Ten Pitchers Have Started A Game For The Giants This Season, And Three Of Them Cannot Start Another
Only five clubs in baseball have used fewer starting pitchers than San Francisco, which sounds like stability and is not. Robbie Ray, Tyler Mahle and Trevor McDonald made 53 of the 127 starts. Two were sold inside twenty-four hours at the deadline and the third has a strained elbow, and Sunday at Fenway still has nobody's name on it.
Ten pitchers have started a game for the San Francisco Giants this season. That is a small number. Across the majors this week only Seattle, with six, Cleveland with seven, St. Louis with eight, and Arizona and Pittsburgh with nine have used fewer, and the median club has used thirteen. Houston has used seventeen. Boston, whose ballpark the Giants walk into on Friday afternoon, has used thirteen.
A club that gets through 127 games on ten starting pitchers has usually had a healthy and settled year, and San Francisco has had neither. Three of the ten cannot make another start for this team.
Who the three are, and what they were worth#
Tyler Mahle was traded to Atlanta on August 2 for a minor league right-hander. He had made eighteen starts for San Francisco, 94.2 innings at a 5.13 earned run average.
Robbie Ray was traded to San Diego the following day for two prospects. In San Francisco he made twenty-one starts and threw 122.2 innings at a 3.08 earned run average, the lowest figure among the six pitchers who made ten or more starts for the Giants this year.
Trevor McDonald has not pitched since July 20. He went on the fifteen-day injured list the next day with a strained right elbow, and on August 13 the Giants moved him to the sixty-day list, which ends his season. Fourteen starts, 70.1 innings, 5.12.
Add those three together and they account for 53 of the club's 127 starts, or 41.7 percent, and 287.2 of the 677 innings San Francisco has taken from a starting pitcher, or 42.5 percent. Two of the three left the organization within twenty-four hours of each other. The third had left the active roster twelve days earlier, on July 21, and the filing that ended his season came on August 13, ten days after the deadline that ended the other two.
Seven for 111 games, and seven for sixteen#
Through August 1 the Giants played 111 games and used seven starting pitchers: Ray, Landen Roupp, Logan Webb, Mahle, Adrian Houser, McDonald and Carson Whisenhunt. That is a rotation in the ordinary sense of the word, five men and two fill-ins, running for four months.
Since August 2 the Giants have played sixteen games and used seven starting pitchers: Roupp four times, Webb three, Blade Tidwell three, Whisenhunt three, and one apiece for Houser, JT Brubaker and Matt Wilkinson.
The same number of men, one-seventh of the schedule. Three of the seven had never started a major league game for San Francisco before this month. Tidwell got the first of his on August 4, Brubaker on August 7, and Wilkinson on Wednesday in Cleveland, where he faced seven hitters, threw twenty-five pitches and handed the ball to Houser.
The count of everyone who has thrown a pitch for the Giants this year is thirty, and two of those are infielders. Christian Koss has pitched twice for two innings and Buddy Kennedy once for one. Hayden Birdsong, who pitched in 21 games for San Francisco last season and 16 the year before, has not appeared in one this year and is on the sixty-day injured list.
What sixteen games of it has cost, with the caveat that sixteen games is sixteen games#
Before August 2, a San Francisco starting pitcher averaged 5.40 innings and the club used 4.07 pitchers a game. In the sixteen games since, the starter has averaged 4.88 innings and the club has used 4.56 pitchers. The share of starts lasting six innings or more has gone from 45 of 111, which is 40.5 percent, to 4 of 16, which is 25 percent.
Those are directions and not findings. Sixteen games is not enough to separate a rotation that has genuinely thinned from three weeks of ordinary variance, and the honest version of the paragraph above is that half an inning a start and half a pitcher a game is what the difference looks like so far.
What is not a small sample is the roster. San Francisco is 52-75, twenty-four and a half games out of the division and fifteen and a half out of a wild card, with an elimination number of eleven in the division and twenty in the wild card. Thirty-five games remain.
Sunday#
Logan Webb starts Friday at Fenway Park against Sonny Gray. Blade Tidwell starts Saturday against Patrick Sandoval. Boston has named Jake Bennett for Sunday afternoon.
San Francisco, as of Friday morning, has named nobody, and the blank is not obviously a shortage. Whisenhunt last pitched on Tuesday, which puts Sunday on regular rest for him. He has made seven starts this season, on top of five as a rookie in 2025, and this year's seven have produced a 7.03 earned run average across 32 innings with 20 walks and 23 strikeouts. Roupp started Thursday in Cleveland and would be going on two days' rest. Wilkinson threw twenty-five pitches on Wednesday and has been used once, for two innings, as an opener.
So the blank is not really asking who is left. It is asking what the club thinks the last thirty-five games are for. The pitcher most likely to win a game at Fenway on Sunday afternoon and the pitcher San Francisco most needs to have seen before it builds a 2027 rotation are not the same man, and nothing the club has filed this month says which of those two jobs it believes it is doing. Does a team already counting down its elimination number spend Sunday trying to win it, or trying to learn something? The lineup card posted at Fenway that morning is the first document that has to answer.
Sources: starts, innings, earned run averages, appearance counts and injured-list designations for every pitcher named, plus San Francisco's record, schedule and announced probable pitchers, from the MLB Stats API and MLB's official transaction log for teamId 137, retrieved August 21, 2026. The count of starting pitchers used by all thirty clubs was taken from the same official season pitching records and checked in a browser against Baseball Reference's 2026 team pitching tables for San Francisco and Seattle, which agree exactly. Per-start innings, pitchers used per game and the six-inning shares were counted from the starting pitcher's line in each of San Francisco's 127 regular-season box scores through August 20.
