Carson Whisenhunt's Only Scoreless Start This Season Was The One He Did Not Finish

The last pitch Carson Whisenhunt threw in a major league game this season was a changeup at 83.5 miles an hour. Sal Stewart flied it to right field for the second out of the third inning on Monday, and Whisenhunt came out of the game.

The pitch before that one was a sinker, and it was 94.1. His first sinker of the night had been 94.4.

Those are ordinary numbers for him, and that is the whole problem with them.

Nothing in Whisenhunt's speeds moved#

Major League Baseball's pitch-tracking log has every pitch Whisenhunt threw at Oracle Park on Monday night. His four-seam fastball averaged 94.1 miles an hour in the first inning and 93.4 in the third. His sinker averaged 94.0 in the first and 94.1 in the third. He threw his last one for a called strike.

The changeup did move, from an 85.0 average in the first inning to 83.6 in the third. That was five changeups in five different counts, and a mile and a half is well inside the range a pitcher creates on purpose. Somebody with his full season in front of them may find something in it. There is nothing in it here.

The rest of the line is the line of a good start. Eleven hitters, two hits, one walk, three strikeouts, no runs. Twenty-six strikes in 47 pitches, which is not sharp command and was good enough anyway. He left with two outs in the third, Elly De La Cruz on first and Ivan Johnson on third, and San Francisco leading 5-0. Jason Foley struck out Dane Myers to end the inning, and neither runner scored.

Eight starts, and one of them was that#

Whisenhunt has started eight games for San Francisco this season and Monday is the only one in which the other team did not score. Look at the earned runs in order: two, two, four, six, four, one, six, and then nothing. He came into the night with a 7.03 earned run average and left with a 6.49, which is what two and two-thirds scoreless innings will do to a small denominator.

He told reporters afterward that it was the best he had felt all year. He also said something less quotable and more useful, which is that the season had been "probably in the same boat of a weird year. Just very back and forth." Tristi Rodriguez of NBC Sports Bay Area had it Monday night. The earned run averages agree with him.

The MRI was Tuesday morning. Before that night's game against Cincinnati the club told reporters, NBC Sports Bay Area among them, that it had found a torn ulnar collateral ligament and that the Giants' doctors had recommended surgery. San Francisco then placed him on the 15-day injured list and recalled right-hander Spencer Bivens from Triple-A Sacramento. The transaction itself, filed the same hour, reads "left elbow sprain," which is the category the paperwork has for it.

No timeline has been published, and the reason a timeline matters is that there are two operations and they are not the same length. A full reconstruction, the one everybody calls Tommy John, takes a pitcher out for the better part of two seasons. An internal brace repair is a shorter absence. Nobody has said which one is being recommended, so anybody putting a return date on this today is guessing.

The third one#

Hayden Birdsong went on the 60-day injured list on March 21. The transaction names the reason in three words: Tommy John surgery. Trevor McDonald went on the 15-day list on July 21 with what MLB's log calls a right elbow strain, had Tommy John surgery with Dr. Keith Meister on August 5, and was moved to the 60-day list on August 13. Whisenhunt is the third San Francisco starting pitcher this season to arrive at that elbow. Two have had it rebuilt. He has been told to.

Widen it past the rotation and the count is worse in a way that is probably meaningless and is worth writing down anyway. San Francisco has made 33 placements on the injured list this season. Eight name an elbow, across seven different men, and Birdsong's is a ninth that names the operation instead of the joint. Two of the seven are catchers and one is the shortstop, which is why nothing about a cause gets asserted here. Clubs are not laboratories and 33 is not a sample. It is still eight.

One of the eight is Willy Adames, hurt at Fenway Park on Sunday and placed on the list Monday, and the distinction in his case is real and worth keeping: it is his left elbow and he throws right-handed. A shortstop's non-throwing arm and a left-hander's throwing arm are not the same problem wearing the same word.

And then Tuesday#

Adrian Houser started the next night at Oracle Park, retired five of the six men he faced, allowed one hit and no runs, and came out in the second inning after 26 pitches.

His fastball did what Whisenhunt's did not. In the first inning Houser's four-seamer averaged 96.3 miles an hour and his sinker 95.5. In the second they were 94.3 and 93.5. That is roughly two miles an hour off both pitches between one inning and the next, in an outing that lasted five outs.

Houser has an account of when it started, and it lines up with the numbers. "Started a little bit in the [Reds catcher Tyler] Stephenson at-bat at the end of the first, and then went back out for the second," he told Will Simonds of NBC Sports Bay Area. "Just kind of feeling it on every pitch."

Vitello called it "just some tightness in his flexor." Houser called it a "minor setback" and said it feels similar to the flexor strain he had with Milwaukee in 2022, which cost him about eight weeks, "but not near as bad."

A flexor strain and a torn ligament are different injuries with different calendars, and nobody outside the building knows which one this is. Houser's MRI is Wednesday morning. No result has been published, and none is guessed at here.

What the audition was for#

Whisenhunt is 25. San Francisco took him out of East Carolina with the 66th pick of the 2022 draft, and by the time he reached the majors he had been ranked inside the top 100 prospects in baseball at MLB.com and at Baseball Prospectus. The major league version of him now sits at 13 starts, 58 innings, 33 walks, 42 strikeouts, a 5.90 earned run average and a 1.66 WHIP.

Fifty-eight innings is a starter's June. A club cannot decide anything on it, which is precisely why the club kept handing him the ball every sixth day of a lost August.

That matters because of what the Giants have left, which is 30 games and no season. They are 54-78, 26 games out, with an elimination number of five in the division (that is any combination of Giants losses and Dodgers wins totalling five, and it can be reached in a long weekend). A club in that position has one use for its last month that is worth anything in 2027, and it is finding out which of the arms it already owns can hold a rotation spot. Whisenhunt was one of those questions. He is not one this year, and on the two operations available he is probably not one next year either.

Blade Tidwell, who has four starts, is still here. Matt Wilkinson, who has two, was optioned to Sacramento the day Whisenhunt got hurt. Ten pitchers have started a game for San Francisco this year and four of them cannot start another: Tyler Mahle and Robbie Ray were traded on consecutive days at the deadline, McDonald is on the 60-day list, and now this. Those four made 61 of the club's 132 starts.

The Giants have won two in a row, which is worth saying because of how both of them looked. They beat Cincinnati 5-0 on Monday and 3-1 on Tuesday, and their starting pitchers threw four and a third innings between the two games and gave up nothing at all. Both men left early. Neither left because he was being hit.

Landen Roupp goes Wednesday. He has 25 starts, more than anyone else on the team, and he and Logan Webb are now most of what is left.

Sources: San Francisco's 2026 transaction log, 40-man roster, standings, schedule, and Whisenhunt's career and 2026 game-by-game pitching lines, from the MLB Stats API, retrieved August 26, 2026. Pitch types and velocities counted from the same feed's play-by-play for gamePk 823183, the August 24 game against Cincinnati, and gamePk 823181, the August 25 game, read with the pitch-result field included rather than inferred. Both games carry a one-pitch gap between the boxscore and the play-by-play, and both are recorded rather than smoothed: Whisenhunt's boxscore gives 47 pitches, 26 strikes and 21 balls against 46 tracked events with 26 strikes and 20 balls, so the untracked pitch is a ball and cannot be the one Sal Stewart put in play; Houser's boxscore gives 26 pitches and 19 strikes against 25 tracked events and 18 strikes, so the untracked pitch is a strike and could be his last, which is why no last pitch of his is named here. The inning averages are unaffected by one pitch either way. Whisenhunt's postgame comments via Tristi Rodriguez, NBC Sports Bay Area, August 24, 2026. Houser's and Vitello's comments and the Wednesday MRI via Will Simonds, NBC Sports Bay Area, August 25, 2026, updated 10:39 p.m.; the note that Adames's ligament injury is to his non-throwing arm via Alex Pavlovic, NBC Sports Bay Area, the same day. The torn ulnar collateral ligament, the surgery recommendation and the club's announcement to reporters before Tuesday's game via ESPN and Sports Illustrated, August 25, 2026, both crediting NBC Sports Bay Area. Draft position from East Carolina University Athletics, July 18, 2022, and NBC Sports Bay Area, July 17, 2022; the top-100 prospect rankings via MLB Trade Rumors, August 25, 2026. McDonald's surgery date and surgeon via MLB Trade Rumors and McCovey Chronicles, August 2026. Birdsong's designation is quoted from MLB's own transaction log for March 21, 2026.