SAN FRANCISCO — Giants manager Gabe Kapler likes to use the phrase “read and react,” and that philosophy can help explain why the Giants’ outlook ahead of Tuesday’s 3 p.m. PT trade deadline has shifted, particularly in regards to pitching. What was once an excess of starting pitching depth has quickly turned into an area of scarcity. But while the Giants aren’t likely to ship out any of their arms, Farhan Zaidi said Monday, they aren’t in a hurry to pay a premium to go out and get any, either. Zaidi was speaking from inside the third-base dugout before the Giants’ series opener against the D-backs, and it took only a few hours for the team to prove his point. Turning to an opener for a third straight game, pitching wasn’t the problem in a 4-3 extra-innings loss to the D-backs (57-50), closing the gap in the wild-card standings to one game. “Our entire bullpen all the way through did a nice job,” Kapler said. “They just got more hits in the big moments and made a few more plays than us.”
With scheduled starter Alex Cobb unavailable with a stomach bug, Alex Wood and Jakob Junis combined to get the Giants (58-49) through five scoreless innings, while seven total San Francisco pitchers held Arizona to two runs until extras, when each inning starts with a runner on second base. The Giants weren’t able to push theirs across in the 11th, again coming up hitless with runners in scoring position as Joc Pederson, Blake Sabol and Patrick Bailey went down in order. The strong showing from Wood and Junis followed back-to-back wins over the Boston Red Sox, in which the Giants got nine innings of one-run ball from Sean Manaea and Ross Stripling. Add in the work of Junis and Wood on Monday, and that’s a 1.84 ERA from four pitchers thought to be on the outs of their rotation. As Wood said after Monday’s game, “everyone’s in the ‘pen now, pretty much.”
Having logged the most relief innings in the majors this season, Junis made his first “start” and faced only one more than the minimum through the first three innings. Wood served as the bridge to the core of a bullpen that has been the best in the majors since the start of May, not allowing a hit until his 11th and final batter. Credited with both of Arizona’s runs before extras, Wood said he felt “really, really good” in an encouraging sign for the Giants’ pitching prospects. “Tonight was the best my stuff has been in a while,” Wood said. “I felt like even working through everything the past couple of weeks, it was just a matter of time until I hit my stride.”
Zaidi confirmed other teams have inquired about their pitchers, including Wood and Junis. While he said it was once an option they were open to, circumstances have changed with injuries to Anthony DeSclafani (flexor strain), Keaton Winn (elbow soreness), Kyle Harrison (hamstring strain) and Carson Whisenhunt (elbow strain). “We’re kind of in a different position than we were a week ago,” Zaidi said. “It’s less likely that we explore something there. It kind of feels right now that we have just enough pitching to be comfortable and have some options, but we’ll see what happens.”
Getting quality work out of Wood and Junis and the rest of the pitchers at the fringes of their staff — Manaea, Stripling, Tristan Beck — is all the more important given the recent attrition to injuries. While the Giants are more optimistic about Harrison and Winn, DeSclafani and Whisenhunt may not pitch again this season. “It’s kind of a wakeup call how easily that pitching depth can evaporate,” Zaidi said.
While Zaidi was quick to note that the opener strategy wasn’t a “core philosophy we’re trying to champion,” why mess with a good thing? Overworking the bullpen is one concern, but the Giants’ loss was only their fifth in 19 games this season not using a traditional starter. “A lot of that has come from the ability to feature our bullpen, which has been a strength of the team,” Zaidi said. “If there’s a way to manage a game where we get quality out of the starting pitchers like we did this weekend but also feature our bullpen, which is really effective especially when put in good matchups, that’s just a good way for us to win ballgames. Weighing that flexibility and the ability to feature our ‘pen against bringing in a starter who we’d kind of be locked in to, I’m not sure there’s a starter who we could win seven out of their last nine starts, 14-4 (overall) with openers. It’s a pretty good formula for us.”
In a playoff series, Logan Webb is starting Game 1 and Alex Cobb is taking the ball in Game 2. But a typical playoff rotation features three or four starters, not two. Who would get the nods in Games 3 and 4? Kapler didn’t rule out the possibility of bullpen games and bulk-inning pitchers in the postseason. “A regular season game isn’t exactly like a postseason game, but it’s pretty close,” he said. “If you have a guy that gives you three innings of work and throws up zeroes, that puts you in a pretty good position to win the rest of the game. Hypothetically, you throw up zeroes in the first couple innings of a game and you have a bullpen that you know is not going to go back-to-back-to-back because of the offdays in the playoffs, you could do some cool things there.”
The bigger priority ahead of Tuesday’s deadline, evidenced by their trade for veteran outfielder A.J. Pollock and utilityman Mark Mathias, is lengthening their lineup. In their final game of July, the Giants managed only two runs in regulation, which did nothing to improve upon their average of 3.3 per game this month, already the lowest in the majors. They ended the month with a .212 batting average and a .639 OPS, both ranking 30th out of 30 teams. Wilmer Flores continued to swing a hot bat — the Giants’ only one at the moment — driving his sixth homer of the month (14th of the season) over the left-field wall in the third inning, but the Giants continued to struggle to string together rallies. A double down the right field line in the fourth from Patrick Bailey put Blake Sabol in position to score the Giants’ only other run until extras on a sacrifice fly from Brandon Crawford. It took a wild pitch from Arizona reliever Kevin Ginkel for the Giants to even the score in the bottom of the 10th after Arizona pushed its automatic runner across against Scott Alexander in the top half. Crawford, the Giants’ automatic runner, advanced to third on a groundout from Isan Díaz and raced home when a two-strike slider got away from Ginkel and catcher Carson Kelly. Another pitch got past Kelly in the 11th, allowing Casey Schmitt to make it third base with one out. But Sabol struck out, and Bailey grounded out to second to end the game.