The most common rebuttal to the position that Brian Bocock shouldn't be in the majors is this:

The Giants are supposed to be rebuilding, so what harm is there in seeing what the kid can do?

A major league team shouldn't just be afraid of putting a young player on the major league roster because their performance might hurt the efforts of the team to win. There are development issues as well.  Even polished first-round picks from Miami or Stanford will need time to adjust to professional baseball. They'll see pitches that are located better and thrown harder, and they'll have to adjust with a wood bat. No one disagrees with this so far.

But what happens if a player isn't given time to adjust? Some people are of the mind that either a player is going to eventually adjust, or he isn't. If you throw a player into a position in which they'll likely fail, they'll take their lumps, but they'll come out the other side stronger for the experience.

I can't imagine that the above opinion can be applied universally. I'm always wary about venturing into this kind of discussion. I played baseball for over a decade, but I was only able to drive myself to a couple of those games, so take everything from this point on with a grain of salt. But while some players can stink for their first few years -- Omar Vizquel is one example -- and come out of the stink just fine, some players will respond negatively to what is surely the first set of baseball-related struggles they've ever known. The response doesn't have to manifest itself in self-doubt or depression; it can manifest itself in a changed approach or altered swing that has more to do with preventing short-term embarrassment than it does with long-term development.

I can almost see the argument that Bocock isn't going to be negatively affected by struggling in the majors. He isn't expected to hit right now, so the pressure's off, and he can work with what are ostensibly the best professional hitting coaches the organization can offer. I disagree strongly, but I can see the argument.

But Manny Burriss? Really? It wasn't enough to have one shortstop who struggled mightily in A-ball rushed straight to the majors, but we needed a backup shortstop who had the same A-ball struggles? It makes perfect sense. That way, one can develop by missing everything that's thrown at him, and the other one can develop by sitting on the bench. Ingenious!

I still have hopes for both Bocock and Burriss -- just because they struggled in A-ball doesn't mean they won't be fantastic shortstops. Maybe they will and maybe they won't, but the current setup isn't likely to help the development of either one. There's a good chance that rushing them will actually hurt their development.

Rebuilding is more than looking at the ages of the players in the starting lineup. You can't just field a lineup made from the first nine position players drafted in June, sit back, and say "we're rebuilding! Yayyyy!" It would be a failure on multiple levels to have Jose Vizcaino, Neifi Perez, or Royce Clayton starting for a team in the middle of a rebuilding process, but it's a much, much bigger failure to have no other options to start at short than two kids who struggled against the California League. Their service-time clocks have started long before they needed to, and they've been put into a position of almost-guaranteed short-term failure.

Yeah, I know. But this is the most baffling pair of roster decisions since...well...ever. The front office didn't want to trade for a young shortstop with some upper-level success, like Ronny Cedeno, Ben Zobrist, or Brent Lillibridge. Fine. Maybe the price was too high. The front office doesn't trust Ivan Ochoa to help in any capacity. Okay. Be that way. That leaves only one reasonable option: Find Jose Vizcaino, sign him, and get the two young shortstops back to a level that will help their development.