Before the 2021 season, I wrote an article titled “The Giants’ postseason hopes are tied to a boom-or-bust rotation.” It discussed the low floors and high ceilings of the pitchers the San Francisco Giants had assembled, from Aaron Sanchez and Johnny Cueto to Kevin Gausman and Alex Wood. Logan Webb got a mention in the same paragraph as Travis Blackley. The point was to show that the Giants had a low-floor, high-ceiling rotation, and they’d need to hit that high ceiling if they were going to contend.
There weren’t that many people yelling about the idea that they even had a chance at the postseason, but I’m sure “[Comment removed for violating Code of Conduct]” was doing a lot of work. You know what happened after that: The Giants took that boom-or-bust rotation and boomed their way to a division title, setting franchise records along the way.
This isn’t to take a weird victory lap several years later. One of the first columns I wrote for The Athletic in 2019 was titled “The Giants rotation is set, and it’s impossible to predict how it will fare.” Turns out it wasn’t really impossible. The rotation looked kind of janky, and it ended up being kind of janky. Madison Bumgarner made 34 starts and a lot of money that offseason, but Jeff Samardzija actually had the best season. After that there were a lot — and I mean a lot — of ERAs over 5.00.
Everything new is old again. The Giants have done it again, building an entire rotation out of inscrutable test cases and unpredictable pitchers. Even the steadiest of them all, the Opening Day starter and fan favorite, is tricky to analyze after last season.
The Giants’ projected five starters are all so unusual, in their own ways, that each deserves a boom-or-bust profile.
We’ll start with the pitcher who gives off more 2021 vibes than the other four combined: Robbie Ray.
Ray doesn’t give off 2021 vibes because that’s the season he won the Cy Young Award. He gives them off because that’s the year the Giants were relying on notable pitchers coming off injury-shortened seasons. Some of them ended up being very effective (Anthony DeSclafani, Wood), and some of them were ineffective (Aaron Sanchez, Scott Kazmir). The 2021 Giants couldn’t have done anything without some of them succeeding. The 2025 Giants will probably need Ray to be good if they’re going to do anything.
It could happen. Ray made seven starts with the Giants before he was shut down with a hamstring injury, and they were a mixed bag. In his first start back, he carved up the Dodgers for five no-hit innings, striking out nine. Less than a month later, he threw 39 pitches and got two outs in a disaster outing against the Braves. There was also a dominant start against the White Sox mixed in, but everyone reading this had a dominant start against the White Sox last season. Some of you had two.
Robbie Ray struck out 12.6 batters per nine innings in 2024. (Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)
The high points were high, though. Let’s look at starting pitchers with at least 30 innings last year, a cutoff that Ray barely squeaks over. Here are the pitchers with the highest percentage of swings and misses when batters offered at one of their pitches:
1. Blake Snell, 64.1 percent contact rate
2. Robbie Ray, 66.2
3. Grant Holmes, 68.6
4. (t) Dylan Cease, 69.3
4. (t) Garrett Crochet, 69.3
The pitchers just out of the top five were also very successful, whether during the season (Chris Sale, Cy Young Award winner) or offseason (Matthew Boyd). It’s hard to fake that kind of whiff rate, as it’s one of the fastest stats to stabilize. A larger sample size might have brought it down, but not by much. Note some of the pitchers who weren’t in the top 20. Paul Skenes was 29th. Corbin Burnes was 35th. Shohei Ohtani didn’t even record a single swing-and-miss as a pitcher last year, which makes you think.
The hamstring injury might be the only reason Ray is still on the Giants. His last start was Aug. 25, which means he probably would have had five or six starts remaining if he had stayed healthy. If he had a similar strikeout rate over those starts, he might have felt comfortable opting out of the two years and $50 million he had left on his contract. Consider that Boyd, a year older and without anything close to the same kind of career success as Ray, got two years and $29 million. Pitching ain’t cheap.
It’s the whiff rate that has the projections optimistic. ZiPS has him pitching only 108 and three-thirds innings*, but others have him throwing more, and all of them have him being reasonably effective. You have to be a serious grump to think he doesn’t belong in the middle of a major-league rotation this season. If he can keep missing bats like he did in his first seven Giants starts, there’s an argument for him to be toward the top of even a contender’s rotation.
* I know. Yell at Dan Szymborski and his computers, not me.
Those are the reasons for optimism. The reasons for pessimism are easy to list and impossible to ignore: He’s pitched 34 innings over the past two seasons because of a serious arm injury, and now he’s 33, a full three years removed from his Cy Young season. You can predict effectiveness when he’s on the mound, but you can’t predict how often he’ll be on the mound. Pitchers come back and thrive after Tommy John surgery all the time — Justin Verlander did it when he was 39 — but it’s not just the elbow that they have to worry about. The hamstring injury was a reminder that every part of Ray’s kinetic chain is suspect until there’s evidence that it isn’t. A full season can be problematic for the hips, shoulders, backs and legs of 33-year-old pitchers who didn’t miss most of the previous two seasons.
That might be overly dramatic, but if you look through the super-handy Tommy John Surgery Database, you’ll see 2,550 names (and counting), but only about 6 percent of those pitchers were Ray’s age or older*. There’s no point in listing all of those pitchers who were successful again. Some of them were, some of them weren’t, and one of them won the NL Cy Young Award just last year.
* One of them was a guy named Tommy John. Boy, what were the odds that he had to have the surgery?
The Sale example is helpful here, and not just as a best-case scenario. When he returned from a lengthy absence following his surgery, he got just a little time on the mound in July 2022, then had to be shut down again. In the following season, he wasn’t a Cy Young pitcher, but he was solid: He made 20 starts with a 4.30 ERA (106 ERA+), and he pitched 102 innings. That’s roughly what Ray’s projections are, albeit with about 10 to 30 fewer innings.
There’s always the freakish surgery-return season from Verlander to point to, but that’s an obvious outlier that won’t be topped until the nanobots are duct-taping ligaments back together in real-time. It might take another year to get the full Ray experience, if it’s even still in there. We really don’t know.
We do know, though, that Ray looked pretty darned good at times during his return. Good enough to shut down the Dodgers in his first game as a Giant, even. Now that the offseason is mostly over, it seems pretty clear that if the Giants are paying more than the market value for him, it’s not by much, and they should feel lucky to have him.
The difference between a stepping-stone season and an award-consideration season could be a major difference in how interesting the entire team is. Err on the side of caution, but keep a little cubby hole free for a speck of optimism. Sometimes pitchers boom, and sometimes they bust. The Giants have seen both from pitchers with a resume far less impressive than Ray’s.
(Top photo: Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)
