The buzz during Spring Training was Logan Webb. Have you seen Logan Webb? The way he’s pitching? With all the pitches and whatnot? He looks great. Tremendous. Maybe he won’t get any Cy Young Award votes, but Jacob DeGrom might get a few second place Logan Webb Award votes. Great things are coming. Great things are here. Get as excited as humanly possible over Logan Webb’s 2021 season.
Logan Webb had his first good regular season start in four tries this year on Sunday.
This is not to say that Logan Webb is a bad pitcher or even that he is going to have a bad season. He was, after all, quite good on Sunday. But even the savvy baseball knowers, when encountering a player who has suddenly become quite good in a small sample known for not producing repeatable results, will absolutely fall all over themselves to believe that he’s good now. It has happened every year that we’ve had baseball, and it will continue to happen every year until the expanding Sun renders Earth uninhabitable, and even then it’ll still be a strong maybe.
And even though every person who’s paid attention to baseball for more than 18 minutes knows this to be an unassailable fact — just try assailing it, guess what, you can’t — it’s still so easy to fall into the trap. Because even if you know for sure, without a doubt, without even having to think about it, that Logan Webb pitching 17 excellent innings in March doesn’t mean anything, well, the thing is, what if this time it does?
Can you afford to take the risk that the one time you don’t get excited about a guy in Scottsdale, he’ll become a star? No, of course not. You gotta do what you gotta do. We’ve all been there, friend.
And speaking of premature excitement (hey-o!), let’s talk about Gregory Santos, because Santos’s major league debut was electric.
No, that undersells it.
Santos’s major league debut was Edison electrocuting an elephant to spite Tesla electric. Please ignore that that myth is apocryphal, because I’m rolling here. Santos entered the game against the Marlins and struck out two in a perfect inning. But he made it look so simple, flashing an easy 98 and a wipeout slider that made baseball-superstar-when-he-is-inevitably-traded-to-a-big-market-team Jazz Chisholm Jr look ridiculous. The performance was sublime and inspiring, everything you could hope for from a debut, and a sign that the Giants could well have a dominant back end of the bullpen for years to come.
Two days later, Santos gave up three runs without recording an out.
He still had the stuff, but Gregory Santos is a young pitcher, and young pitchers do that. You cannot expect excellent control and perfect stuff every day, or even most days, if we’re being honest. Santos was raw when he got to San Francisco, and he will continue to be raw for a while. The way to work through this is to work through it, plugging away day after day until you figure out how not to make the mistakes that come naturally to you.
But that’s all in the future. Just like Logan Webb, Gregory Santos created sky high expectations for himself that he’d never be able to meet. It’s probably our fault for having those expectations in the first place, but that’s half the fun of baseball, isn’t it?
Anyway, we can all look forward to doing this again when Tyler Cyr gets called up fresh off a string of 17 straight scoreless appearances in the PCL, and with mysterious reports of a new pitch. I honestly can’t wait. Sure, we’ll be disappointed eventually, but it’ll sure be fun on the way there.