Less than a week before opening day, the San Francisco Giants’ chances in 2018 took a major blow on Friday, when Madison Bumgarner broke a bone in his pitching hand after being hit with a line drive. The Giants’ ace is expected to be out for at least a couple of months, and considering the club will already be without Jeff Samardzija for three weeks, significantly weakens the club’s rotation to start the season.
Longtime baseball writer Buster Olney joined Tolbert & Lund shortly after the news broke about Bumgarner, and said that he doesn’t expect the Giants to sign a free agent starting pitcher as a reinforcement, largely due to the fact that very few are available. Instead, Olney thinks the Giants will call a young arm up from the minor leagues and hope for the best.
“There’s nothing,” Olney said about the free agent market. “In the next 72 hours, the next 4-5 days there could be some options of pitchers who you could conceivably grab onto but, I mean, it’s the bottom of the barrel at this point. All the big free agents — Jake Arrieta is off the board, Alex Cobb is off the board, Lance Lynn is off the board — you’ve got to hope and pray.
“They’re just going to have to hope to rope-a-dope here in the early weeks of the season, especially when they have all these games against the Dodgers right away…My guess is they’ll reach down to the farm system, pull somebody out, and hope that it works. Teams in April will tend to be very conservative because the asking prices for pitchers with other teams, or crazy solutions, they don’t go for those because of ripple effects down the road.”
Listen to the full interview below. To hear Olney on Bumgarner, start from the beginning.