SAN FRANCISCO — Rookie left-hander Kyle Harrison watched in admiration as Logan Webb strode out of the dugout in the ninth inning Wednesday night. Harrison listened to the ovation Webb received from a near-sellout crowd in China Basin. He saw the determination on Webb’s face as the San Francisco Giants right-handed rotation anchor took the mound with a 1-0 lead, 96 pitches on his odometer, and the unspoken confidence from his manager that he was still the best option on the staff to close out a desperately needed victory.
But mostly, Harrison heard Webb’s walk-out music — the same breezy bars of Andre Nickatina’s “Killer Whale” that welcomed Webb to the mound barely 110 minutes earlier when he threw the game’s first pitch. And that struck Harrison as the coolest thing ever.
“I mean, who doesn’t want to hear their walkup song twice?” Harrison said. “He’s one of the only guys who can stay in the game that long and be that dominant. It’s a credit to him and all the work he puts in. He sets an example for all the other guys in the rotation to try to get to that point.”
It’s the best rotation in baseball, at least by proclamation of Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi, who cited confidence in his fully assembled starting staff as the reason that he didn’t orchestrate a selloff from a roster that was two games under .500 at Tuesday’s trade deadline.
It’s a rotation that includes former Cy Young Award winners Blake Snell and Robbie Ray in addition to Harrison and fellow rookie Hayden Birdsong, two young pitchers whose confidence is rising along with their strikeout stuff.
It’s also a rotation that continues to be fronted by Webb, one of the most durable and bankable pitchers in the major leagues. You do not worry about Webb’s innings piling up or his pitch counts soaring. There are no rehab protocols or guidelines to follow.
Nearly every starting pitcher in baseball takes the mound with a series of restrictions that require special permission to override. Webb keeps it simple. He will always want the baseball. He will almost always be the best option to throw the next inning. He defaults to set-it-and-forget-it mode so often that he could be the featured product in a Ron Popeil infomercial.
But wait! There’s more!
Webb is also just like any other pitcher. He is capable of a really, really crummy month. And he finished up one of his worst on Wednesday, making his final start in July after he posted a 6.65 ERA in his previous four outings, yielded 32 hits in 23 innings, and sought a reliable soulmate for his two-seam fastball. If Webb couldn’t right his own ship, then it wouldn’t matter how much confidence the rest of the rotation inspired. The Giants would be sure to take on water at a time when they’d already flooded more than one compartment.
So on a night when the Giants’ offensive output against Ross Stripling and three Oakland A’s relievers amounted to Brett Wisely’s sacrifice fly in the fifth inning, Webb did what he’s done best since emerging as one of the league’s best pitchers in 2021. He bailed everyone out.
Webb threw his third career complete game and his second shutout, rediscovering the form on his changeup while holding the A’s to five hits and a walk as the Giants avoided what would have been a disastrous two-game sweep in this Bay Bridge interleague series. Webb gave up a seeing-eye single to Abraham Toro with two outs in the ninth but followed by getting Seth Brown to ground out on his 106th pitch.
The game clocked in at one hour, 55 minutes — the fastest nine-inning Giants game in 17 years and tied for the second fastest in 25 seasons at their waterfront ballpark.
“I think we can all appreciate that,” Giants catcher Patrick Bailey said.
Nothing was stopping Logan tonight! pic.twitter.com/vuVYFGYYO6
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) August 1, 2024
Bailey and Giants pitching coach Bryan Price noted that the A’s were ultra aggressive the previous night when they hit three home runs off Ray and chased him in the fifth inning. They sought to combat that aggressiveness by throwing a heavy mix of changeups, and Webb was able to replicate his familiar depth on the pitch. He threw 54 of them, which was just more than half his pitch total. Among those that tumbled out of the strike zone, the A’s swung 47 percent of the time. It was Webb’s highest changeup usage since his third start of the season on April 7. Opponents had been hitting .303 against the pitch and slugging .407 percent — 100 points higher than last year, when by Run Value, it ranked as the most effective offspeed pitch in the major leagues.
Webb had turned to his slider, a pitch that has more horizontal movement than previous seasons, to complement his fastball. But if he wanted to pitch to his high standards, the changeup had to return at some point.
“Not only was it getting groundballs, it was getting swings-and-misses,” Giants manager Bob Melvin said. “His movement was back today: backdoor sinkers, changeups going straight down. He’s been using his slider or sweeper or whatever we’re calling it these days a little more. But the changeup has been his bread and butter and he leans on it.”
Webb leaned on it when he once again found himself in a first-inning jam after giving up hits to two of the first three hitters he faced. With runners at the corners, Webb had to go through Brent Rookier and Shea Langeliers, who have 46 home runs between them. The right-hander got ahead with two-seamers and changeups and located on a pair of called third strikes to escape.
His approach there?
“The approach was, ‘Really? You’re going to do this again?’” Webb said of his first-inning struggles. “Those are two very good hitters too. I got extra locked in. Just had to put my head down and get out of that inning as best as I could.”
The A’s advanced just one runner into scoring position the rest of the way. When Webb walked off the mound in the eighth inning, he filed past Melvin at the dugout steps. The manager didn’t motion for a handshake. That was all the communication required.
“I let him walk right by,” said Melvin, who was going to stick with Webb until the game ended or the A’s scored a run in the ninth. “If he had any problems, he would’ve said something. Bryan (Price) went by and checked on him real quick. But he was going out. And I was hoping he wanted to go back out.”
With no special permissions to override.
Even when you lead the purported best rotation in the major leagues, it’s no longer a prerequisite for an ace to go the distance. Webb’s nine-inning complete game was just the 20th in the big leagues this season. There are 17 teams who haven’t received one all year. But when you are relying so heavily on your rotation to carry you to September relevance, it helps to have the occasional night when a starting pitcher can carry you through to the handshake line. And Webb is the Giants’ only pitcher capable of providing that kind of full-service effort.
Snell, for all his two Cy Young Awards and his 15-strikeout dominance in his outing Saturday, has never thrown a pitch in the ninth inning. (He’s faced only 12 hitters in his career after the seventh inning.) Ray, for all his dominance while winning the AL Cy Young Award in Toronto in 2021, threw his only career complete game when he was a 25-year-old with the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2017, and it’d be the shock of shocks if he goes the distance this year while coming back from reconstructive left-elbow surgery. That leaves Harrison and Birdsong, two rookies who take inspiration from Webb but are very much products of their era.
The Giants needed more than a solid performance from a starting pitcher Wednesday. They needed the rotation to inspire them — and to begin to prove that Zaidi wasn’t spouting hyperbole.
What did Webb think of Zaidi’s pronouncement?
“We think that, too,” Webb said. “We have to think that. We believe in ourselves, all five of us, and it’s a vote of confidence, not trading Blake, which wasn’t news to me. I didn’t think that was ever going to happen.
“I don’t think I’m the only one capable of (throwing complete games), honestly. But either way, I just think it’s great to have a mix of different guys. I mean, there’s a lot of times I wish I could strike out 10-plus like those other guys do. So it’s kind of a perfect balance, to be honest.”
Almost as balanced as hearing the same music at the start and finish of the quickest night of Giants baseball in nearly two decades.
“Yeah, pretty cool,” Harrison said. “It’s pretty cool to be in that rotation and hear that comment. And yeah, I do think it’s one of the best rotations in baseball. It’s on me and Birdie to keep up with these guys going the distance. We might have to score one run and squeak out a win that way. The pressure’s on us, but we’re ready for it.”
Harrison pointed to Webb’s locker.
“And that’s the guy who’s going to lead us.”
(Photo: Kelley L Cox / USA Today)
