Despite depth concerns, SF Giants are ‘excited’ about their pitching

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Justin Meccage saw plenty of former colleagues Sunday when the Giants hosted the Brewers, where he was their Triple-A pitching coach last year. His previous stop was in Pittsburgh, where he worked with Paul Skenes.

In other words, Meccage knows young pitching. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Giants are putting an inordinate amount of their eggs in their own basket of young arms.

“I’m more excited now about this group than I was coming in,” the Giants’ new pitching coach said Sunday. “I think they’re all high-level arms.”

Meccage was specifically talking about the group that includes Hayden Birdsong, Landon Roupp, Carson Seymour, Carson Whisenhunt and Trevor McDonald.

They were supposed to shoulder a larger load last season. But Roupp was the lone one to log 100 innings. Altogether they produced a 0.1 bWAR. The Giants missed the postseason and finished the year with three reliable starting pitchers.

“We’ve done some things with a few of them that have elevated their status a little bit,” Meccage said, citing Whisenhunt as one example. His fastball was up to 97 mph with better carry. He also introduced a power slider. “Everybody’s in a little different spot. Some guys it’s being in-zone more. Some guys it’s just getting their stuff better. Because if their stuff is better, then their confidence is better and they go out and they feel really good about competing.”

The strides haven’t quite yielded results this spring for Whisenhunt or Seymour. But Roupp and McDonald look poised to break camp as the No. 5 starter and bullpen swingman, respectively. Birdsong isn’t likely to be an option after an MRI showed structural damage in his elbow.

“I think the depth, just if you’re talking about the whole group, is still strong,” manager Tony Vitello said after Birdsong’s injury. “If you’re gonna boil it down to a bigger-picture question, I do feel good about the competitiveness and the depth.”

One reason for optimism has been the springs from veteran free-agent additions Tyler Mahle and Adrian Houser, whose short-term contracts reflected their status as relative unknowns.

Mahle has made 30 starts once, and he’s been limited to 125 total innings the past three seasons with elbow and shoulder issues. Houser generates ground balls but doesn’t miss many bats. He hasn’t made 30 starts once. But they look like good bets so far.

Houser, 33, allowed a two-run homer but otherwise breezed through five innings in his last start. He may or may not have popped a 99, depending on how trustworthy the radar gun at Scottsdale Stadium is, but either way, his velocity has been up — consistently 94-96 mph.

Meccage saw a lot of Houser, a former Brewer, in the NL Central.

“He’s better right now than I’ve ever seen him,” Meccage said. Mahle, who hasn’t allowed a run in three spring starts (six innings), “is what we thought he would be. He’s consistent. He has a really nice approach on what he wants to do and he goes out and executes it.”

While Meccege said that Mahle “added a couple little tweaks to some pitches that we think are going to be really helpful,” of Houser he said, “I think there’s big upside there we can tap into.”

With Roupp, it could shape up to be a solid five-man group with Logan Webb and Robbie Ray anchoring it at the front. While Webb is away pitching Team USA into the WBC semifinals, Ray has gone nine innings without allowing a hit and was so locked in the last time he took the mound that he said afterward that he had been pitching in a “flow state.”

It’s easy to forget Webb, who will start Opening Day, isn’t the Cy Young winner in the rotation.

“The slider, he feels it’s back to where it was in ‘21,” Meccage said. When Ray won the Cy Young. “We identified some things in his delivery that probably were a little out of whack. I think the last two starts you’ve seen a progression toward where he’s going to be.”

There are still spots up for grabs in the bullpen, where the Giants must replace Tyler Rogers and Camilo Doval, both traded away at the deadline, as well as Randy Rodriguez, who is recovering from elbow surgery.

Vitello hasn’t committed to naming a closer, but Meccage said that in the “ideal scenario” they would have one pitcher dedicated to the ninth inning. He could envision Ryan Walker and Erik Miller splitting up the last six outs based on matchups, perhaps with an appetizer of Jose Butto.

With Joey Lucchesi only coming into camp last week, Matt Gage appears to have the upper-hand as the bullpen’s second southpaw but Meccage said, “It’d be nice to have three lefties.”

Missing bats might be a problem, particularly without Doval or Rodriguez. Nobody vying for a role anywhere in the bullpen struck out a batter per inning last season. Miller has strikeout stuff, but he’s been hampered by health issues.

“You’d always like to have more swing and miss,” Meccage said. “That’s kind of what we’re doing with some pitch shape stuff and some structural stuff when we’re making decisions with those guys: Who can we get miss from?”

Meccage will attempt to apply lessons from his time in Pittsburgh and Milwaukee in San Francisco. His deputy, Christian Wonders, comes from an organization with equally impressive credentials in pitching development, the Rays, and is considered a data guru. Frank Anderson followed Vitello from Tennessee to helm the three-man pitching operation.

Meccage praised the Pirates for identifying and developing starting pitchers and said the Brewers were “as good as I’ve ever seen in terms of combining the art and science.”

“That’s our goal, to kind of fill the gap,” Meccage said. “What does a player need? We can meet a player wherever they need to go. Whether they want to dig into pitch shapes or biomechanics or if they don’t want to think about any of that and go the mindset route, I think we’ve got all that covered.”