2025 Depth Charts: Right-Handed Starters

The position that keeps on giving

Photo Credit: Mick Anders | Richmond Flying Squirrels

So far in this year’s Depth Charts series, we’ve looked at:

• Shortstop

• First Base

• LHP - Starters

• Center Field

• Catcher

• Third Base

Is this the most important Depth Chart we’ll tackle this offseason? In the wake of the Diamondbacks signing the top free agent pitcher on the market, Corbin Burnes, The Athletic’s Andy Baggarly put this note up on Bluesky:

This is the second straight winter that the head of Giants’ baseball operations has spent pounding the table about the club’s confidence in their wave of young arms coming through to help the club compete. As I noted last year when handling this same topic, it seemed like the Giants’ confidence in the young pitchers outstripped the opinions I was hearing from other clubs. I wrote last year that either they were going to be proven very right, perhaps to the point of changing industry opinions about their player development, or people might be losing their jobs. In the end, a job was lost.

That’s not going to happen again this year, of course. But, before I get into my grades for this group of right-handers, I do think it’s worth noticing that ZiPS projections are extremely bearish on this group. It’s not unusual for projection systems to be pretty conservative in handling players with mostly minor league work on their resumes, of course. But, at least in the case of ZiPS, which has a decently strong track record of projecting over time, starting pitching is not only NOT the strength of the upcoming Giants club, it’s a clear weakness, as Dan Szymborski writes:

[T]he pitching, and more specifically, the starting pitching, is San Francisco’s biggest obstacle. For the umpteenth year in a row, ZiPS is super into Logan Webb, who has steadily ranked in the top three for WAR over any X number of future years for about three years now, only occasionally swapping places with hurlers like Corbin Burnes. The problem, of course, isn’t Webb.

(oh, the sting of that Webb/Burnes note tossed in there…)

That model sees everybody we’re going to discuss today from Jordan Hicks to Nick Sinacola as, basically, some variation of a mid-4.00s ERA and around 1 fWAR or less of value (it’s true of the lefties, too). To add insult to injury, Stuff+ models don’t seem to be terribly high on many of these guys either. For the Giants to be proven correct — for some of these players to take big steps forward and become important parts of a winning club — they’re going to have to prove the computers wrong to greater or larger degrees. It’s at this point that GM Zack Minasian might tell the tale of his former club, the Milwaukee Brewers insisting that they really liked the young guys in their system and didn’t need to go out and pay for expensive starting pitching. It took a few years, but Brandon Woodruff, Freddy Peralta, and some guy named Corbin eventually proved them right.

Our sole consolation is that this is a position that has been highly productive on the farm this decade. It’s produced the team’s biggest home grown star (Webb) one of the true breakout prospects of the past couple of years (Hayden Birdsong), and enough depth of potentially helpful options that fitting them all on the Giants’ roster to start the year will almost certainly be impossible (though, more possible now that Burnes is in the desert). Some pretty interesting arms with a measure of big league success on their resumes are likely going to have to schlepp it down I-80 to Sutter Health Park to open the season (and I’m not suggesting that they’re getting traded to the Athletics). That could be a tough pill for them to swallow — it seems that bitter pills are all the rage in this new year — but it’s not a bad position for a team to be in, knowing that many layers of reserve are going to be necessary to make it through a 162-game season.

Let’s dive in. There’s some quantity here, there’s a little star power here (though less than we’d hoped), and there’s some pretty intriguing potential to go along with it. Who would I point to to beat the projections? Let’s see…