidence we have at the moment, though, it sure seems like a polished college right-hander would be perfectly positioned for a team on the Giants\u2019 timeline. Flora, in this perfect world where all the dominoes fall as expected, would be established by the time the youth movement picks up.<\/p>\n There are downsides, of course. Some concerns with Flora that are reasonable to have:<\/p>\n \u2022 He\u2019s a pitcher<\/p>\n \u2022 He\u2019s a prospect<\/p>\n \u2022 He\u2019s a pitching prospect<\/p>\n While you can get excited about top-of-the-first-round college pitchers in a way that feels more tangible than the distant excitement you might feel with the best high school prospects, it\u2019s still an impossible profile to predict with any accuracy. Scroll through draft histories, and you\u2019ll spot ghosts from draft classes past. Look at the drafts that built the Giants\u2019 championship teams: Before Tim Lincecum, teams drafted the much safer and polished Luke Hochevar and Brandon Morrow. Before Madison Bumgarner was Daniel Moskos; before Buster Posey was Brian Matusz. Those profiles all inspired write-ups similar to this one. Should move quickly, more polished than their peers, a certain major leaguer, et cetera, et cetera.<\/p>\n There is also a question about Flora\u2019s strikeout rate, which is outstanding (11.7 K\/9) in isolation, but not as robust as a lot of the big-stuff, top-five college pitchers from recent drafts. You want college pitchers drafted there to dominate. You want stats that suggest Flora is a pitcher who made hitters study harder after they realized they weren\u2019t future major leaguers.<\/p>\n This is a minor concern relative to the rest of the profile, though, and it\u2019s certainly one with a variety of acceptable explanations. Now that we\u2019ve acknowledge that, let\u2019s focus on the fun stuff. Like how Flora throws the baseball:<\/p>\n If you\u2019re looking for reasons why the Giants made this pick, you don\u2019t have to start thinking about the future of teenagers in the Arizona Complex League. You can just look at the videos of Flora pitching. He has the kind of size and frame that led FanGraphs\u2019 Michael Baumann to give him the rare \u201cideal baseball body\u201d tag<\/a>. (Baumann was also enamored of Flora\u2019s personality, remarking in the FanGraphs\u2019 draft chat <\/a>that he was \u201coutrageously charismatic\u201d and talked for 20 minutes at the MLB Draft Combine, which is about 18-19 minutes longer than most prospects.)<\/p>\n There are tangential reasons to be excited about the pick. Not only is Flora from Pleasanton and Foothill High, like Brandon Crawford, but he also grew up a Giants fan, sprinkling names like Jeff Samardzija into his post-draft conference call after the requisite Matt Cain, Madison Bumgarner and Tim Lincecum mentions. On that same call, he had to correct himself when calling the ballpark AT&T Park instead of Oracle, which is simply charming.<\/p>\n It\u2019s Flora\u2019s backstory that gets me most excited, though. Not the part where he might have seen one of Kelby Tomlinson\u2019s three perfect home runs<\/a>, but the part where he went undrafted out of high school. This doesn\u2019t mean that he lacked the talent to be drafted, just that he wasn\u2019t likely to be drafted high enough to buy him out of his college commitment, so teams ignored him.<\/p>\n Then Flora went to UCSB\u2019s pitching factory, one that got a lot more notice when Shane Bieber emerged out of the mists<\/a>. They didn\u2019t do everything that made Flora the fourth pick, but it\u2019s easy to imagine him developing into a much different prospect at another school. Head coach Andrew Checketts actually prefers high schoolers with a chance to grow into their stuff, saying that they\u2019ve had to learn how to pitch differently. They couldn\u2019t dominate with raw stuff, so command and pitchability was how they got to a Division I school in the first place.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re not hard throwers when they\u2019re younger, so they figure out how to throw it down the middle of the plate,\u201d Checketts told The Ringer in 2021. \u201cAnd then they\u2019re successful in high school because they have the ability to throw the fastball where they want it.\u201d<\/p>\n The work of the modern pitcher isn\u2019t just to get bigger and stronger, throwing harder along the way. It\u2019s also to take instruction and turn words into action. Why a pitch is thrown a certain way, the differences between how pitches spin, the sequences that work best with the movement and release point he offers, how to improve that release point, et cetera.<\/p>\n A lot of pitchers learned those things in college, but only one of them was picked in the first half of the 2026 draft. It speaks to Flora\u2019s general malleability as a pitcher, which is almost as important as velocity readings and slider shapes these days. Think of him as someone who got an earlier jump on the language of major-league pitching, like a kid put into a foreign-language immersion school. You can see evidence of this in Flora\u2019s changeup, which he picked up just this past season. He needed a pitch that moves away from left-handers and prevented them from sitting on the natural movement of his fastball and slider, so he developed one. In under a calendar year, he took a pitch from concept to Baseball America\u2019s list of best changeups in the draft<\/a>.<\/p>\n None of this guarantees success, and you\u2019ve seen pitchers have all kinds of success in unorthodox ways, even when they didn\u2019t have the physical head start that Flora\u2019s DNA gave him. Lincecum won Cy Youngs with the frame of a backup infielder on the 1974 Cardinals. Ryan Vogelsong had to travel around the world for a decade. Logan Webb had to stop throwing harder and focus on the movement of his pitches, becoming an All-Star as a high school draftee when peers like Brady Aiken or Tyler Kolek \u2014 the top two picks of the 2014 draft \u2014 didn\u2019t make the majors at all.<\/p>\n When building a pitcher from scratch, however, you would love some components to be pre-installed. You want the size, and you want the stuff. You want at least three pitches, including one that gets opposite-side hitters out. You want polish, but you also want ceiling. You want to eliminate as many of the surprises as a pitching prospect might come with.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a guy who does that, and it doesn\u2019t hurt that he\u2019s also slid down the Coke bottle a few times. You won\u2019t know what the best pick would have been for another few years, if not longer. Everyone knew which pick makes the most sense right now, though, and it just so happened to be the best player left on the Giants\u2019 board. It\u2019s nice to have that kind of synchronicity in a year when nothing else has been in sync.<\/p>\n If the Giants drafted an unrelated player with the name \u201cBonds,\u201d it would be worth noting. Heck, it was worth noting when the Giants drafted Bonds with back-to-back picks in 2007 \u2014 Brock Bond in the 24th round and Casey Bond in the 25th. Looks like the Giants are trying to draft Bonds again, we all said. It was a good bit.<\/p>\n Well, here\u2019s the actual item, an honest-to-goodness Bonds back in the organization. His grandfather, Bobby Bonds Sr., played seven seasons for the Giants, and his uncle, Barry Bonds, played 15 for them. They combined for 772 home runs in a Giants uniform and 1,094 major-league home runs overall.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/JacksonFlora_Action_12-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
![\"go-deeper\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/AP26064264619638-1024x681.jpg\")
<\/p>\n