On Monday, the San Francisco Giants optioned Hayden Birdsong, who was due to start this coming Sunday. That led me to ask an important question: who will start on Sunday?
We have an answer. It’s a good old fashioned bullpen game, folks. I know how much you love those!
But while the bullpen game answers the question in letter, it doesn’t answer it in spirit. Because really, all the Giants did is change the first few laters of the date at the end of the question. And now we have to ask ourselves the same
question, but updated: who will start on Monday?
The Giants announced on Friday that Landen Roupp was heading to the 15-Day Injured List with elbow inflammation, and I announced that you have permission to panic. As a result, the team is down to three starters, and while I don’t think a bullpen game on Sunday was the initial plan, it became a necessary one when they realized they had no actual way to add two starters to this team.
But it seems highly unlikely that they’ll opt for a bullpen game two nights in a row, especially since neither Roupp’s injury nor Birdsong’s optioning is a short-term thing. It’s not like they just need to get through Sunday and Monday and then can return to normalcy. They’ve got to fill 40% of the rotation for a few starts at the very least.
I had been leaning towards Kai-Wei Teng getting the nod to start, even though he’s not on the 40-man roster. He’s been AAA Sacramento’s best pitcher for the last few months, and he does the one thing the Giants openly pine for: throw strikes. It seemed to be trending in that direction when Teng was pulled from his scheduled start on Tuesday; reading the tea leaves, it seemed as though he was preparing to start in San Francisco over the weekend.
That doesn’t appear to have been the plan, though, because Teng pitched in relief for Sacramento on Friday night, and threw 42 pitches — presumably a bit too many to masquerade as a standard bullpen session between starts.
So who, then? Carson Seymour has been impressing lately, but he’s thrown nine innings total since June 19, so probably isn’t stretched out. He feels more likely to just take down a good chunk of innings on Sunday.
A trade? Give Carson Whisenhunt a go, even though he’s struggling? Opt for Mason Black, who hasn’t had a good year but was fantastic on Wednesday for Sacramento?
We’ll soon find out.
More from mccoveychronicles.com:
