Logan Webb is a safe bet for the Giants, but there's a pitch worth monitoring

New York Times

24-02-2025

This is the fourth installment in a series looking at the high variance and unpredictability of the individual starting pitchers in the San Francisco Giants' rotation. The first three were easy. Robbie Ray is a former Cy Young winner coming back for his first full season after Tommy John surgery. Kyle Harrison is young, talented and inexperienced, which are adjectives that can precede both frustrating and breakout seasons. Jordan Hicks is still an in-progress conversion tale, but now he's armed with a little experience and a full offseason of preparation.
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Logan Webb is one of the steadiest pitchers in baseball. He has led the league in innings in each of the last two seasons. He has made 33 starts in each of the last two seasons. His version of even-year nonsense is that he struck out 7.6 batters per nine innings in 2020, 2022 and 2024. Even his nonsense is reliable. He isn't a high-variance pitcher, and it's going to be a stretch pretending he is.
All true, but there's an important clarification: Every pitcher is a high-variance pitcher. They're pitchers. You can find quibbles and qualms with all of them if you look hard enough. Even the ones with Cy Young votes in three straight seasons.
Pretend that you're a skeptical fantasy player looking for a reason to draft another starting pitcher, then. Pretend you went to Las Vegas and put $100 on 'Giants stinking this year,' which is oddly ambiguous wording for a wager. Come to think of it, that's not a betting slip, it's a Raley's receipt with something scribbled on the back, and I'm not sure the guy in the parking lot actually worked at Caesar's. But now you're looking for evidence to make you feel better about your bet. If Webb isn't thriving, neither are the Giants, most likely, so start with him and look for any red flags.
Are there any?
The landing page on Webb's Baseball Savant page has some, at least on the surface. It's color coded with percentile rankings for different metrics, and the simple way to read it is 'red good' and 'blue bad.' Webb has plenty of both. He's dead red on some of the most important ones (overall pitching value) and the expected ones (ground ball percentage), but he's got a lot more blue than the other pitchers with Cy Young votes.
You can wave off the blue for fastball velocity because overpowering velocity has never been his game, but what about some of the other ones? Opponents hit the ball harder off Webb than they do against other pitchers. The expected batting average against him was .272 , which is notable in a league that hit .247 last season. Consider that only 21 qualified batters in the National League had a higher batting average than the league's expected average against Webb. He gets a swing and miss just 8.5 percent of the time, which was 54th out of the 57 starting pitchers who qualified for the ERA title.
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If your eyes are glazing over because of the numbers, here's a quick and dirty summary: Batters make more a lot more contact against Webb than they do against other pitchers. They make a lot harder contact against him. This is why his 4.31 expected ERA (xERA) was tied with Rockies starter Ryan Feltner in the bottom half of the NL last season. Webb is unlike any other starting pitcher in baseball, which means that there will always be newfangled statistics that send mixed messages.
It's pretty easy to dismiss some of this. Hard contact is a big problem … unless the majority of the baseballs are pounded straight into the ground. The average contact against Webb's sinker is roughly as hard as the average contact that Bryce Harper makes, but not all contact is created equal. The ball might leave the bat at 89.8 mph, but it's often heading toward the fielders a lot slower than that. This means the lack of swing-and-miss in Webb's game is often a feature and not a bug.
Often. But not always. There are pitches in Webb's repertoire that he'd certainly like to get more batters waving through, and if you're looking for nits to pick, there's a specific pitch to worry about. It might be the difference between Webb having a very good season, with lots of effective innings getting him down-ballot Cy Young votes, and the kind of season that gets him first-place Cy Young votes. Maybe even a plurality or the majority of first-place Cy Young votes.
Keep your eye on the changeup. It's the one pitch that sticks out as being just a little bit different in 2024 compared to previous seasons, and it was one of the least effective pitches in baseball last season. Not only did it leave the bat faster than in previous seasons, but hitters were able to get it in the air more. Webb allowed just 11 home runs last year, and nine of them were hit against the changeup. To be fair, the first four he allowed were to Mookie Betts, Bryce Harper, Aaron Judge and Yordan Alvarez, so maybe it's less of a problem with a specific pitch and more of a problem with those guys being talented. He also allowed one to this guy, who should be pretty good:
The changeup has always been Webb's most mercurial pitch. When he was a prospect, Keith Law called it a fringy pitch that would need to improve if he were to escape the dreaded fifth-starter label. Baseball America wrote this about Webb's changeup in their 2019 prospect rankings:
The righthander is still working on a third-pitch changeup, but it's well behind his fastball and breaking ball. It often comes across too firm, not creating enough separation from his heater.
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The following season, Baseball America named it the best changeup in the Giants' system. When Kerry Crowley profiled Webb before the 2020 season, he mentioned it as one of the pitches that was an obvious asset.
At 22, Webb showcased … a polished changeup that fooled the likes of left-handed sluggers Cody Bellinger, Joc Pederson and Eric Hosmer.
It was a key pitch in his transition from an unknown quantity to a soon-to-be four-time Opening Day starter. It's also the pitch he was the least happy with last season, as Baggs detailed:
He's resolved to get better results with his changeup and made a minor grip adjustment that might help him restore some of its familiar fading action.
It's up, it's down, it's effective, it's ineffective and, more often than he wants, it's getting hit where fielders can't make a play on it. This is important because the pitch is one of Webb's most used weapons against left-handers, as he threw it 46 percent of the time against them in 2023 before dialing it back to 37 percent last season (which was closer to his career averages). The answer there, as alluded to in the Baggs article, might be the cutter. Webb threw 83 of them last year — all to left-handers — and allowed just one hit on it.
The changeup isn't just something that Webb throws to lefties, though. He throws it about a quarter of the time to right-handers, but he stopped throwing it nearly as much to them in the second half last season. It got clobbered by righties in both August and September, and they were getting more in the air against him long before that, which isn't typical. And while the cutter shows promise, he isn't throwing it to right-handers. At least, not yet.
However, this was a snipe hunt in search of reasons to feign concern about Webb, and the conclusion was 'his changeup could be more effective, I guess,' which is probably good news for him and the Giants. He's Logan Webb. If he's not excellent, it'll be a huge shock. If every player on the roster was as good as Webb at what they did, the Giants would win the NL West by 10 games.
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Still, keep an eye on the change. Point out the cutter when you want to look smart to someone watching a game with you. It's a fine line between sixth place in the Cy Young voting (last year) and second place (2023). It's the kind of fine line that can be explained by a single pitch from a pitcher who offers a wide variety of them.
(Photo of Webb: Rick Scuteri / Imagn Images)