On Wednesday night in Milwaukee, Kyle Harrison looked excellent for four innings. In the fifth inning, everything fell apart. With two outs, he gave up a walk, a single, a double and a homer in about three minutes. It took 11 pitches to go from a scoreless tie to a five-run deficit. Life comes at you fast, but baseball comes at you faster.
FIVE. RUN. INNING.@Wcontreras42 https://t.co/xJfrNlP0Si pic.twitter.com/aJVxBcfj2r
— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) August 29, 2024
That’s OK, as far as these things go. Harrison just turned 23 two weeks ago. That fifth inning was his 121st of the season, which is a career high as a professional. There will be growing pains, learning lessons and hiccups in a lot of his starts, especially so as we reach the final month of the regular season.
On Tuesday, the Giants placed Robbie Ray on the IL with a left hamstring strain. His brief Giants career has contained multitudes, with absolutely dominant starts mixed with impossibly disastrous starts.
That’s OK, as far as these things go. Ray has shown the velocity and movement he needs to compete. He was never a command-first pitcher, and command is typically the last thing to come back after Tommy John surgery. If he doesn’t opt out of his contract this offseason — and I honestly can’t tell if that’s likely or not — he’s proven enough to make you excited about potential contributions in 2025. The likeliest scenario was always something like this. It’s not just elbow ligaments that need time after reconstructive surgery. All of the other body parts, like hamstrings, have to hold up. Give him an offseason.
Also on Tuesday, the Giants placed Jordan Hicks on the IL with right shoulder inflammation. Elbows can be scary. Shoulders are always terrifying.
That’s OK, as far as these things go. Hicks is just experiencing general fatigue, which was absolutely predictable for a young, high-leverage reliever transitioning into a full-time starter. It’s a process. Just like establishing yourself in the majors, like Harrison. Or coming back from Tommy John surgery, like Ray.
The Giants currently have three starters who aren’t quite where they need to be to help the team the most right now, but that’s OK because all of their predicaments were somewhat foreseeable.
Which begs the question — and I’m 79 percent sure that I’m using the idiom correctly here — if these hiccups were at least partially foreseeable, what was the plan going to be if the Giants were actually going to the postseason? As in, if it’s sort of baked in that Harrison, Ray and Hicks were risky bets to be fully operational battle stations in September and October, how was that a good thing?
Let’s go into an alternate universe for this one. In this alternate universe, Michael Conforto is an All-Star again. He feels great, and he’s an absolute monster at the plate. Jung Hoo Lee doesn’t crash into a wall, and he’s hitting .310. He’s a spark plug at the top of the lineup, and you look forward to his at-bats. Wilmer Flores has the same season that he did in 2023, with well-timed dingers going all over the place.
And, in addition to all this, you still have Tyler Fitzgerald emerging. You have Heliot Ramos making the All-Star team. You have the breakout season from Ryan Walker. There’s so much that’s exceeding expectations, and you get to pair all of it with some of the higher-percentile outcomes from the players you were expecting to contribute. The Giants are rolling offensively. They’re certainly not average as all get out.
Hey, sounds like fun. Except the rotation is kind of a mess. Lots of fatigue to go around. Not sure if it’s what the team will need in October in this scenario.
So … what was the plan?
It couldn’t have been that Ray was a rock-solid, reliable horse. That’s unfair to a pitcher coming back from Tommy John surgery, and it’s also unrealistic. It’s unfair to assume that Harrison’s workload wasn’t going to be a problem, especially considering how careful the organization was with him in the minors. That’s not a criticism; the Giants were also ultra-cautious with Logan Webb in the minors, and he’s evolved into one of the great inning-munchers of his era.
It was super goofy to think that Hicks was going to be chugging along in September and October, but I half-think that the Giants were counting on him to be a high-leverage reliever by May and got caught off guard by his early, enjoyable and very convincing success as a starter.
Maybe the plan was that Webb and Blake Snell would be enough of a foundation to scare any team in the postseason, and that at least two younger or more uncertain pitchers were going to fill the void. Maybe it was Ray coming back stronger from Tommy John than expected, or Alex Cobb returning to his All-Star form before June, or Hayden Birdsong giving way more than expected, or Mason Black thriving, or Keaton Winn fulfilling his promise or a deadline trade once they figured out that the offense was worth supporting, or, or, or. There were a lot of different ways the pachinko ball could have bounced.
There was a fatal flaw with that plan. What if either Webb or Snell were erratic? What if they didn’t have the season it was realistic to expect? Then you get dominoes tumbling, and you end up in August with two starting pitchers on the IL and a pair of young pitchers running out of gas. Don’t look toward Cobb for answers, as he’s on the IL for the Guardians.
The real answer is that it’s time for a normal rotation.
A normal rotation has at least four pitchers who don’t need an ‘if’ or a ‘but’ when explaining how it can work. You’re not thinking about what a Tommy John surgery recovery typically looks like, and you’re not thinking about how many innings a fresh-faced youngster is throwing. You’re not saying things like, “if this 36-year-old, oft-injured pitcher recovers from a hip injury by the middle of the season, we should be fine.” The Giants took advantage of undervalued pitchers like Kevin Gausman, Carlos Rodón, Alex Wood and Anthony DeSclafani, and they won a lot of games with them. It was a strategy that worked at the time. But it wasn’t that reliable. It certainly wasn’t normal.
Imagine a rotation with Webb doing his typical thing, along with tempered versions of Harrison and Birdsong, not as restricted by youthful workload concerns. You add a big starter on a big contract — say, Blake Snell with a contract extension — and you also have someone like Ray, one year removed from a tough reintroduction. That’s five starters. Five mostly normal starters, who don’t require a lot of speculative fiction to imagine as the kind of pitchers who can propel a team to the postseason and stay effective during that final, grueling month.
It’s right there, within reach.
That doesn’t mean you can’t side-eye the Giants’ plan for this season, though. It turned out that the Giants needed a lot of help from unexpected young sources to even approach an average lineup. But if they had scored more runs than the average team, it was always dubious to count on a rotation of pitchers with 100-inning career highs and pitchers with injuries that were both serious and recent.
A normal rotation, whether it’s built by this front office or the next. That’s what the Giants have lacked for a while, and it’s what they desperately need to heal their fans’ broken brains. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure how anyone — myself included — thought this was going to work out at all.
(Photo of Harrison from Wednesday night: Patrick McDermott / Getty Images)
