The San Francisco Giants shook up their roster and rotation on Tuesday, sending Hayden Birdsong and Tristan Beck to Sacramento and replacing them with Carson Seymour and Sean Hjelle.
The Beck-Hjelle swap isn’t particularly notable, as it would appear to be a way to get a fresh long reliever on the roster after Monday’s accidental bullpen game. Birdsong pitching his way out of the rotation and back into the minor leagues, most certainly is.
For years, my touchstone for an “unexpectedly and irrevocably disastrous start” was Madison Bumgarner’s 2011 start against the Twins. Ten batters came to the plate, and only one of them made an out, with the others banging out hit after hit — four singles, five doubles — to score eight earned runs. It was an all-time meltdown, but in his next start, he allowed just one run in seven strong innings.
Birdsong’s start on Tuesday is the new champ, though. It was an absolute catastrophe that shouldn’t be topped for years, if not decades. He faced six batters and walked four of them. Another batter hit a line-drive double, and he hit the final batter he faced, but it wasn’t just the outcome that was disastrous.
It was also how the batters walked. Some of the pitches didn’t even appear on MLB’s Gameday app, as they were too far away from the plate for the lasers to catch. He threw a curveball that curved less than any curveball you’ll ever see again.
It was as concerning a start as possible, at least without a player’s health being involved. And it’s a good excuse to recall just how strange Birdsong’s professional career has been.
When he was a 19-year-old sophomore at Eastern Illinois, he had a 9.76 ERA and a 0-5 record. About 1,000 days later, he was pitching against Shohei Ohtani. Now, a lot happened in those thousand days to make the journey seem more plausible at every step, but it’s still been an extremely compressed timeline for him.
Considering that command and control have never been a strength for him, the ingredients for a hiccup like this were always there. The hiccup happened to be more of a belch that set off car alarms, but Birdsong’s season had been trending in the wrong direction because of an inability to throw strikes, and it wasn’t getting better.
Carson Seymour would be the logical replacement for Birdsong in the rotation, and while he’s already made his major-league debut, he’s yet to make his first career start in the majors. He’s appeared in one game since the Giants sent him to Sacramento, throwing three innings in relief, allowing a run and striking out seven.
That was his first relief appearance in Triple A this season after 15 starts, which suggests the Giants were preparing him for a bullpen role. It might not be a given, then, that he’ll be even a short-term solution in the rotation, especially with the trade deadline just over a week away.
The problem with the Giants looking outside the organization, though, is that it’s impossible to tell if they’re buyers or sellers right now. The simplest solution is probably the likeliest one: Let Seymour take the starts, even if he’ll need a couple to get stretched back out.
When the Giants were relevant in the NL West this season, they were doing so because of their superior pitching. Along with just about everything else on the team, though, the pitching has been a disaster in recent days, even affecting the most consistent performers on the staff.
Birdsong’s demotion now leaves the rotation as Logan Webb, Robbie Ray, Justin Verlander, Landen Roupp and others. Webb and Ray were both All-Stars, but they’re both coming off nightmare starts, and they’ve struggled more recently than they previously had all season.
Verlander is 42 and winless in 16 starts with a 4.99 ERA. There’s context that can make the previous sentence seem a little less scary and depressing, but there sure isn’t nearly enough of it. Considering all of this, let’s take a moment to appreciate that Roupp has temporarily become the rock of the rotation, right when the team was starting to get desperate for quality starts.
As for the others, we’ll see if he’s just one pitcher (likely Seymour) or if they’ll settle for a steady diet of bullpen games until they can find a permanent replacement. And it’s not unreasonable to hope that Birdsong adjusts and dominates in a couple of Sacramento outings and rejoins the rotation like nothing ever happened.
Until then, though, the rotation is in flux. What seemed like a mighty surplus of starting pitching just a couple of months ago has turned into an area of acute need, and Birdsong’s demotion is just the latest development in the saga.
(Photo of Hayden Birdsong: Lachlan Cunningham / Getty Images)
