What to make of Giants' pitching problem, and Jorge Soler

The Giants Have A Pitching Problem

If the Giants were going to be a successful baseball team in 2024, the pitching staff was going to have to be a big reason for that. When the season started, the Giants had a rotation of Logan Webb, Blake Snell, Kyle Harrison and Jordan Hicks with Robbie Ray and Alex Cobb waiting in the wings. On paper, it is a rotation that absolutely could have been the foundation of a playoff-bound season. From the start, I’ve said this rotation could be VERY dangerous in a short playoff series.

Baseball is not played on paper, though. It is played on the field. And so far, the Giants rotation, as good as it appears on paper, has not brought that success to the field. Webb has been great, looking every bit like the Top-3 Cy Young finisher he was last year. After that, it gets dicey.

Harrison has been up and down, but overall, it has been an encouraging season for the 22-year-old lefty.  Hicks looks like one of the best signings of the offseason, in stark contrast to the signing of Snell, which looks like one of the worst signings in Giants free agent history this side of Barry Zito.

With regards to Harrison and Hicks, performance is not the concern so much as it is workload. Harrison has thrown 77.1 innings so far this season, and was just placed on the 15-day Injured List after rolling his ankle during a weightlifting session this weekend. He has never thrown more than 113 innings in a professional season, which came in 2022 while pitching for the Eugene Emeralds (High-A ball) and Richmond Flying Squirrels (Double-A ball).

Hicks, in his first year as a full-time starter, is at 71.2 innings, six innings shy of his career high that he set in his rookie season in 2018. He was touched up for 3 runs in 4.2 innings in his start last week against the Astros, though he said he was not concerned about his workload after the game.

But at some point, the Giants will have to be realistic about the workload they are placing on these pitchers. And it will be a herculean task for Giants manager Bob Melvin to pull the right strings in keeping his starters fresh.

“We're always going to push through where the earnings limit for these guys,” Melvin said before Friday night’s game against the Angels. “How much, that was kind of what we're trying to decide.”

The good news for Melvin and the Giants is they do have an ace – well, two aces, really – and Cobb up their sleeve, which can help alleviate the innings crunch.

“We always felt like Cobb would be back and Robbie [Ray] would be back,” Melvin said. “Certainly, Blake hasn't pitched as much. At some point in time, we'll probably be able to get some of these guys a break but at this point in time, they feel good.”

Getting Ray, the 2021 Cy Young winner working his way back from Tommy John surgery, should help. Giants broadcaster Dave Flemming suggested this week on The Morning Roast that Ray could debut in the Giants rotation as early as the week after the All-Star Break. And anything the Giants can get from Cobb, at age 36 and coming off an All-Star appearance of his own last year, would be a welcome bonus.

But Snell, simply put, has to provide not just more innings, but higher quality innings. The Giants have not won a game that was started by Snell or a pitcher filling in for his spot in the rotation.

This leads into another glaring issue that the Giants have to deal with: bullpen usage. While Webb can be counted on to get the Giants six or seven innings per start, none of the other starters are much of a guarantee to get this team more than 15 outs per game. And that creates a situation where the bullpen now has to shoulder an even greater workload.

Last year, the Giants bullpen threw the third-most innings in the first half of the season and sported a respectable 3.80 ERA, 11th-best in MLB. That workload began to rear its ugly head in the second half of the season, as the pen threw a league-leading 326 innings due, in part, to a heavy amount of bullpen games, and sported a second-half ERA of 4.05, still the 12th best in the majors, but a noticeable rise that contributed (among other things) to the Giants’ lackluster final two months of the 2023 season.

This year, a similar trend is developing. The Giants, through 71 games, have thrown the second-most innings from their bullpen at 283.2 innings, behind only the Milwaukee Brewers at 290 innings. The Giants bullpen has a 4.16 ERA, good for 19th best in baseball.

“It's been a lot,” Melvin said Sunday when I asked him about the bullpen workload. “We do have some guys coming back that should be able to combat that now until they're actually back here, it's going to probably look the same.

“It's just where we are. Not much you can do about it. You do the best you can and hope some of these guys that are on their way back come back sooner or later and in the second half we don't have to deal with what we had to in the first half.”

The season is far from lost, this poor weekend showing against the Angels notwithstanding. Melvin is correct in saying that there will be reinforcements coming. But the Giants are in a precarious place right now at a time when the schedule is setting up well for them to start putting more wins on the board. But pitching was supposed to be a foundational strength of this team. Right now, it is looking like their Achilles Heel.

To Believe or Not, in Jorge Soler

I want to believe in Jorge Soler. I truly do. And that belief could possibly be paying off. In the four-game stretch covering the Giants series vs the Astros and the Friday night series opener against the Angels, Soler reached base 10 times: 4 hits, 5 walks and a hit by pitch. In the 12 games prior to that stretch, he reached base 10 times, only once off a walk.

“He looks a lot more balanced,” Melvin said Friday evening about Soler when I asked if he feels that the Giants slugger had turned a corner. “He's taking some pitches where he's not off balance so forth. He's getting some good swings again. There have been a couple times we felt like he was right on the verge and then maybe had a step back but it feels like his bat is consistent right now, certainly drawing a lot of walks and making them throw a lot of pitches and getting on base.”

As of writing this, Soler took former Giant Hunter Strickland deep to left field for a three-run shot that gave the Giants an 8-2 lead over the Angels for his 8th homer of the year. Believe it or not, that was the second time he hit a home run with runners on base this season. The other time was back on April 27th against Pittsburgh Pirates reliever David Bednar in the bottom of the 10th inning. The runner, Patrick Bailey, was the Rob Manfred Ghost Runner.

After Sunday’s 13-6 win, Soler cited his ability to lay off the pitches low and out of the zone for his ability to feel more locked in at the plate.

“I've been able to get on base in the last few games and my whole perspective is just to make sure that to continue to that,” Soler said through Giants translator Erwin Higueros. “I'm not [chasing] pitches outside the strike zone, I'm seeing the pitches better. So that's helped me a lot.”

The Giants continue to be stuck at and around the .500 mark and have an offense that is lackluster more often than not. Soler was signed to provide a level of power that the Giants have not had consistently since the days of Barry Bonds. Time will tell if this recent hot streak from Soler is just that, a hot streak, or if he is finally emerging from his early season funk to become the slugger the Giants signed him to be.