The Giants hitched themselves to an injury guy and have experienced all the highs and lows that come with it.
2023 stats: 19 G (18 GS), 99.2 IP, 4.88 ERA, 4.35 FIP, 18.9% K%, 4.8% BB%, 1.0 fWAR
It’s a little strange to consider that Anthony DeSclafani represented a win above a replacement level player in 2023, right? Well, through the first two months of the season, he was actually the 31st-most valuable starting pitcher in Major League Baseball by FanGraphs’ Wins Above Replacement (1.2); and, if you want to make an 11-start stretch sound even more impressive, that value was good enough to place him 17th in the NL, well ahead of probable Cy Young winner Blake Snell.
I say all that not to make fun of DeSclafani by way of small sample size, only to point out that he started off the season being the guy the Giants knew they had. They were able to pull him out of bargain bin of free agency and fix the dent that had put him there in the first place, reviving a career that had gone from interesting to shaky pretty quickly. His 2021 season was mostly magical, except for the 7 starts against the Dodgers where it was a curse, but you had the feeling even through that NLDS that the Giants had helped him figure something out.
But then last season happened, and it felt like DeSclafani mirrored the rest of the franchise’s sudden pumpkining after that magical 2021 season. The Giants had extended him for three years and it felt like a solid move to shore up the back of the rotation until it didn’t. Then Spring Training came around, and amidst the chorus of “Sure, Jans” to Disco being in The Best Shape of His Life or some such, we got this bit of news from Susan Slusser:
For most of his life, it turns out, Anthony DeSclafani was pitching without a groove for the peroneal tendon in his right ankle, his body somehow compensating for that genetic anomaly until late in the 2021 season.
It’s rare we get A Reason for why a player suddenly stinks, but you look at that and you think, “Okay, well, yeah, that would do it.” Then the first month of the season happened where he and Alex Cobb basically kept the Giants afloat and it felt good. It felt like the team’s evaluation of him had been vindicated and this one simple trick was going to make the last two years of his deal really fly. I’m sure that’s most of us felt after his 8 shutout innings against the Astros in Houston on May 2nd, easily his best start of the season. Brady wrote at the time:
Because Anthony DeSclafani continues to have the kind of year that we’ll look back on and point at if the Giants do figure this whole thing out.
DeSclafani’s performance wasn’t as box score dominant as Alex Cobb’s recent complete game shutout. He only pitched eight innings. He only struck out three batters.
But when you consider the quality of the opponent and the fact that the Giants were on a four-game losing streak and reeling in a big, big way, I feel confident calling this the best pitching performance of the season for the Giants.
It’s too bad it was his best pitching performance of the season because they really could’ve used his help in the second half. Instead, he hit the IL with shoulder and elbow issues starting in July. Some combination of fatigue and probably some pain from that surgically repaired ankle conspiring to take down what had been such a promising start to the season.
Role on this year’s team
Hear me out. If you’re the Giants, a rotation of Logan Webb, Alex Cobb, Anthony DeSclafani, Sean Manaea, and Ross Stripling, with Jakob Junis, Tristan Beck, Keaton Winn, Sean Hjelle to back them up and Kyle Harrison expected to come along at some point makes a lot of sense for a team on sub-$200 million payroll. Figure a projection of 7 WAR for Webb & Cobb, 5 between DeSclafani & Manaea, maybe 2 WAR for Stripling and a combined 1 from the rest and that’s 15 WAR from your starting staff alone, which if that had wound up being the case this year would’ve put them right between Tampa Bay (3rd in MLB – 15.5 fWAR) and San Diego (4th in MLB – 14.5 fWAR).
It’s less of a “you have to squint in order to see it” and more “if everything works out, this is the most likely outcome,” but I don’t think the latter was ever delusional. Then again, we should probably factor in the injury component: not that injuries are both unpredictable in the specific but predictable in the general sense, but that Alex Cobb and Anthony DeSclafani’s careers have been defined by injury. Manaea was a bounce-back candidate and Stripling was coming off a career best season. A healthy DeSclafani was a critical piece of the Jenga tower and after he got taken away, we saw how much the tower wobbled.
Role on next year’s team
He’ll make $12 million in the final year of that three-year extension he signed and in order for him to “equal” that value, he’d need to put up basically 2-2.5 fWAR. Even in a diminished state he threw up a 1, but the shoulder and elbow problems that accompanied ankle surgery really does suggest that as much as the team will need him to be the 4th starter next year he is not a player they can count on and it’s now an open question if he’ll even be effective during the short stretches where he might be healthy.
But, dang it, if he is healthy at all, his ceiling is pretty clear: a guy who can give you a quality start every fifth day. That’s valuable and sorely needed. He’ll be paid as a guy who’s supposed to above the fray, but if he winds up being a contributor in the Junis/Stripling mold, that could work too. Maybe just don’t count on or even hope for it.