When the Giants signed him in July of 2017, Casey Kelly was not a particularly distinguished minor league pitcher. He was coming off 60 thoroughly adequate innings for the Iowa Cubs, in which he’d posted a 4.65 ERA. He’d been good the year before, with the Gwinnett Braves, putting up a 3.53 ERA, but hadn’t quite gotten it going in the majors, giving the Atlanta Braves 21.2 forgettable innings of 5.82 ball.
Kelly had been a first round pick, but by the time he made it to the Giants organization, that was 9 years in the rear view mirror. He’d been a top-50 prospect too, but even that had been 4 years earlier. He was, at that point, just a minor league starter. With the Giants, by and large, that’s how it went for him. In 7 starts for the River Cats in 2017, he threw 41 innings with a 4.17 ERA; the next year, still in Sacramento, he threw 136 innings with a 4.76 ERA.
In August of 2018, Kelly got called up to the Giants, where he proceeded to pitch reasonably well, if unspectacularly. During the offseason, he was DFAd and signed with the LG Twins of the KBO, where he’s made a very nice career for himself and seems happy.
The Giants could desperately use a Casey Kelly right now.
In those 2017 starts, Kelly averaged just under 6 innings per start. In 2018, his average was 5 2/3 innings per start. Not only is no one on the 2024 River Cats averaging 5 innings per start, they don’t have anyone who’s much higher than 4 innings per start. It’s no wonder, then, that as the Giants starting rotation has gotten decimated with injuries, they haven’t been able to find anyone from the minors who can start a game and eat innings. Spencer Howard has done well, which has helped the team out a lot (especially last night), but he’s not throwing 5 innings every fifth day.
Why do the Giants have such a conspicuous lack of pitchers like Kelly? I picked Casey Kelly because I remember him well, but he’s not the only one. They also had Robert Coello, and Michael Roth, and late career Kevin Correia, and Daniel Camarena. In 2021, they had Scott Kazmir, Matt Shoemaker, and Logan Ondrusek. This is a big part of what AAA has historically been for: you sign veteran pitchers who want another chance, and the deal is, if you need a starter, he’ll get the chance, and he probably won’t do much with it, and then you’ll DFA him.
To be fair here, the Giants do have Tommy Romero in Sacramento. Romero has been entirely used as a starter or long reliever this year, fairly successfully, and could certainly be viewed as an option to eat some major league innings. They also signed Daulton Jefferies during the offseason, and he made two extremely unsuccessful appearances with the big league team before getting DFA’d and traded to the Pirates.
But Romero, as far as I can find, is the only River Cats starting pitcher this season who’s recorded an out in the sixth inning (he has done it once, on June 9th against Albuquerque, when he went 6.2 scoreless innings). Considering the horrifically desperate need of the big league team to get innings out of its rotation, this isn’t going to address their needs. Like Roger Munter pointed out in his mailbag this morning, the Giants bullpen is already leaking gas and we’re not out of June yet. Like I pointed out in this space a month ago, there was no way this team can maintain both their current level of bullpen usage and what was at the time a high level of bullpen performance. And hey, look at that, the bullpen’s fallen apart in June. What are the odds?
(Please ignore that the answer to the central question of that last link, Could The Giants Actually Be Good, is a resounding no)
So the Giants need starters who can give them innings, they have one at most, and, considering he’s been very up-and-down over the last month, probably wouldn’t feel great about calling him up anyway. They have prospects in Sacramento, but it would be premature to call them up, and you’d likely be left with a Mason Black scenario, where they get bitten by the second time through the order penalty (the cooler, more modern cousin of the third time through the order penalty).
The question then becomes how did they get here? How did they get here and how do they avoid getting here next year?
The answer to how they got here is optimization. The Giants have, for several years now, watched starters flounder, and then turned them into relievers. Among prospects, Sean Hjelle is certainly the most prominent recent example, but just last year they did it in the majors with Alex Wood and Ross Stripling. Caleb Baragar had been a starter in Richmond, and then the team turned him into a big league reliever for a couple years, and cut bait in 2021 before his disastrous peripherals came back to bite him.
In each of these cases, it’s easy to understand why the team made the decision they did. Consider Hjelle. He was drafted as a starter and was a starter up through AAA, but it wasn’t working. So the team turned him into a reliever, nad he’s had a great year. Outstanding. The problem is, the team needs a competent starter way more than it needs a shutdown reliever. Was turning into a reliever the only thing that made Hjelle a good big league pitcher? He was a reliever last year in the majors, and the year before, and it didn’t go well.
What if Hjelle’s new cutter would have also played as a starter? What if it took him a long time to figure out how to control his lanky body and his improved control would have translated well to the rotation? Would it be worth it to give up Sean Hjelle, Excellent Reliever if you knew what you were getting in return was Sean Hjelle, Competent Starter? For this team, it might. But we’ll never know if that trade is on the table, because the team optimized him. They didn’t take the risk of keeping him starting because they thought they could get more out of him as a bullpen arm. Maybe they’re right! But it leaves the team right here.
This could also be a function of how the game has changed. Maybe hitters are so much better now that it’s untenable to pitch 5 innings with reduced stuff, instead of 2 innings at the top of your game. Jordan Hicks would seem to be a counterpoint to that example, but Jordan Hicks is also coming back to Earth a bit after his great start. Mayeb the team feels that competing is great, and heart is great, and guts are great, but none of them compare with throwing 97 because it’s a lot easier to hit the gutsy pitcher’s one mistake than it is to hit a fast two-seamer with tons of late movement.
Maybe the game is just changing in ways that are both aesthetically unpleasant and that lead to increased pitcher injuries. Maybe teaching everyone to throw a hard sweeper that will blow their arm out in two years is the best way to get outs today, so you live with the consequences. Maybe you’re so much likelier to give up a homer when your fastball sits at 93 that it’s not worth making the majors, compared with the guy who throws 98 and occasionally it’s in the strike zone. And maybe the Giants just don’t have the organizational talent to combat these trends this year.
But this is the third straight year in which the team didn’t have enough starting pitching depth, and is having to lean too hard on their bullpen. I know it worked in 2021, but everything worked in 2021, and at some point that has to stop being the baseline for how you build a baseball team. The Giants have to make it a priority to have starters in the upper minors who can step in to save the bullpen. Otherwise, you get this, and this isn’t good enough. Where have you gone, Casey Kelly? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
(He’s gone to Korea. Please don’t take that literally.)
Maestro - If their coaches can't even teach their starting pitchers to hold runners on first base, why do you hold such other loftier expectations of them?
Where have you gone, Kirk a-Reuter, Oh? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
See what you've done?
What we need is a bridge over troubled starters