Per Jon Heyman of MLB Network, the Giants have signed righty Brandon Beachy to a minor league pact. Beachy had been out of affiliated ball since 2015, when he made two late-season starts for the Dodgers.
The 32-year-old Beachy was an early-decade stalwart for the Braves; after a circuitous route to the majors, which saw the Indiana-born product go undrafted following a decorated career at little-known Indiana Wesleyan University, the then 23-year-old broke in with Atlanta during the club’s Wild Card run in 2010. In four injury-marred seasons with the club, Beachy posted a stellar 9.2 K/9 against 2.9 BB/9 in 46 games (all starts) on the way to an excellent 3.23 ERA/3.34 FIP.
Beachy’s career was derailed after a 2012 Tommy John surgery and numerous setbacks in the subsequent rehab. Since returning to the big-league hill for five cameo appearances in 2013, and a second Tommy John that wiped out his 2014, Beachy has appeared in just 14 professional games, most of which came with the AAA-Oklahoma City Dodgers in 2015, the first in the four-year GM tenure of current Giants president of baseball ops Farhan Zaidi. After signing a one-year, $1.5MM pact with Los Angeles prior to the 2016 season, the 6’3 righty’s campaign was derailed by a recurring bout with elbow tendinitis; after the injury failed to progress in the way he’d hoped, Beachy left the team (and organized baseball) for the remainder of that season and the next.
He did attempt a 2018 comeback with the unaffiliated New Britain Bees of the Atlantic League, striking out a dozen men in just twelve appearances, though attendant scouting reports are predictably scarce. The Giants, though, whose upper-minors starting-pitching depth has been scraped clean of anything resembling a big-league track record, are perhaps a better spot than any for a longshot reclamation project, and should give the aging righty ample opportunity to prove his tank isn’t set permanently on empty.