Kevin Gausman earns Opening Day start.
SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ. >> There’s officially a new tone-setter atop the Giants’ starting rotation.
Giants manager Gabe Kapler announced Wednesday that right-hander Kevin Gausman will start for the team on Opening Day against the Seattle Mariners at T-Mobile Park.
Fellow right-hander Johnny Cueto started for the Giants on Opening Day last season, but after Cueto posted a 5.40 ERA in 12 outings and battled command issues at times this spring, the Giants went in a different direction and tabbed their best pitcher from a season ago.
Gausman’s start on April 1 will mark the second Opening Day nod of his career. He took the ball for the Baltimore Orioles in the opener in 2017, throwing 5 1/3 innings of two-run ball in a 3-2 win over the Detroit Tigers.
Gausman becomes the Giants’ fourth different Opening Day starter in four seasons, following Cueto in 2020, lefty Ty Blach in 2019 and Madison Bumgarner in 2018. Blach started the season-opener in 2019 as a fill-in for Bumgarner after the veteran southpaw fractured his hand in his final outing of Cactus League play, forcing him to miss the first two months of the regular season.
With a 3.62 ERA in 12 outings last season, Gausman was the Giants’ most consistent pitcher and performed well enough to receive a one-year, $18.9 million qualifying offer from the organization. Despite receiving interest from multiple teams on multiyear deals, Gausman chose to return to San Francisco, citing his desire to remain with an organization that’s helping him maximize his potential and the chance to work with veteran catcher Buster Posey.
BELT TO MAKE DEBUT >> Giants first baseman Brandon Belt was slated to make his 2021 spring training debut in Wednesday night’s game against the Padres as a pinch hitter, the club announced. Belt was initially scheduled to be held out of early Cactus League action because he was recovering from an October surgery to remove a right heel spur, but his return to action was delayed after he was diagnosed with COVID-19 and mononucleosis prior to the start of spring camp.
The Giants have yet to rule Belt out for Opening Day, but it’s possible he’ll open the season on the injured list for the second consecutive season as he continues to regain his strength and stamina. Kapler has mentioned recently the Giants want to ensure Belt can play the field for a full nine innings and before the team would be comfortable adding him to the roster.
Belt has been a participant in live batting practices where he’s taken multiple at-bats and played some first base at Scottsdale Stadium over the last week, but Wednesday’s game against the Padres will mark his first game action.
• The team also announced a pair of right-handed relievers who were candidates to make the Opening Day bullpen will undergo Tommy John surgery in the next week. The Giants already revealed Rule 5 draft pick Dedniel Núñez had been diagnosed with a right elbow sprain that would require surgery, but the team said Wednesday that Rico Garcia will also have Tommy John surgery.
• Left-hander Alex Wood, who underwent an ablation for nerves in his lower back last week, will throw his second bullpen since the non-invasive procedure on Thursday. Kapler said earlier in the week that if Wood’s bullpens went as planned, he could throw a live batting practice by the weekend.
It remains unclear if Wood’s injury will require him to open the season on the injured list so the starter can build up his stamina. ZAIDI HAS PLAN TO MAKE GAMES SHORTER >>
Major League Baseball is determined to fix its pace of play issue.
Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi has an idea for how to help, but one he knows won’t sit well with most fans.
“Last year, when the conversation started about the season and us having to play doubleheaders, maybe frequent doubleheaders with games having to go seven innings, my thought was, why don’t we just make all games seven innings?” Zaidi said on KNBR last week.
Forget a pitch clock. Forget requiring hitters to stand in the batter’s box throughout an at-bat. Forget most of the ideas the league is toying with that don’t address the real problem. The only way games are going to be shorter is if they’re ... actually shorter.
“This is just me talking, I’m not speaking on behalf of Major League Baseball or the San Francisco Giants organization, but I kind of enjoyed those seven-inning games,” Zaidi said. “You kind of just got to the late innings and the drama built up really quickly.”
The Giants were awful in doubleheaders last season, going 1-5 in the six seveninning games they played. That doesn’t change Zaidi’s enthusiasm for the concept, however, because he sees benefits in shortening the games so they last as long as nine-inning games from decades ago.
“If you go back to the late ‘70s, the average game was two and a half hours long,” Zaidi said. “Mid-20th century, games were like two hours long. The question is why do games take so much longer now, and I really think it’s because of the athleticism involved in baseball now. You go back to a game from the ‘80s and pitchers were just playing catch and commanding, hitting spots, now every pitch is like an athletic feat. These guys are throwing 100 miles per hour and we just can’t do that every five seconds.”