Why Luke Jackson is still around

Luke Jackson has had an awful year. After a solid 2023, his ERA has skyrocketed, his strikeout rate has plummeted, and his standing among Giants fans has hit a low. Another year removed from Tommy John surgery, he was supposed to be even better than he was last year, the way John Brebbia took a step forward in 2022 after an uneven 2021.

Instead, Jackson has regressed and regressed pretty badly. His fastball velocity is still there and the quality of contact hitters are making off of him hasn’t changed from last year, but he’s just stopped missing bats, and it’s been extremely apparent to anyone who’s watched him. Whenever the Giants make a roster move, “Why is Luke Jackson still on the roster?” is one of the first comments. He pitched three good innings last night, but on the whole, it’s been a massively disappointing year for him.

Brebbia hasn’t been anything special this year either, for the record.

So what’s going on here? Who’s wrong? Either the Giants are wrong for keeping him around, or the fans are wrong for wanting him gone. Let’s get a definitive answer to this question right here, right now.

Well, it depends.

In terms of pure performance, well, yes, Jackson had an ERA over 9 in the month of June. During that month, he threw 9.2 innings, struck out 2, and walked 6, plus he hit another guy with a pitch. He also had six straight scoreless outings at one point, but that does tend to get kinda overshadowed by the six runs he gave up in the two outings that bookended that nice little run.

So far this month, Jackson has been fine, with an ERA of 3 across 6 innings and 4 appearances, but the damage (both ERA-wise and psychological) has already been done. Whenever Luke Jackson comes into a game, we all anticipate disaster. And yet here he stays, taking up a valuable roster spot. What gives?

There are two main reasons the team could view Jackson as still worth his roster spot. The first is a conviction that Luke Jackson will turn it around and be a good major league reliever this year. 3.00 ERA in July! He’s turning the corner! Great major league track record! You can’t just give up on a guy like that! And so on!

The second possible reason is inventory. In a few weeks, the team is supposed to have Robbie Ray and Alex Cobb back on the roster. They are both going to need 40-man and 26-man roster spots. If you’re going to finally DFA Luke Jackson, you’ll want to be sure you have a better option for that roster spot.

Because it’s possible your other options aren’t as strong as they seemed. On June 27, for example, Sean Hjelle had a 2.33 ERA on the season. He was having a fantastic, breakout year. Then he gave up 6 earned runs to the Dodgers, and a couple outings later gave up 3 earned runs to the Guardians, and last night gave up another 2 earned runs, and now his ERA is all the way up to 4.14. There are still things he’s doing very well — he has a nice strikeout rate, and he’s barely walking anyone — but a little bit of bloom is off that very tall rose.

Maybe that will happen with someone else. Maybe Randy Rodriguez falls apart, or Erik Miller takes a huge step back, or there’s an injury. There’s no way to tell what the bullpen will look like a few weeks from now, so why rush things? This really has been the Giants’ preferred method of roster management for decades, even predating Farhan, and they’ve never shown any signs of doing anything different. But now, at this late juncture, why not scrape together every bit of information you can before a DFA? It was one thing to get rid of Nick Ahmed, who was signed solely to be Marco Luciano’s sacrificial lamb (though he ended up being Brett Wisely’s), but Luke Jackson was supposed to be a big part of this bullpen, and so the team is incentivized to make every effort to that end.

Of course, Jackson went 3 innings yesterday, so the other possibility is that the team was just trying to get everything they could out of his arm before immediately cutting him and calling up Spencer Bivens for 4 games before the All-Star Break. They’re dicks! They just might do it!

So are the fans wrong to want Luke Jackson DFA’d? Well, no, because baseball is an entertainment business and Giants fans have multiple glaring memories of Jackson’s pitching being decidedly unentertaining. Is the team wrong for not having done it yet? Again, not necessarily. We don’t have the advanced data that they do to show whether a guy is pitching well and getting unlucky, or whether a different pitcher on the staff is throwing badly but muddling through.

It’s entirely possible the Giants have some proprietary data showing that Luke Jackson isn’t the worst reliever on the team, and if that seems like it’s damning with faint praise, well, yeah. It’s also entirely possible that they’re in a wait and see mode, and trying not to make any big decisions before they have to. We don’t have any way to know until the team finally acts. Whether that’ll be today or in a couple weeks, we’ll just have to wait and see.