Twelve Outs

Logan Webb Got Six Outs In Pittsburgh. The Pitcher San Francisco Added That Morning Got Twelve.

Cesar Perdomo was assigned to Double-A Richmond on the first of April and had a 5.10 earned run average at Sacramento. He gave up one run in four innings of the worst game the Giants have pitched in weeks.

GL
Grant LombardSep 2, 20265 min read
Every call on this site goes on a public ledger and gets graded. The misses stay up.

Logan Webb recorded six outs in Pittsburgh on Tuesday and was charged with nine earned runs.

Eighteen men came to the plate against him and nine of them got hits. Two more he hit with the baseball. It was 11-5 before the Giants had batted four times, and the afternoon had arrived at the place where a manager stops managing the game and starts looking down the bullpen phone at whoever is cheapest to spend.

The man he spent had been on the 40-man roster for about four hours.

Cesar Perdomo pitched the fourth, the fifth, the sixth and the seventh. Fifteen batters, twelve outs, three hits, one walk, four strikeouts, one run. Fifty-eight pitches, forty of them strikes, which is 69 percent against Webb's 57. He entered with nobody on base and left with the score 12-7, and if you are keeping track of who had the better day between the man in the third year of a five-year, $90 million contract and a left-hander nobody outside the building could have picked out of a lineup, it was not close.

San Francisco lost 13-12. They scored five in the eighth to tie it and gave the run back in the ninth. Nobody will remember this game for the pitching, which is the usual fate of the pitching in a game where twenty-five runs score.

The part that took five years#

Perdomo is 24 years old, five feet ten, 219 pounds, and throws left-handed. The Giants signed him as a free agent out of San Juan de los Morros, Venezuela, on the second of July, 2021, when he was 19 years and four months old.

He did not pitch in a professional game for another 338 days.

When he finally did, in the Dominican Summer League in June 2022, he was very good and then he was hurt. Four appearances, fifteen innings, an earned run average of 0.60, eighteen strikeouts against three walks. On the sixth of August the DSL Giants Orange put him on the 60-day injured list. He was activated in November, which is to say his first professional season was fifteen innings long and ended in the summer.

The next year he was still in the complex leagues, in Arizona, throwing sixty innings with a 5.55 earned run average. That is not a prospect line. That is the line of a 21-year-old the organization is deciding about.

He did not reach a full-season league until the first of April, 2024, two years and nine months after he signed. Two years and nine months is a long time to be a professional baseball player without ever having played in a town anybody has heard of.

The part that took five months#

Then it went fast, and it went fast in the way these things actually go, which is not a straight line.

At Low-A San Jose in 2024 he threw forty-three innings with a 1.26 earned run average, fifty strikeouts, eleven walks, and only one of his thirteen appearances was a start. San Francisco moved him up to Eugene in June and made him a starter, and the earned run average went to 4.00 across fifty-four innings. In 2025 he stayed at Eugene and made twenty-six starts, 127 and a third innings, 118 strikeouts, thirty-eight walks. That one season is three quarters of what he had thrown in the four years before it, which came to 172 innings.

On the first of April this year the Giants sent him to Double-A Richmond, and Richmond is where he became somebody the front office had to have an opinion about. Fifteen appearances, thirteen starts, seventy-two and a third innings, eighty-nine strikeouts. That is 11.1 strikeouts per nine innings, against 2.7 walks. He went to Sacramento on the seventh of July.

Five months separate the Richmond assignment from the major leagues.

The part the Giants had to talk themselves into#

Sacramento did not go well, and leaving that out would be selling something.

Nine starts, forty-seven and two-thirds innings, a 5.10 earned run average, twenty walks. The strikeouts fell from 11.1 per nine to 6.8. The walks climbed from 2.7 per nine to 3.8. The Pacific Coast League is a hitters' league and Sacramento's park is a hitters' park, and both of those things are true and neither of them turns twenty walks into good news.

So the club selected the contract of a pitcher whose most recent two months were his worst two months, and the reason is that September asks a different question than August does. Rosters went from 26 to 28 on Tuesday. The Giants are 57-82 and have been eliminated from the division. Adrian Houser moved from the 15-day injured list to the 60-day with a right forearm strain, and the club's own injury page lists his expected return as 2027, which opened the roster spot that Perdomo's selection then spent. The 40-man began the day at 39 of 40 and ended it at 39 of 40.

Buster Posey has said the point of these weeks is getting a look at players the club would not otherwise get a look at. On Tuesday the look lasted four innings and went better than the ace's two.

Whether it means anything is a separate question, and four innings is four innings. He gave up a home run. He faced a Pittsburgh lineup that had already scored eleven runs and had every reason to stop concentrating. The Giants have twenty-three games left and they will find out more about him in those than they learned in Sacramento, because the thing they need to know is whether the strike-throwing that worked at Richmond survives contact with major league hitters, and one afternoon against a team that was already ahead does not answer it.

Also on Tuesday#

San Francisco recalled catcher Zach Morgan from Sacramento. Morgan's contract was selected on the tenth of August, and he has now been on a major league roster twice without ever appearing in a major league game. The record still shows no debut date beside his name.

The club also signed two players to minor league contracts: catcher Charlie Muniz, assigned to San Jose, and second baseman Darren Baker, headed for Sacramento. Neither is on the 40-man roster.

Fourteen pitchers is the September maximum, and San Francisco is carrying fourteen. The next arm the Giants want costs them an arm.

Called Shots#

Cesar Perdomo starts a game for San Francisco on or before the end of the 2026 regular season. He made twenty-two of his twenty-four minor league appearances this year as a start, the club has twenty-three games left and a stated interest in looking at people, and a rotation that just watched Webb give up nine runs has room for an experiment. It loses if they keep him in long relief, which is what they used him for on the day they got him, or if he does not pitch again. Price: +150.

Zach Morgan appears in a major league game for San Francisco on or before the end of the 2026 regular season. He has been carried on the active roster twice now without getting in. It loses if San Francisco goes another twenty-three games treating a third catcher as insurance rather than as a player, which is exactly what it has done since the tenth of August. Price: +110.

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