What We Learned When Winn, Giants Suffered in Loss to Phillies originally appeared in NBC Sports Bay Area
The Giants have played 21,432 games as a franchise. It’s hard to imagine that the list of games worse than Saturday’s is very long.
The game was delayed over an hour because of rain, and within minutes of the first pitch it was clear that a rainout would have been the best thing that ever happened to San Francisco. Starting pitcher Keaton Winn was knocked out in the bottom of the first, the Philadelphia Phillies sent 18 runners to base in the first two innings and the Giants lost a catcher to injury for the second day in a row.
They lost 14-3, and that doesn’t sum up how difficult the night was.
Pitching in the rain, Winn threw 39 pitches in the first before being pulled. The Phillies continued to face the long Mitch White and led 9-0 after two innings.
To add injury to insult, San Francisco the lost catcher Tom Murphy to a left knee injury during the second race of four races. Murphy fell to his knees on a spiked curveball in the dirt and immediately returned to the dugout, where Patrick Bailey sat in a sweatshirt a few hours after suffering a 7-day concussion.
Murphy was dealing with knee soreness before Saturday’s game, and if he needs to join Bailey on the IL, the Giants will be in an incredibly difficult situation. They’ve already recalled Blake Sabol, the only other catcher on the 40-man roster, and he replaced Murphy after picking up a red eye in California to get to Philadelphia in time.
Jakson Reetz, a 28-year-old who has made just two starts in the big leagues, is the next up in Triple-A but is not on the 40-man roster. The Giants may already need to open up a roster spot for 40 players if they select Mason Black as their starting pitcher on Monday.
It’s a mess now, and not just because of the rain.
Here are three things you should know about the rainiest night of the year:
One to forget
Keaton Winn went exactly six innings and allowed just one run in each your three previous matches. He was starting to look like a workhorse, but it was clear early in Saturday’s game that he wasn’t going to be around for long.
Winn had no idea of his preferred splitter and led off the bottom of the first with back-to-back walks. Bryce Harper’s single loaded the bases and Winn singled out Alec Bohm, putting the Phillies on the board. When Brandon Marsh hit a splitter to right for another run, White began moving around the bullpen. Winn hit a double play, but it was followed by two more singles, which ended his night. Bob Melvin wasn’t going to take any chances with a rookie who was throwing 40 pitches.
Winn was charged with five earned runs in two-thirds of an inning, increasing his ERA from 3.15 to 4.41. He had made 11 previous starts and four relief appearances in the big leagues and made at least three innings in all of them.
Offensive
In fact, the only thing missing from the game early on was the Giants loading the bases with no outs and no scores. They did it in the fourth inning when Tyler Fitzgerald struck out and Nick Ahmed turned into a double play after Ranger Suarez walked them in. In the eighth, they loaded the bases with one out, but Ahmed turned another double play.
San Francisco entered the game hitting just .206 over its previous eight, with a total of 19 runs in that span. They haven’t scored more than three runs since a 5-1 win over the New York Mets on April 23. The last time the Giants went nine consecutive games without scoring more than three runs was in 2018, when they did so in 11 consecutive games in September.
Welcome to the show
Randy Rodriguez took over for White in the bottom of the fourth, making his MLB debut after six seasons in the minor leagues, including parts of three seasons at Triple-A. Rodriguez was charged with three gains in 2 1/3 innings of work, but it was a bit of an unfair line for a reliever who was forced out for a third inning because the Giants were running out of arms.
Rodriguez was sharper in his first two games, and his first big league shutout was one to remember. He froze Harper with three fastballs, each one harder than the last.
The 24-year-old was added to the 40-man roster ahead of the 2021 Rule 5 Draft, joining at the same time as Sean Hjelle and Heliot Ramos. He was coming off a dominant season in A-ball at the time, although he had trouble getting hits in the upper minors.
Rodriguez’s arm is as electric as any in the system, but he walked 57 batters in 70 innings last season. This spring, Melvin talked about how obnoxious Rodriguez was when he was in the zone, and started peppering him with the River Cats in recent weeks.
If he can keep this up, he will certainly have a chance to stay. The four-seam boat topped out at 99.5 mph on Saturday and averaged 97.4 mph.
