The Giants Might Actually Have Something in Carson Whisenhunt
Two starts, two wins, and a poise that does not match the birth certificate. Add three home runs and an 8-2 win over Colorado, and Thursday night was the first Giants game in a while I actually enjoyed watching.
I have spent most of this season in this space telling you how bad the Giants are, and I am not going to walk any of it back, because it is true. But I also promised, somewhere in one of those columns, that the day this team gave me a reason to write something else, I would take it. Thursday night at Oracle Park, they gave me a reason. His name is Carson Whisenhunt, and for the first time in a while, I left a Giants game thinking about the future instead of dreading it.
Whisenhunt got promoted from Triple-A Sacramento earlier in the day, took the ball against Colorado, and pitched like a kid who had done it a hundred times. Five and two-thirds innings, three hits, two runs, four strikeouts. He walked four, which is the one thing I would clean up, but I am nitpicking a rookie left-hander who just picked up his second win in as many big-league starts. He is now 2-0. Two starts, two wins, and the thing that jumped off the screen was not the stuff, though the stuff is real. It was the composure. He worked out of traffic, he did not speed up when the Rockies put a couple of runners on, and he handed the ball over with a lead intact. That is not what a scared rookie looks like. That is a pitcher.
And look, I am not going to sit here and anoint him after two outings against a Rockies team that is not exactly a murderers' row. I have watched this franchise fall in love with prospects before and I have the scar tissue to prove it. But you evaluate what is in front of you, and what was in front of me Thursday was a young left-hander who looked like he belonged, on a roster that has given me almost nothing to feel good about. If the Giants have finally developed a starting pitcher who can miss bats and keep his head, that is not a small thing. That is the kind of thing you build around. Whisenhunt is the first genuinely interesting arm this system has produced in a long time, and after two starts, I am interested.
The offense actually showed up too, which felt like a rumor most of this year. Casey Schmitt got it started in the first with a solo shot, his 18th, into the bleachers. Colorado answered with a two-run homer from Willi Castro in the fourth to grab a brief lead, and here is where the old Giants would have folded. This version did not. Bryce Eldridge tied it right back in the bottom of the fourth with a blast of his own, his eighth, and if you were watching closely, you saw that ball land in San Francisco Bay. The home team's first splash hit into the water this season, and it came off the bat of the twenty-year-old who is supposed to be the whole point of whatever this rebuild is. If you are keeping a list of reasons to keep the TV on, put Eldridge at the top of it.
From there the Giants did something they almost never do: they pulled away. A two-run fifth gave them the lead for good, and then they blew it open in the eighth with a four-run inning that included Willy Adames driving a two-run homer, his 15th, deep into the night. Thirteen hits, three home runs, twenty-six total bases. For a lineup that got no-hit into the ninth by Dylan Cease a couple of days ago, this was a different team wearing the same uniforms, and I will take it without asking too many questions.
Credit the bullpen too, because that is a sentence I have not typed in months. After Whisenhunt departed, JT Brubaker, Erik Miller and Caleb Kilian combined for three and a third innings of shutout relief to close it out. No blown lead, no late-inning collapse, no ninth-inning home runs off a mop-up arm. They just finished the job. It sounds like the bare minimum, and it is, but on this team the bare minimum has been rare enough that it deserves a mention.
I want to be careful here, because I have watched too much bad baseball to get carried away by one good night in July against Colorado. This does not fix the season. At their record, the year is still what it is, and a four-game series against the Rockies is not where playoff teams are forged. One 8-2 win does not erase the 10-0 losses. But that is not what Thursday was about. Thursday was about a young pitcher who looked like he might be part of the answer, and a couple of young hitters who reminded you what this team is supposed to become. On a roster I have spent months calling one of the worst I can remember, that is worth something.
So no, I am not changing my mind about where this season is going. But I told you I would write the other column the day they earned it, and Carson Whisenhunt earned it. Two starts, two wins, and the calm of somebody who plans on sticking around. Bryce Eldridge dropping one in the Bay. For one night at Oracle Park, the Giants were not bland or beaten or a chore to watch. They were fun, and they might have found something. Ask me again after his next five starts. But for the first time in a long time, I am actually looking forward to finding out.
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