I don’t want to shock you with my controversial opinions, but the Giants haven’t had a good bullpen this year.
Ah, sorry, I should have warned you to put your monocle down before you read that sentence. That’s my bad. You can bill me for the replacement; I’m good for it.
On Opening Day, the team had a bullpen very heavy on the lefties. They only had three right-handers, and one of them, Reyes Moronta, went on the IL pretty quickly, leaving the team with Tyler Rogers, Matt Wisler, and absolutely no one who could throw the ball hard in order to strike dudes out. What could they do?
They could call up guys from the minors, is what they could do. First, on April 16, they called up Camilo Doval, and then, on April 22, it was Gregory Santos’s turn. Both featured excellent stuff, nigh-unhittable when located correctly. Both had had standout springs. Both had skipped the entire upper minors, with Santos’s highest level reached before 2021 being Low-A and Doval’s High-A.
Both have gotten hit hard.
Santos had an excellent first appearance and then gave up 5 earned runs in his next 2 appearances (1 inning pitched) for an overall ERA of 22.50. Doval was unscored upon in 4 of his 5 appearances in April, but when May came around he fell apart. Santos got optioned to AAA, and Doval would likely be there if the Giants had any other right-handed options on the 40-man other than Santos and Kervin Castro, himself wildly inexperienced and faltering badly in AAA.
These growing pains are to be expected when pitchers skip important developmental levels. In 2019, Doval had a 3.83 ERA at San Jose, which is perfectly respectable, but it came with a 5.4 BB/9, an unacceptable number in the majors, much less three levels down. Santos made eight starts for Augusta that year and did well, but he only struck out 6.8 guys per 9 innings, a number that is way too low, considering his electric stuff.
They have a lot to learn. They always had a lot to learn, and they never got time to learn it, and now they’re in the majors and that lack of education is being badly exposed.
Maybe the worst part is how unfairly high expectations were around both of them after their first games in the majors. Here are some of the things fans said about Doval after his debut:
Maybe that’s not fair. They’re just fans! They’re supposed to be irrationally optimistic. What about the professionals?
The hype on Doval was irresistible. He looked absolutely dominant, and poised, and he knew how to pitch, and he was going to be a big part of the Giants’ future.
It’s been a month, and he’s turned out to be a young reliever with good stuff and iffy command. We’ve never seen one of those before!
As for Santos, well, I don’t want to go through all of that again, but here’s Friend Of The Newsletter Roger Munter after his first outing:
I mean, that was a pretty goddamn impressive slider. Look at this!
But it wasn’t enough. You can’t get by in the majors with pure stuff when you don’t have the command and you don’t have the mental preparation to get yourself under control when things go wrong. These are things that pitchers spend years working on in environments that are pressure-packed, but less pressure-packed than the majors. When they work on these things in the minors, fans don’t immediately come to distrust them forever and things get worked on, preventing the major league team from losing because of them.
It’s kind of a win-win, when you think about it!
But the Giants haven’t done that with Doval and Santos. In a lot of ways, they can’t, because of the dearth of righties on the 40-man, but they also were the ones who put players on the 40-man, so they don’t get to put themselves in this position, make bad decisions to try to get out of it, and then complain about the situation they’re in. That is, as the lady said in the commercial, not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.
The Giants either thought this would work, or thought it could work because they were betting on talent. But if we’ve learned anything from Doval and Santos, and Merkin Valdez before them, it’s that talent doesn’t get it done alone.
The Giants bullpen could get some right-handed reinforcements from within before too long; Aaron Sanchez will come back at some point, either heading to the bullpen himself or sending Logan Webb there, and Tyler Beede is making rehab appearances for Sacramento. so he’s working his way back too. The status quo won’t last forever, if only because the team is run by rational people who are able to make normal decisions.
But the fact that it was ever the status quo at all is a sign that sometimes the rational people who are able to make normal decisions get overexcited. It’s a good thing to give players time to develop. There’s too much pressure to win at the major league level to keep throwing guys into big situations where they can fail, watching them fail, and hoping they learn something from it. There are always things to learn at any level, including in the majors, but expecting high quality from players who aren’t ready is expecting too much.