San Francisco Traded A Reliever For A Starter And Then Used Him In Relief

A year ago the San Francisco Giants traded a relief pitcher to the New York Mets and got a starting pitcher in the return. Then, for the entire month of April, they used the starting pitcher in relief.

Blade Tidwell appeared in eight games for San Francisco between April 2 and April 28. He started none of them. He threw twelve innings across those twenty-seven days, and in six of the eight he was the last pitcher the Giants used all day.

He starts tonight against Houston.

The eight games he pitched in were started by Logan Webb, Landen Roupp, Adrian Houser, Robbie Ray and Tyler Mahle, who started three of them. That is the whole San Francisco rotation as it stood in April, and every one of Tidwell's eight appearances came in a game one of those five started. His longest outing was three innings, on April 2. Five of the eight were exactly one inning. He was optioned to Sacramento on April 29 and did not throw another major league pitch until August 4.

(The pitching was fine, for the record. Four earned runs in twelve innings, three walks, ten strikeouts. Nobody was hiding him. There was simply nowhere to put a sixth starter on a staff that had five.)

What he cost, and what happened to the man he cost#

San Francisco acquired Tidwell on July 30, 2025, sending Tyler Rogers to New York for him, right-hander José Buttó and outfielder Drew Gilbert. Rogers pitched two months for the Mets, elected free agency on November 2 and signed with Toronto on December 15. He has a 1.70 ERA in 55 appearances for the Blue Jays this season and has not allowed a home run.

So the Mets rented him, which is what a contender is supposed to do with a reliever in July, and the Giants took three players for the privilege. Gilbert has played 94 games in San Francisco this year. Buttó is on the 60-day injured list.

(Rogers has thrown 53 innings for Toronto this season. Tidwell has thrown 32 in the major leagues in his life.)

Tidwell was the arm in that group. He was 24 the day of the trade, he had made four major league appearances for the Mets, two of them starts, with a 9.00 ERA in fifteen innings, and he had spent the season starting in Triple-A: 14 starts at Syracuse before the deal, three at Sacramento after it, 17 out of 21 appearances. He has started 15 of his 16 games for Sacramento this season. Starting is what he does everywhere except San Francisco, where the rotation was full and stayed full.

Then it emptied. San Francisco traded Mahle on August 2 and Ray on August 3, and two of the five men Tidwell had pitched behind in April were gone inside two days. The club recalled him on August 3. He started at Texas the next night: five innings, six hits, two earned runs, one walk, three strikeouts, 100 pitches, 64 percent of them strikes. The Giants lost 5-4 and he took no decision.

The number that looks like an answer#

His line as a Giant reads like a man who has fixed something. Seventeen innings, four walks. That works out to 2.1 walks per nine innings, which would be a genuinely excellent rate for anybody, and if you saw it on a card you would write down "throws strikes" and move on.

Seventeen innings is not many innings, and nothing else on his record agrees with them.

At Sacramento this season, 72 innings across 16 appearances, he walked 35 men. That is 4.4 per nine. In Triple-A last year, across Syracuse and Sacramento, 97 innings and 37 walks, or 3.4 per nine. In his fifteen major league innings with the Mets he walked ten, a rate of 6.0 per nine and the worst of the lot. Four samples. The two big ones say he walks people, the small one in New York says it louder, and the only sample that says otherwise is the one being used to say it.

None of that is a forecast about tonight. Command shows up in small pieces and sometimes it stays, and 25-year-old pitchers do figure things out, often suddenly and usually without warning anybody first. It is a caution about arithmetic. Four walks in seventeen innings is not evidence that the walks stopped. It is seventeen innings.

The Sacramento line says one more useful thing, which is how long he goes. His longest outing at any level this year is six innings. He has got there twice, on June 27 and again on July 9, and nowhere else in sixteen starts. His 15 Triple-A starts average a shade under five. On August 4 he needed 100 pitches to record fifteen outs.

So what the Giants are buying tonight is about five innings, which is a thing worth knowing before the fourth ends and somebody starts throwing in the bullpen.

He faces Hayden Wesneski at Oracle Park. Houston is 60-59. San Francisco is 49-69, fourth in the National League West, 21 games behind the Dodgers with 44 to play, and nothing that happens tonight moves any of those numbers anywhere that matters. That is exactly the condition under which a club finds out whether the pitcher it traded for a year ago can hold a rotation spot, because there is no longer anything in the way of finding out.

Anyway. A year, two trades and twelve mop-up innings, and Blade Tidwell has the ball.

It is worth about five innings.

Sources: transactions, game logs, box scores, season and career totals, pitcher-usage order and probable pitchers via the MLB Stats API, retrieved August 10, 2026. The count of Tidwell's April appearances, the identity of the starting pitcher in each of those eight games, the six occasions he was the last pitcher used, and every walk rate per nine innings in this piece were computed here off those box scores and season lines. Standings via the league's own feed for August 10. Tonight's matchup is confirmed in the Field Level Media game preview carried August 10, 2026.