Giants takeaways: Willy Adames is back. So is Kyle Harrison, and Logan Webb's four-seamer
The Rockies have played in about one out of every nine games in Oracle Park's 25-year history, and they've hated almost every second of it. The last time they won consecutive games in the same series in San Francisco was May 2018, when the Giants were using Austin Jackson as their starting center fielder and Gorkys Hernández as their leadoff hitter. Giants reliever José Váldez gave up two runs in the top of the ninth of that second game, even though it's possible that Baseball-Reference made him up.
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Some Giants fans might have taken comfort in that history of dominance before this week's four-game series. The real sickos and malcontents among you, though, were waiting for the jump scare. Baseball doesn't like to be that predictable. The Rockies were 6-29 in their last 35 games at Oracle Park entering this series, and it felt like the old movie cliché of 'It's quiet. A little too quiet.' It would be so very baseball-esque for the Giants to survive one of the gnarliest road trips in recent history, only to face-plant at home against a very, very bad Rockies team.
So when the Rockies won the first game of the series, it wasn't time to panic, but it was time to tighten muscles you didn't even know you had. Tyler Rogers entered Thursday's game with one run allowed in 16 games, and then he gave up two runs in the span of 12 pitches. The Giants lost that first game, and the baseball gods' group chat was going wild.
As it turns out, even the baseball gods can only do so much. The Giants won on Sunday, 9-3, winning the four-game series, and order was restored in the universe. The jump scare will eventually get everyone, but it'll have to wait for another month.
And now, some notes, tidbits and general errata from the series.
Willy Adames raised his season OPS by 73 points on Sunday, which tells us two things. The first is that he had an outstanding game, with two homers and a double. The second is that it's still early enough in the season that a single game can make that big of a difference in a player's stats. I'm not sure what the expiration date is for the 'it's still early' excuse, but apparently it's after the first week of May.
Adames was hitting .202/.279/.263 at the conclusion of last Sunday's game, and he's up to .230/.312/.363 exactly one week later. Another week like that, and nobody will remember the slow start at all. Let's agree upon a general rule that you can stop using 'it's still early' when it's not possible for a player to raise his slugging percentage by 100 points in a week. Until then, it's still early, and the Giants are finally getting the player they were expecting when they gave him a franchise-record contract.
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If this is the start of a turnaround, let's appreciate how much worse it could have been for Adames and the Giants. If the team were 10 games under .500 with their prize free agent struggling mightily, it would have been easy to place an outsized portion of the blame on him. 'Of course the Giants are struggling,' the pundit-industrial complex would have noted. 'They gave all that money to that guy, and he's not doing anything.' That kind of attention makes the spotlight brighter, which also makes it hotter. The hotter the spotlight, the sweatier the hands get. The sweatier the hands get, the squishier the batting gloves get. It gets worse from there.
Instead, the Giants had a fine start to the season, which eased just enough of the burden on Adames. He might have been pressing, but he wasn't panicking yet, which might have been the case on a different team in a different situation. When Adames came to bat in the bottom of the seventh inning on Sunday, the Oracle Park crowd gave him a standing ovation that roughly translated to, 'We believed in you, and we're glad you're here now.' It was a nice sentiment.
It also might not have happened like that without the hot starts from Jung Hoo Lee and Mike Yastrzemski, Wilmer Flores' well-timed RBI hits and a pitching staff that's been among the most effective in baseball. Baseball's a team sport, and the 2025 Giants have done incredibly well in spite of Adames. Now they'll have a chance to keep it going because of him, which is where they were expecting to be all along.
After Sunday's game, the Giants designated Lou Trivino for assignment and recalled Kyle Harrison. You're also recalling Kyle Harrison right now, perhaps fondly. It's been quite the couple of months for him.
Harrison found whatever was missing from his Cactus League outings, with uniformly positive reports about his velocity and stuff, and his Triple-A stats were trending toward absurdity. He struck out 33 percent of the batters he faced, with a 13.2 K/9 and 2.8 BB/9. He struck out seven batters over five innings in his last start for Triple-A Sacramento, which was especially impressive considering that the game was in Reno, which is like the Coors Field of the Pacific Coast League, which is already a hitter-friendly league. Harrison left the game with a 4-1 lead, and the River Cats eventually lost 16-6, to give you some idea of the offensive environment he was thriving in.
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Now the only question is how the Giants are going to use him. They're saying he's in the bullpen for now, but from the start of spring training, they've been adamantly against the idea of him being a second left-handed reliever, even when that looked like an obvious fit on paper. It would be odd for the Giants to reverse course after he's succeeded as a starter in Triple A, especially considering that Erik Miller has been far from overworked as the only lefty in the bullpen.
At the same time, Robbie Ray is coming off his best outing of the season, and his fastball-slider combination has moments where it looks just as unhittable as it was in his Cy Young season. Justin Verlander is pitching well enough through seven starts to stick with him indefinitely. Landen Roupp's 3.86 FIP seems much more predictive than his 5.10 ERA, and his best career outing was just two starts ago. It doesn't seem like the time to yo-yo him in and out of different roles and rosters.
That leaves Jordan Hicks as the starter who might be on the bubble. He hasn't had a quality start since his first game this season, and while there are a lot of questions about what the Giants would do with any of the other starters if they were removed from the rotation, none of them apply to Hicks. That thing he did very well at times for his previous teams? He'd be asked to do it again. Hicks moving to the bullpen is the easiest transition the team could make.
Another possibility to consider is that it's Hayden Birdsong who will squeeze back into the rotation, with Harrison taking over the every-fifth-day bullpen role that Birdsong has been so good in. Or maybe we should just stick with Occam's Razor and assume that Harrison is going to step into the Lou Trivino role, because that's all we know with any specificity right now.
Or maybe the Giants will use one of their extra starting pitchers to make a trade for Carlos Correa when they're in Minnesota this week. He could fill in for Tyler Fitzgerald until he's back, and then they'd figure it out from …
OK, maybe we should just wait and see how Harrison is used. It's notable that this is the first roster move the Giants have made that wasn't a result of an injury. I almost miss the roster carousel of previous seasons. I'm pretty sure the Giants clubhouse doesn't, though.
Webb threw 14 four-seam fastballs against the Rockies on Sunday, and they swung through five of them. That's more swings-and-misses than he got out of any his sweeper, sinker or changeup, even though he threw a lot more of those pitches.
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The first time Webb used a four-seamer on Sunday was in a 3-2 count to Michael Toglia in the second inning. The pitch missed high and outside for ball four, and it would have been easy to ditch it entirely and stick with proven pitches.
He used it again in a two-strike count with the very next batter, though. And it was nasty.
Webb would then strike out the next two batters on six pitches, finishing them both off with the four-seamer. It's not just a pitch he's using to change eye levels. He's using it as an out-pitch. That's a development worth monitoring.
He was facing the Rockies at Oracle Park, yes, and we've already established that they're being punished by the baseball gods for stealing the secrets of rosin from Mt. Olympus*. Still, whatever the Rockies' problems might be, it's not like their scouting report reads 'can't hit 94-mph four-seam fastballs.' It still takes a quality version of the pitch to get major-league hitters out, and that's what Webb is showing off right now. It's not like it's a new pitch for him — he was throwing a four-seamer predominantly as a rookie — but the effectiveness is what's different. And it's a welcome difference so far.
* It's basically the tale of Prometheus, but instead an eagle eating the Rockies' liver every day, they have to play at different altitudes and tolerate a foam triceratops. You shouldn't feel bad for them. They know what they did.
(Top photo of Adames: Lachlan Cunningham / Getty Images)
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