Rotation unsettled as season gets closer
During the early days of spring training, the Giants felt their rotation was a stable part of the roster as the club brought in veterans Anthony DeSclafani, Alex Wood and Aaron Sanchez to fill out a staff headlined by Johnny Cueto and Kevin Gausman.
With less than two weeks until Opening Day, it’s increasingly unclear how the Giants’ rotation will look at the beginning of the season and undecided as to who will start on April 1 against the Mariners.
Cueto and Gausman each threw Monday with Cueto appearing in a simulated game at Scottsdale Stadium while Gausman took the mound at Camelback Ranch against the Chicago White Sox. With no defense playing behind him and mostly young, inexperienced batters hitting against him, it was difficult to know how rigorous of a test Cueto took on Monday. The White Sox, on the other hand, provided quite a challenge for Gausman, who gave up seven hits (six for extra bases) and four runs in a 3 2/3-inning start that was his worst of the spring. The White Sox won the game 7-2.
“To be honest today was kind of frustrating and I felt like I’ve been a lot sharper this spring than I was today,” Gausman said. “But you know you can have those (outings) during the season and that’s what we did today, we kind of grinded through it.”
Chicago shortstop Tim Anderson opened the bottom of the first with a solo home run to left field and watched from the dugout as teammate Eloy Jimenez sent another Gausman offering over the center field wall later in the inning. The White Sox added a run in the second as Anderson lined a double into the left field corner to score Adam Eaton, who doubled to the same spot on the diamond earlier in the inning.
“It took me two innings really to make an adjustment,” Gausman said. “My goal is always to pitch up in the zone with my fastball and those first couple of innings, I just couldn’t get it up there. Trying to go up and I just kind of kept missing belt high. Against these guys,
you have to have your Agame.”
The outing didn’t suggest Gausman is rounding into regular season form and is immediately deserving of being named the Opening Day starter, but the Giants aren’t an organization that places a lot of emphasis on small sample sizes. A front office led by Farhan Zaidi believes Gausman can perform even better than he did a season ago, when the right-hander struck out 79 batters in 59 2/3 innings and was the Giants’ most reliable starter.
Regardless of whether Gausman or Cueto starts on Opening Day, the other will likely be counted on to hold down the second spot in the Giants’ rotation and it’s clear the club will need both starters to pitch well this season to have a chance of challenging for a playoff berth.
Cueto seemed to take a step forward in his five-inning game as he threw 80 pitches while limiting hard contact against a group of hitters that included Brandon Belt, Chadwick Tromp and prospects Marco Luciano and Logan Wyatt.
Cueto didn’t have a defense and batters weren’t running the bases, so determining which batted balls would result in base hits and which ones would be tracked down by position players was guess work. It also wasn’t a priority for Cueto, who used Monday’s outing to increase his stamina and focus on improving the command of his pitches.
“I was working on all of my pitches, working on location and working on hitting the corners,” Cueto said.
Behind the Giants’ top two returning starters, DeSclafani would seem to be the best bet to pitch the third game of the season, but right-hander Logan Webb has pitched his way into the mix with a dominant spring.
The 24-year-old has made
significant strides and easily been the team’s top pitcher during Cactus League play. Webb has 10 strikeouts in six scoreless innings and will have another chance to boost his stock when he faces Cleveland in Goodyear on Wednesday.
Webb’s emergence has taken place at a good time for the Giants as Wood underwent an ablation for nerves in his back last week and might not be ready to start the season on the active roster. The Giants are confident Wood won’t need long to ramp back up after a noninvasive procedure, but he could be headed for a stint on the 10-day injured list.
The wildcard in the Giants’ plans is Sanchez, who made his first start of Cactus League play on Friday after pitching in a few simulated games earlier in March. The right-hander missed the entire 2020 season while recovering from shoulder surgery, but Zaidi and Co. gave him a one-year, $4 million deal to pitch out of the team’s rotation anyway.
Sanchez insists he’ll be ready to go by the beginning of the season, but there are always concerns about how a pitcher coming back from a major surgery will fare against big league hitters.
The Giants are well aware that the starting rotation could look quite different by the middle or end of the season than it will in April and have attempted to build up depth behind the top group of pitchers. Minor league free agents including Nick Tropeano, Shun Yamaguchi and Scott Kazmir are all stretched out to throw multiple innings with Tropeano looking like a front-runner to lock down a long relief job in the Opening Day bullpen.
Younger starting options including Conner Menez and Anthony Banda will likely open the season at TripleA while right-hander Tyler Beede, who is recovering from a March, 2020 Tommy John surgery, could be in the mix to join the Giants’ rotation as soon as June.