© Jennifer Stewart | 2019 Aug 17
It’s been quite an eventful few weeks for Logan Webb.
Webb has rampaged through the San Francisco Giants farm system since returning from injury with minimal resistance and dominating minor-league starts. His race through the organization was punctuated on Saturday afternoon when he made his major league debut against the Arizona Diamondbacks.
The Giants needed all the help they could in the back end of their starting rotation as Conner Menez, Tyler Beede, and Andrew Suarez have all struggled in recent outings. Shaun Anderson is still on the injured list and Johnny Cueto isn’t ready to make his return yet, so the Giants turned to their fireballing phenom to see if he could make an impact after just one start with Triple-A Sacramento.
The Giants needed a pitcher to come up and make an immediate impact and Logan Webb did just that.
Webb tossed five innings of two-run ball, walking one and striking out seven. He impressed many in the Giants organization and did more than enough to earn another start. One of the people he impressed most was Mike Krukow, the longtime color commentator for the San Francisco Giants on NBC Sports Bay Area.
Krukow stopped by the Murph & Mac show on Monday morning to discuss Webb’s impressive MLB debut and what stood out most to him.
“Your Major League debut your geeked up out of your mind anyway, right?” Krukow said. “So you’re watching a guy who’s got a really good fastball, he’s got big sink on the fastball, he’s got life on the four-seamer and his velocity is right around mid-90’s.
“He’s got a curveball, and he says that the curveball is his best specialty pitch. The Giants will tell you it’s the changeup. When we saw him on the field what we saw were three swing-and-miss pitches and he had them early in the game.
“He had an opportunity to completely let that go awry in the first inning and he didn’t, he pitched through an error, he minimized the damage. It was a two-run inning, one run was earned, and then that was it. The Giants come up and have a long second inning, they score five I think it was, and the whole time the kid’s on the bench. But under that particular instance, when you’re geeked up with adrenaline, that’s the time when a long spell on the bench I don’t think hurts you, I think it helps you and he came out in the bottom half of the second inning and just goes bang, bang, bang. Shutdown inning. Gets his team back in the dugout and he had two or three times he could have peed down his leg and he didn’t.”
Krukow continued: “He had one instance where, the one time where he had a strikeout and didn’t get it because the zone was tight. The zone was tight all weekend, terrible strike zones to pitch with, and for a rookie getting a tight strike zone in his first start I thought he handled it well. He had one strikeout, and I think it was Wilmer Flores, he had struck out but didn’t get it and the next pitch, you could tell he was affected by that pitch, he wanted it and the next pitch he laid it out over the middle and it wasn’t a good pitch and it was a base hit up the middle.
That’s about the only time I saw him have a break of concentration, and in the end when his five innings were up he had seven strikeouts and everybody is just going, ‘We wanna see more of this kid.’ I thought that this guy showed better than Beede has in his last four or five starts. I thought he showed better than Menez showed in his starts. I didn’t think that this guy let the situation get out of hand, and again this was his first big league start.”
Webb is the first starting pitcher to get a win in his MLB debut for the San Francisco Giants since Ryan Sadowski in 2009.
Listen to the full interview with Krukow below. To hear him discuss Logan Webb’s MLB debut start from 8:53.
