The Giants Have More Men On The 60-Day Injured List Than Any Club In Baseball, And All Of Them Return In November

Randy Rodriguez threw fifty games for the Giants last season and gave up ten earned runs in fifty and two-thirds innings. The 1.78 earned run average that came out of it was the lowest any reliever now on this roster posted last season, and the next-best figure was 3.64. He has not thrown a pitch in 2026, and the club's transaction log records no move for him this year at all. Its last entry on him is dated November 6 of last year.

Rowan Wick is thirty-three and has not thrown a major league pitch since 2022. Hayden Birdsong worked sixteen games in 2024 and twenty-one in 2025 and has not appeared this season either. All three men are on San Francisco's 60-day injured list, along with Matt Chapman, who played eighty-four games at .235 with a .692 on-base plus slugging before an abdominal strain, Casey Schmitt, who played ninety-eight at .271 and .784 before a knee, Harrison Bader, Daniel Susac, and Adrian Houser, who threw one hundred nine and two-thirds innings with a 4.02 earned run average before his forearm went.

Fourteen players are on that list. No other club in baseball has more than nine.

Keaton Winn became the fourteenth on Thursday. He had pitched forty-four times this season, all in relief, forty-three innings at a 3.35 earned run average, and the club moved him from the 15-day list to the 60-day with right elbow neuritis. The same afternoon it claimed third baseman Brett Harris off waivers from Boston and optioned him to Sacramento.

Those look like two transactions and they are one.

The ledger#

Winn's transfer opened the 40-man roster spot that Harris's claim filled, and it was the ninth time in thirty-three days the club has done that. Nine players have been moved to the 60-day list since August 2. On every one of those nine dates, the 40-man took on somebody new.

San Francisco has selected twenty-one contracts this season and ten of them since August 1, which is the demand side of the same arrangement. The club has been adding roughly a player a week to a roster that has been full since the deadline, and it has been paying for each one the same way.

There are four ways to open a spot on a full 40-man roster. MLB's own glossary lists them: designate a player for assignment, trade him, release him, or transfer him to the 60-day injured list. The first three cost the club the player. The fourth does not, which is why it gets used.

The same rulebook is careful about what the fourth one is. Players on the 60-day list "are temporarily removed from a club's 40-man roster, which often makes the list a last resort for clubs." The glossary goes on to explain why a team will sometimes leave an injured man on the 10-day list past sixty days rather than transfer him: so it "won't need to risk losing another player by going through the process to clear a spot" when he is ready to come back.

San Francisco has treated the last resort as the first one nine times in five weeks.

Fourteen against a league median of six#

Counted off the league's own 40-man rosters, five clubs are tied for second at nine: the Athletics, the Tigers, the Cubs, the Blue Jays and the Royals. The median across the thirty teams is six and so is the mean. That puts San Francisco eight above the middle of the league and five clear of the next club.

Some of that is a bad injury year rather than a roster strategy, and the two are hard to separate from outside the building. Six more players sit on the 10-day and 15-day lists, which do count against the 40-man: Willy Adames, Marcelo Mayer, Victor Bericoto, Jesus Rodriguez, JT Brubaker and Sam Hentges. Twenty of the fifty-three names attached to the roster are hurt.

What temporary means#

The removal reverses on a schedule, and the club's own transaction log says when.

In 2023 San Francisco activated four players from the 60-day injured list, one on November 2 and three on November 6. In 2024 it activated four, all on November 4. In 2025 it activated two, on November 6. The pattern is the first week of November, three years running.

The arithmetic that follows is not complicated. Thirty-nine men are charged against the 40-man roster today, with one spot open. Add fourteen and the roster reads fifty-three names for forty places.

Thirteen have to go somewhere before the club can carry a legal roster, and the four doors are the same four doors. Some of the work gets done for free, because players who reach free agency come off and non-tender decisions in late November take more. But free agency and non-tenders are the ordinary business of any offseason, and every other club does them against a list of four or six rather than fourteen.

Then the Rule 5 draft sits on top. The 40-man roster is what protects a minor leaguer from being taken in December at the Winter Meetings, and the deadline to add men to it falls in November alongside everything else. A club that has handed out fifteen major league debuts this year, counted off the league's own full-season roster and debut dates, has a large group of players arriving at that decision, and it will be making those calls with the fewest open spots in the league.

There is a reading of the last five weeks in which none of this was a cost. San Francisco is fifty-eight and eighty-three, twenty-five and a half games back, eliminated from the division, with twenty-one games left. A roster spot in September of a lost season is worth less than the look a club gets at a twenty-four-year-old, and the front office has said as much in public. Those nine spots brought in ten players, six by contract selection and four off waivers, among them Turner Hill, Yunior Marte and Cesar Perdomo, and bought each of them a major league September.

The other reading is that the club spent November's flexibility to buy September's, in a season where September decides nothing and November decides who stays in the organization. Both readings are available and the paperwork does not choose between them.

What the paperwork also does not say is which thirteen names San Francisco intends to give back. The list of fourteen is public, the number of places is fixed, and the club has not yet had to name anybody. Does a front office that spent five weeks avoiding that decision have a different answer ready in November, or has it only been choosing the order in which the same men leave?

Sources: MLB Stats API 40-man and active rosters, transaction logs for all thirty clubs and 2023 to 2025 Giants transaction history, retrieved September 4, 2026; MLB.com glossary entries for the 40-man roster, the 60-day injured list and the Rule 5 draft; mlb.com/giants/roster/transactions; MLB.com standings.