San Francisco Used The Same Roster Spot For Two Major League Debuts On Saturday

Seth Lonsway's major league career began at five minutes past one on Saturday afternoon and was interrupted before the sun went down.

He is 27 years old. The Giants signed him in July 2021. He spent five seasons and part of a sixth waiting for somebody to call, and when the call came it bought him two innings of relief in a game San Francisco lost 7-1. Five hits, three runs, two of them earned. Then the Giants optioned him back to Triple-A between games, because they needed his spot on the active roster for somebody else.

The somebody else was Yunior Marte, who turned 23 on the ninth of this month and who had never pitched at Triple-A at all.

He started the second game. San Francisco won it 7-2.

The rung nobody used#

Marte came from Double-A Richmond. There is a whole level of professional baseball between Richmond and Oracle Park, and the Giants own a team that plays in it. Sacramento is eighty-seven miles up the road. It has a full pitching staff. Two of its pitchers were promoted to San Francisco on Saturday morning: Lonsway, and Matt Wilkinson, who started the first game and lost it.

The club went past all of that and took the one from Richmond.

His record is not a secret and it is not a fairy tale either. Marte has thrown 291 innings in the minor leagues since 2022, starting in the Dominican Summer League and moving through the Arizona Complex League, Columbia, San Jose, Eugene and Richmond. In 2024 he pitched sixteen and a third innings in Arizona with an earned run average of 9.92, which is the kind of line that ends a career in the complex leagues without anybody outside the organization noticing. This season he made 22 appearances between High-A Eugene and Richmond, twenty of them starts, and finished with a 3.85 earned run average across 107 and two-thirds innings. At Richmond he struck out 72 and walked 22 in 64 and a third. MLB Pipeline has him 24th in the organization.

He is six foot six, and the club lists him at 236 pounds (which is a considerable quantity of pitcher to be introduced to for the first time on a Saturday night). His four-seam fastball topped out at 95.8 miles an hour, and Arizona scored on him once, in the third, when Ildemaro Vargas bunted his way on and came home on a Lars Nootbaar double. That is the whole of the damage. Four and two-thirds innings, eighteen batters, three hits, one run.

"He lets it go," manager Tony Vitello told reporters afterward. "Here's my stuff, deal with it. He has good stuff, to boot."

Before the game Marte met Juan Marichal, who was at the ballpark for a number retirement. Marte is from Azua, in the Dominican Republic, and Marichal is the first Dominican in the Hall of Fame and a pitcher, which Marte mentioned first when he was asked about it.

"He gave me some tips," Marte said, in Spanish, to MLB.com's Maria Guardado.

Anyway. He is the eleventh man to start a game for the Giants this season.

Where the spot came from#

Two men cannot occupy one roster line, so Saturday required some paperwork, and the paperwork is the part that tells you where this club is.

Marte was not on the 40-man roster. Getting him onto it meant taking somebody off, and the somebody was Casey Schmitt, moved from the 10-day injured list to the 60-day with a tear in the meniscus of his left knee. Schmitt has been on the injured list since July 28. The 60-day move does not change his knee. It changes the arithmetic. The 60 days run from the day he first went on the list, so the earliest he can be activated is September 26, and the regular season ends on September 27.

That opened the 40-man spot. Optioning Lonsway opened the active one. Two different roster limits, two different men, one pitcher arriving.

Fourteen#

Here is the number that outlives Saturday.

Fourteen men have made their major league debut for San Francisco in 2026. Guardado reports that only the White Sox, at fifteen, have handed out more, and the Giants are 56-81.

Look at how they are spread. Six of the fourteen debuted between April 1 and June 26. Then came July, the month of the trade deadline, the month this club was still deciding what it was, and July produced none. Not one debut in thirty-one days.

Then August. Nate Furman on the first, Eddys Leonard on the fourth, Trent Harris on the eighth, Turner Hill on the fifteenth, Matt Wilkinson on the nineteenth, Braxton Roxby on the twenty-eighth, and Lonsway and Marte on the twenty-ninth. Eight debuts in twenty-nine days, more than the club gave out in the previous four months put together.

The club's stated reason for Saturday is the true one and it is narrow. Carson Whisenhunt tore an ulnar collateral ligament and Adrian Houser strained a forearm inside three days, and after that San Francisco was out of arms and said so. That is why it happened on August 29.

It is not why the answer was a 23-year-old two levels down. A team in a pennant race patches a rotation with a swingman off waivers or a reliever asked to go three. A team that is 56-81 in the last week of August has nothing left to protect, and the cost of finding out about Yunior Marte in September dropped to roughly nothing. The injuries picked the date. The record picked the answer.

None of which makes him good. Four and two-thirds innings is not a sample, it is an evening, and Vitello volunteered the caveat himself: "I don't think he's anywhere close to where his ceiling is." The projection is a projection. What happened is that a club with nothing to lose spent a 40-man spot to look at somebody, and will get to look at him four or five more times before the end of September, which is more than it learned about most of its roster in July.

Lonsway will probably be back on Tuesday, when rosters expand and the club can carry him without sending anybody anywhere. His two innings are in the book (they were not good innings, and they are still his). Nobody takes them out.

Sacramento is still up there, full of pitchers, eighty-seven miles away.

Nobody made Marte stop there.