Giants 7, Rockies 1: Logan Webb Does Not Care That This Season Is Over, and That Is Exactly Why He Is the Best Thing We Have

Six innings, four hits, no walks, seven strikeouts, eighty pitches. A six-run fourth behind him. The one man in that clubhouse who has never once mailed in an August.

Friday night Kyle Freeland walked into Oracle Park and beat us five to two. Kyle Freeland, of the forty-nine-win Colorado Rockies. I went to bed genuinely wondering whether there was a floor left to hit. Saturday afternoon Logan Webb took the ball and the whole thing looked like baseball again for two hours and twenty-six minutes. Seven to one. Six innings, four hits, one run, no walks, seven strikeouts, eighty pitches. That's the entire column, honestly, and everything after this paragraph is me trying to explain why a routine August start by a twenty-nine-year-old on a seventy-two-loss team made me angrier and happier at the same time than anything else this month.

Start with the walks, because that's the tell. Zero. Twenty-two men came to the plate against him and not one of them got a free base. Fifty-seven of his eighty pitches were strikes. He got four ground-ball outs and five in the air and he was back in the dugout before the beer line moved. The only run he gave up was in the third, when Ezequiel Tovar singled, went to third, and came home on a Cole Carrigg ground ball to left. That's it. That's the damage. Against a lineup that has lost seventy-four games he didn't get cute, didn't nibble, didn't throw an extra twenty pitches proving something to nobody in the middle of August.

And that's the whole point of him. Look at what this team has put in front of Logan Webb this year and then look at what he has done anyway: eight and seven with a 3.50 earned run average, a hundred and thirty-nine innings, a hundred and ten strikeouts against thirty-two walks, a 1.06 WHIP. Eight wins. Eight. On a club that has scored him nothing for four months. Go back further: thirty-three starts in 2023, thirty-three in 2024, thirty-four in 2025, two hundred and sixteen innings, two hundred and four, two hundred and seven. A hundred and ninety-nine starts and twelve hundred innings into a career spent entirely in this uniform, and he has never once been the guy who found a reason not to take the ball.

Then the fourth inning, which was the funniest thing I've seen at Oracle Park in a month. Michael Lorenzen had already given up a Drew Gilbert home run in the third, number six, into the right-field seats, tying it at one, and in the fourth the whole thing came apart on him. Turner Hill sacrifice fly, Jung Hoo Lee in. Gilbert singled to centre and both Drew Cavanaugh and Buddy Kennedy scored. Rafael Devers hit his twenty-ninth double, a ground-rule job down the left-field line, and Christian Koss scored. Bryce Eldridge lined a single to centre and Devers scored. Six runs. Lorenzen never got out of the inning, three and two thirds, six earned, eighty-two pitches, and he hit Kennedy for good measure. Parker Mushinski came in and let both inherited runners score, because of course he did.

Drew Gilbert finished three for four with a walk, a home run, three runs batted in and two runs scored, and if you want one small honest reason to keep watching this team in September, he's a decent candidate. Jung Hoo Lee was two for three with a walk. Ten hits, no errors, seven runs. Ten hits out of a lineup that has been scratching for five all summer. It can be done. It just apparently requires Colorado.

The bullpen, briefly, because they were fine. Carson Seymour went two innings, one hit, three strikeouts, twenty-four pitches. Dylan Smith threw a one-two-three ninth on ten pitches. Three innings, no runs, nobody warming up twice. After the summer these arms have had, a clean handoff in a six-run game still counts as news around here.

Now the part that actually eats at me. Logan Webb is twenty-nine years old. He has given this franchise every healthy start of his professional life and what he has to show for it's one October cameo and a decade of front offices explaining that the window is opening soon. He was an All-Star selection this year and never even got into the game. He threw eight innings against Detroit on 9 August and this lineup couldn't find him two runs. The man is running out of prime and this organisation keeps handing him seasons like this one to be excellent inside of. That isn't his failure. It's entirely the failure of the people who built the roster around him.

So: fifty-one and seventy-two, the series with Colorado is level at one apiece, and we needed our best pitcher on the mound to split two games with a team that has lost seventy-four. Nobody is putting a banner up for that. But I've watched this club for long enough to know what it looks like when a professional shows up on a nothing Saturday in a nothing season, and Webb did the exact things he does in April of a year that matters: pounded the zone, worked fast, no walks, gave the ball to the manager with the game already won. There's no version of the next good Giants team that doesn't start with him, and there's no version of this season I'll remember fondly except the days he pitched.

Every result is in the season hub, where this roster actually stands is in the rebuild page, and the rest of it lives on the Giants hub.

More coverage: Bay Area Sports section · Bay Area Sports · Bay Area Sports Blog home