Adrian Houser's Forearm Took A Job With It, And San Francisco Has Been Filling It With Starting Pitchers

Anthony Molina faced twenty batters on Friday night at Oracle Park and got nine outs out of them. Yunior Marte faced twenty batters and got fifteen.

Molina was the starting pitcher. He threw seventy-two pitches, gave up nine hits and seven earned runs, and was gone after three innings of a game San Diego led 7-1. Marte came in for the fourth and threw seventy-seven pitches across five innings, allowing three hits and two walks and no runs at all. Rafael Devers hit his thirty-sixth home run in the fifth, a grand slam off Robbie Ray with the bases loaded on a double and two walks, and the Giants did not score again. San Diego won 7-5.

So the box score is a 62-86 team losing to a contender in September, which is the least interesting thing about it.

Here is the interesting thing. San Francisco has a job that does not appear on any roster sheet. It is not a rotation spot, and the bullpen has no name for it either. It is the job of throwing the middle of a game that is already gone, four or five innings at a time, so that the men who pitch one inning each do not have to pitch two. All season one pitcher had that job. He has a torn-up forearm and a locker he is not using.

Ten times in a hundred and forty-eight games#

Counted off the league's own game logs for every pitcher who has thrown for San Francisco this year, there have been ten games in which a Giants reliever recorded more outs than the Giants starter did. Here they are.

June 16: Adrian Houser started and got three outs, and Robbie Ray relieved him for six and a third. (That one is a technicality. The game was suspended and finished the next afternoon, which is how a starter ends up with one inning without anybody deciding anything.) June 30: Landen Roupp got eight outs, Houser got sixteen. July 7: Trevor McDonald got seven, Houser got seventeen. July 31: Carson Whisenhunt got ten, Houser got fourteen. August 7: JT Brubaker faced five hitters and left, and Houser threw five innings. August 19: Matt Wilkinson got six outs, Houser got fifteen.

August 25: Houser started, got five outs, and walked off with his forearm. Molina relieved him and threw four and a third.

September 1: Logan Webb got six outs and Cesar Perdomo got twelve. September 4: Wilkinson got nine and Marte got fifteen. Friday: Molina got nine and Marte got fifteen.

Houser is the reliever in six of the first seven and the starter in the seventh. San Francisco put him on the 15-day injured list on August 26 with a right forearm strain and transferred him to the 60-day list on September 1, which ends his season. He finishes with sixteen starts at a 5.13 earned run average across seventy-three and two-thirds innings, and ten relief appearances at 1.75 across thirty-six. Six of those ten relief appearances ran four innings or longer. Nobody else on the club has more than two.

The job did not go anywhere. Since Houser's forearm gave out, San Francisco has gotten exactly three relief appearances longer than two innings, and Perdomo, Marte and Marte have thrown all three. Every one of them is a man who has started a major league game for the Giants this season. So is Matt Wilkinson, who started on September 4 and threw two innings out of the bullpen on the 9th.

Two men, two directions#

Molina and Marte are twenty-four and twenty-three, and they have spent this season swapping careers.

Molina pitched for Colorado in 2024 and 2025, at earned run averages of 6.79 and 7.27, and for Atlanta this spring at 5.40. He made fifty-five major league appearances across those three stints and started two of them. He is a relief pitcher by every line on his record. (The first start got five outs against Cleveland in May of 2024. The second went five innings against Toronto last August and gave up seven runs. Nobody gave him a third until the thirty-first of August this year.) San Francisco traded Tyler Mahle for him on August 2, recalled him from Sacramento on August 24, and put him in the bullpen, where he threw four and a third scoreless innings on the night Houser got hurt. He has made three starts since and no relief appearances.

Marte went the other way and went further. He made twenty-two appearances in the minor leagues this year, twenty of them starts, split between High-A Eugene and Double-A Richmond, and he has never thrown a pitch at Triple-A. The two that were not starts were both at Eugene, in April, and they ran four innings and five innings, which is a piggyback rather than a bullpen job. All thirteen of his Richmond appearances were starts. He is from Azua, in the Dominican Republic, and he turned twenty-three on the ninth of August. San Francisco promoted him three weeks later and started him against Arizona in the second game of a doubleheader on August 29, and he went four and two-thirds.

Then it stopped starting him. His two appearances since are the September 4 game at New York, where he and Wilkinson were the only two pitchers San Francisco used in the whole thing, and Friday. Both ran five innings. His major league earned run average is 2.45 and his major league relief earned run average is 2.70, and neither number means much across fourteen and two-thirds innings, which is the point of saying how many innings it is.

San Francisco has used 466 relief appearances this season. Nineteen of them reached three innings, eleven reached four and seven reached five. Houser has six of the eleven and four of the seven. Marte has two of the seven, seven days apart, and before the first one he had not relieved in any game, at any level, since the twenty-fifth of April.

Fourteen games are left. Tony Vitello has a rotation of Webb, Roupp, Blade Tidwell, Molina and Perdomo, three of whom made their first start for this club after the first of August, and a bullpen of men who throw an inning and sit down. What he does not have is the pitcher who used to make that arrangement work on the nights it did not.

So he hands the job to whoever started a week ago. On Friday that was a twenty-three-year-old who had not come out of a bullpen since April and has now done it twice in seven days, five innings each time.

Five innings, no runs, and San Francisco lost anyway.