The Giants got better, but it came at a cost.
I’ll be honest: when Buster Posey took over as President of Baseball Operations, I didn’t know what to expect, but it sure wasn’t this. It sure wasn’t the San Francisco Giants opting out of the Corbin Burnes sweepstakes because they were apparently surprised that a recent Cy Young winner was going to garner a $200-million contract, and then trading a talented homegrown starting pitcher for a $250-million designated hitter.
That wasn’t how I thought any of this would go.
It seemed clear from Day 1 that Posey would inherit the Brian Sabean base philosophy that Posey partook in en route to three championships: strong, homegrown pitching, throwing to strong catchers, backed up by a strong defense. It was less clear that Posey would take the Sabean and Bobby Evans wheelin’ and dealin’ approach that, while providing plenty of positives, also left them leaving town with a 73-win team in their wake that had spent $92.8 million on the quintet of Johnny Cueto, Jeff Samardzija, Mark Melancon, Hunter Pence, and Evan Longoria, received 0.1 fWAR from them, and both supplemented and emphasized it by trading a future All-Star for Andrew McCutchen.
That’s not to criticize the shocking swing for Rafael Devers on Sunday; a move that, when judged through the lens of historical precedent, is an unmitigated slam dunk for the Giants, if you’ll forgive me for crossing my sports in the name of metaphor. It’s just to say that, until Posey recently went on the The TK Show and told Tim Kawakami that he loved Sabean’s trade which brought the Giants a few months of Carlos Beltrán at the cost of Zack Wheeler back in 2011, none of this would have felt in character.
The Giants excused themselves from the Burnes bidding because $200 million was too much for a pitcher, even a great one. They bowed out of the Pete Alonso dance before ever starting, because $100 million was too much for a glorified DH, even a 30-dinger mashing one. They made clear their intentions to find the next Madison Bumgarner, Tim Lincecum, and Matt Cain from the quartet of Kyle Harrison, Hayden Birdsong, Landen Roupp, and Carson Whisenhunt.
And then they did … this. It’s a remarkable about face, and yet at the same time, it feels completely in character. Criticize him for not holding firm in his beliefs or praise him for adapting on the fly, Posey needed less than half a season to determine that even a pricy DH is worth sacrificing a potential Bumgarner for.
I genuinely love it, even if I’m a bit perplexed.
But, for an executive who has extolled the virtues of pitching at every turn, who built a roster on the tenet that you can never have enough pitching, it certainly is a noteworthy risk that Posey has now built a Giants team that, well … doesn’t have enough pitching. No longer in the cliché way, but in the actual, tangible way.
The Giants began the season with so much pitching. They had so many starters that Harrison was shockingly optioned to AAA to begin the year, while Birdsong was just as shockingly placed in the bullpen because there was no room in the rotation for him (to make no mention of the bullpen moves, like optioning Sean Hjelle and Tristan Beck).
That hill of never enough pitching (complimentary) has crumbled into something dangerously resembling never enough pitching (derogatory). Jordan Hicks struggled, lost his job, and was sent to Boston. Justin Verlander was compromised by, predictably, an injury. And now Harrison, so recently the crown jewel of the Giants’ future, is getting acquainted with the local fare in Worcester.
The Giants do still have five starting pitchers, and a damn fine starting five at that. Verlander is set to return to the rotation this week, giving them a delightful unit of Logan Webb, Robbie Ray, Verlander, Birdsong, and Roupp. But where they began the season with Birdsong and Harrison offering protection for the inevitable rotation needs, they now have no one.
San Francisco’s depth pieces on the 40-man roster have been far from compelling. Mason Black is sporting a 4.57 ERA in AAA, and that figure is lower than the number of batters he’s walking per nine innings. Carson Seymour’s 4.24 ERA is a tad better, though perhaps more concerning when you realize that it was a tidy 1.93 at the start of May. Carson Ragsdale’s season has blown up, with a 5.25 ERA, nearly as many walks as strikeouts, and a role shift to something more closely resembling relief.
That leaves Carson Whisenhunt, a player who is not yet on the 40-man, but who is almost surely next up if and when the giants need reinforcements in the rotation. Whisenhunt’s strong year — he has a 3.93 ERA and a delightfully low walk rate — surely gave Posey the comfort to trade Harrison, but there are concerns below the surface. The southpaw’s FIP is just 4.64 and, after blowing his changeup by lower-level hitters, he’s found it harder to strike out batters in Sacramento. His 7.85 strikeouts per nine innings is middle of the pack in the Pacific Coast League, and stands in stark comparison to, say, the 14.0 mark that Harrison posted in his time with the River Cats.
Whisenhunt remains an exciting prospect, but I remain dubious about his ability to hold down a rotation spot for a team that — even after acquiring one of the 20 best hitters on the planet — is built on pitching.
But the Giants will need him, or someone. Asking Verlander and Ray to stay healthy for the entire second half of the season is a tall task, and even if they do, there’s another issue to contend with. Roupp has already thrown 70 innings this year, which is just 6.1 fewer than his mark for all of 2024, and more than double the total he threw in 2023.
The conversations have already begun for how the Giants will manage Roupp’s workload, and likely Birdsong’s as well, after he slowed down while throwing a career-high 129.1 innings a year ago. Even with good health, the plan surely isn’t to run out these five for the next four months.
There are workarounds. The trade deadline is still decades (in baseball years) away, and the Giants could add pitching depth there. Whisenhunt could catch fire as he did in May, and Seymour could return to his April success.
But for now, the Giants did what they had to do: they traded from an area of strength, to bolster an area of weakness. And while it didn’t tip the scales enough to turn that strength into a weakness, or that weakness into a strength, it did put an arm-centric organization in a precarious position. They no longer have the pitching depth that propelled them to thin point: the point where they could start to consider swinging for the fences.