The season isn’t over, so take this with a grain of salt, but the San Francisco Giants’ season ended over the weekend. Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs have different methodologies for their postseason odds, which leads to discrepancies and wide gaps in the middle of a season, but they slowly converge toward the end of every season. The Giants’ postseason odds are 0.3 percent at the former site and 0.2 percent at the latter. You can rummage around for the Jim Carrey GIF if you’d like, but you have better things to do.
As the Giants faced this scenario in the weekend series against the Los Angeles Dodgers — not exactly do-or-die, win or go home, but close enough — they started Kai-Wei Teng and Trevor McDonald in two of the three games. This isn’t a complaint directed toward Bob Melvin or Buster Posey. Them’s the options. And it’s not where the Giants expected to be.
To his credit, McDonald pitched like someone who belongs. There’s a half-baked article in my head about how someone like him needs to get away from the automated ball-strike system in Triple A and pitch to a catcher who can frame the heck out of his sinkers, with a major-league defense behind him. He’s not getting this kind of defensive help in Sacramento:
Teng struck out six of the 15 batters he faced, but he also hit three batters and walked two. He has some of the nastiest, weirdest movement on his pitches you’ve ever seen, with absolutely zero guarantees that they will go where he wants them to. At this point, it’s probably healthier to think of him like a knuckleballer. Could win the Cy Young when he’s 37, could be pitching for Fortitudo Bologna by this time next season, with an infinite number of possibilities in between. You tell me.
Regardless of each pitcher’s future, which is still very much in question, one thing that’s certain is that neither pitcher was supposed to be a part of the present. Teng was designated for assignment over the offseason and re-signed as a minor-league free agent. McDonald was somewhere between 10th and 15th on the depth chart on Opening Day, depending on your personal rankings. They started games the Giants absolutely needed to win, and it wasn’t anyone’s fault, necessarily. Just one of those baseball things.
We can learn from this. “A team can never have too much starting pitching,” is an old baseball truism, except it doesn’t apply to the first two or three weeks of the season. When the 2025 Giants began their season roughly 70 years ago, they had too much starting pitching. They had so much starting pitching that it was going to force young players into unfamiliar roles, and some of those roles might not be ideal for their individual development. What else could the team do, though? It was a good problem to have.
It doesn’t take much for a team to go from that description to the September realities the Giants are facing. Here’s what happened to the starting pitchers who were on the 40-man roster when the season started:
Performed as expected
• Logan Webb
• Robbie Ray
• Justin Verlander
Traded
• Kyle Harrison
Hurt
• Landen Roupp
• Keaton Winn
Ineffective in majors but some success in minors
• Carson Seymour
• Tristan Beck
Ineffective in minors but some success in majors
• Trevor McDonald
Ineffective in majors and minors
• Mason Black
• Carson Ragsdale
Effective in majors until he wasn’t, currently ineffective in minors — look, it’s complicated (don’t forget that his development was accelerated)
• Hayden Birdsong
Since then, the Giants have added Carson Whisenhunt to the 40-man roster, so feel free to add him to the “hurt” section. They’ve also removed Ragsdale, who was claimed off waivers by the Baltimore Orioles (since lost to the Atlanta Braves), but Teng was added back to the roster as a nice, clean replacement for the “ineffective” section.
This is an extremely normal range of outcomes for a group of pitchers, especially if you further separate them into “proven” and “unproven,” with only Webb, Ray and Verlander in the proven category. Now you’re left with young pitchers, and some of them will get hurt, become ineffective or both. That’s what young pitchers will do, all right? I thought I was being eminently reasonable when I listed 11 homegrown pitchers and hoped three of them might be shoo-ins for the rotation next season. Turns out there will likely be just two shoo-ins, and one of them is Webb. And that’s if Roupp sails through next spring as the shoo-in he appears to be.
If this feels like a dog-bites-man story, that’s because it is. Young pitchers are erratic, film at 11. But I’m writing this for myself. I want something to read when I get the urge to write another article about a team’s enviable pitching depth. Because, you see, this isn’t the first time this has happened. Here’s an incomplete list of pitchers I’ve written about as depth, which means there was an unspoken assumption in my brain that all of them were just one hot month away from getting called up and becoming rotation mainstays:
• Ryan Murphy
• Nick Swiney
• Nick Zwack
• Thomas Szapucki
• Shaun Anderson
• Matt Frisbee (no relation)
• Wil Jensen
• Ljay Newsome
I don’t remember some of them, either, but they were organizational depth at some point. I referenced Beck as an option … back in 2021. He’ll still be trying to stick in the majors when the 2026 season starts. That’s a perfect median example of what organizational depth can bring, if only because we still don’t know. It sure is there. But is it helpful depth? Or, more importantly, is it helpful on demand?
This is the season that clarifies the difference. The Giants started the season with an embarrassment of riches in the rotation, and they ended the season by trying not to get embarrassed by the rotation. There are extenuating circumstances and yeah-buts all over the place, but the facts are clear: The Giants’ incredible preseason stockpile of starting pitching didn’t help them make the postseason.
Let’s remember this in the future. And by “let us,” what I mean is that I’m tying a piece of string around my pinkie, where it will remain until April 2045. It’s there to remind me of the newly formed Theory of One Dozen Triple-A Pitchers, which goes like this:
For every 10 minor-league pitchers with enough talent to start the season in a Triple-A rotation, between zero and one of them will actually help in the majors when they’re called upon. Plan for zero.
The Giants’ success story out of the preseason bunch has been Roupp. He sports a 3.80 ERA, which is perfectly fine for a pitcher’s first full major-league season, but that also includes a pair of blow-up starts (a combined 10 earned runs in 5 1/3 innings). Before that, he was pitching exceptionally well, pitching into the sixth inning with some regularity. He should be a part of the rotation next year, assuming he looks just as effective in the Cactus League.
And that’s it. That’s the success story out of the Triple-A depth. You can go back to earlier seasons and find the same thing, even when you’re talking about top-100 prospects. The Giants got some success out of Birdsong in 2024, but successes from previous seasons are non-transferable. Birdsong will be a member of a similar glut of Triple-A-quality-or-higher pitchers next season, too. And possibly the season after that and the season after that. He might be the breakout star of one of them. He might be the one baby turtle that makes it to the sea, so to speak. Or he might slip further down the depth chart.
The specific players aren’t important. Just remember when you’re looking at a vast catalog of potential major-league starters, you’ll get help from exactly one of them … unless you get no help at all. Sometimes an organization’s depth will give it a Chris Heston circa 2015, and sometimes it’ll give it a Chris Heston circa 2016 and beyond. But it will give it a maximum of one success story for that season, with the definition of success being “pretty OK or better.”
This isn’t a breakup letter to the idea of building organizational depth — you still gotta try — but a breakup letter to the idea of looking at a roster early in the season and assuming a team will have the arms to make it through the rough patches. It will not have the arms. It will get one arm to help if it’s lucky. That one arm can be Logan Webb in 2021, a pitcher with almost enough juice to carry the team to a pennant or championship, so this isn’t an overly pessimistic theory of depth. It’s just a realistic one.
If the Giants want to prove me wrong by graduating an entire rotation of aces next season, they’re welcome to do so. Until then, here’s a way to keep your sanity during the long, long baseball season: Excited about the embarrassment of starting pitchers on the depth chart? Don’t be. One of them might help.
The rest you’ll have to figure out on your own, on the fly, sometimes in a must-win series against your historic rivals. In some ways, it was the most predictable predicament in the world.
(Photo: Jayne Kamin-Oncea / Imagn Images)