Over their last three bullpen games, the Giants had been flying high. They gave up four runs (three earned) to the Dodgers, then one run to the Cubs, and then one run to the Dodgers. Five earned runs in all, with one coming on a ninth inning Albert Pujols homer in a situation where a home run was just as bad as a walk.
But still. 27 innings of bullpen game, five earned runs. A 1.67 ERA. This thing was working!
The Giants gave up five runs in their first two innings last night.
They didn’t do anything differently, didn’t surprise anyone with their assignment. Dominic Leone started, just like he did in the last three games. He was followed by Jarlin Garcia and Zack Littell, just like in the last two games. Those three had done so well for three straight bullpen games, and last night they did not do so well.
You can blame them if you want, complain about how they didn’t do their job, say that they didn’t give the team a chance. Those things are true, but they miss the point. Bullpens aren’t designed to eat 9 innings two out of every five days. Guys get tired. Guys don’t get tired, but they don’t have their crisp stuff, but they have to pitch anyway because there aren’t that many pitchers. Things go wrong. The next day, with a tired bullpen, more things go wrong. The problems compound.
The Giants are in this spot partly due to necessity, and partly due to poor depth at starting pitcher. When the season started, they had Kevin Gausman, Anthony DeSclafani, Alex Wood, Johnny Cueto, and Aaron Sanchez penciled in the rotation, with Logan Webb ready to step in when someone got hurt, which happened immediately when Wood went on the IL before the season even started. They had Tyler Beede, who was going to start rehabbing in Sacramento and hopefully regain his form from Spring Training 2020. They had Scott Kazmir in AAA, and Conner Menez, and Nick Tropeano and Shun Yamaguchi. Someone on the farm would be useful.
No one on the farm was useful.
Kazmir could go a coupe innings, but fell apart when asked to really stretch out. Menez never got it going, Tropeano was a reliever who was quickly DFA’d after a short stint on the roster, and most of Yamaguchi’s AAA starts were awful. They have since signed a few more veterans to minor league deals, namely Matt Shoemaker and Logan Ondrusek, but likely no one who they want to use a 40-man spot on, since that would entail getting rid of a player more likely to help in the future. They’ve picked up Jose Quintana, but don’t seem to view him as a candidate to start (or even be a bulk innings guy in) these games. There’s no one left to call on.
They’re stuck, then, with what they have. And if you roll the dice often enough, sometimes they’ll come up with a 4 when you needed a 5, and then your opponent rolls and gets to move to a Roll Again space, and then rolls again and gets a Triple Word Score, and then rolls again and wins $50 for coming in first place in a beauty pageant, and, uh…
Snake eyes! I should have just said snake eyes. Damn it, me. Just messed up a gimme metaphor.
The problem with throwing out most of your bullpen is that if something goes wrong, you don’t have a lot of options to fix it. Someone’s just going to have to pitch through it. There aren’t enough pitchers to only rely on the best ones. You have to rely on all of them. Not all of them are going to be 100% reliable every day, so sometimes it’ll go badly.
The good news is that Alex Wood is relatively close to coming back, and Johnny Cueto also threw on the field for the first time since getting hurt. The bad news is that they’re not particularly reliable either. For all the hemming and hawing that I’ve been doing about the bullpen games, Wood has fallen apart the second and, especially, third times through the order, and Cueto has just generally fallen apart in the second half of the season.
There is no simple, obvious answer for what the Giants should do, but that lack of an answer extends to the bullpen games. As much as Wood and Cueto might not be the answer, neither is the Leone/Garcia/Littell three-headed monster to start the game. The Giants have gotten by with depth all year. The one place they don’t have it is at starting pitcher, and it’s catching up to them.