Waiting for the Great Leap Forward: Logan Webb
Checking out the youngest Giant
Good Monday morning to you! In the last five days even the Giants’ losses have been fun, as they’ve both involved stirring four-run comebacks. And we also got this:
Even with uncertainty, gloom, and fear swirling around the periphery (and everywhere else in our society), the game still provides its native pleasures, as always. So here at There R Giants we’ll keep hope alive and plunge ahead into the future (hopefully a COVID-free one).
I’m going to continue my recent series, digging into the prospects on the major league roster (since that’s just about the only 2020 action we have available) and today we’ll turn our lens on 23-year-old Starting Pitcher Logan Webb.
Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports
Webb is the youngest player on the 2020 version of the Giants — and that’s actually a major understatement. Born in Nov. of 1996, Webb is a full year and a half younger than anyone else on the team, with Conner Menez (May, 1995) being the next closest in age. Both Mauricio Dubon and Jaylin Davis (July, 1994) are nearly 2.5 years older than Webb. The recently departed Rule 5 pick Dany Jiménez was a full three years older than Webb!
When you think about it — that’s a little shocking, isn’t it? We’re pretty far through two years of a soft rebuild program for the Giants, and the youngest player on the roster, by far, is someone who will be turning 24 this Fall. He’ll give up that title when (and if) Joey Bart ever gets promoted to the Giants, but only by the smallest of margins: Bart was born less than one month later, in December, 1996. The Giants aren’t going to really start getting younger until they can get Heliot Ramos, Marco Luciano and company up to the team.
This is all a digression, of course, but it helps when thinking about Logan Webb’s development to understand what he’s accomplished in relatively little time and experience. Indeed, several of the Giants “better” pitching prospects who still have significant development needs in front of them are older than Webb, including #14 prospect Tristan Beck (June, 1996), #20 Jake Wong (September, 1996), #22 Jose Marte (June, 1996) and the recently acquired Jordan Humphreys (also June, 1996 — more on Jordan in a bit).
All of which helps put the climb Logan Webb has made — and the challenges he has faced — in some context. While a decent amount of his contemporaries are still learning their lessons against A ball hitters, Webb’s mistakes are now being judged by the sternest critics of all: major league dudes with bats in their hands and terror on their minds.
Here’s a little clip I shot of Webb in March of 2018 in minor league camp — that’s just two and half years ago and at the time he’d yet to throw a pitch in High A and had just 134 professional innings on his resume:
All of which is to say that we need to be grading Webb’s performance in the majors thus far on a curve. With that said: how has Webb looked in his two starts in 2020? Well, I’m going to go with “Shaky, but determined!” Checking out Webb’s Statcast data at Baseball Savant, the first thing to notice is that there’s a lot of Blue Boxes on his 2020 pitching line:
That’s not so good! Those blue/grey boxes means that he’s in the bottom 10% of major league performances so far this year in a lot of “Expected” categories. An expected BA of .381, expect wOBA of .482, and particularly scary, and expected ERA of 11.59! All of which is based on the Statcast measurements of pitch quality and level of contact.
It’s not terribly difficult to spot the problem here. He’s having tremendous issues commanding his 4-seam fastball. There have been other issues as well, but throwing the fastball where he wants to — pretty much the foundation of all pitching — has been a struggle for Webb this year. And we’re not talking just a little off the edge, either:
Webb’s been pitching in the batters’ boxes a little too frequently! He’s gone from throwing his fastball in the strike zone 48% of the time in 2019 (which was already under MLB average) down to 45% of the time in 2020 (with several of those being WAAAY out of the zone). Not surprisingly, when he has been able to throw the fastball for strikes it’s been getting hid — HARD! The change in Exit Velocity and Barrel % off of his fastball this year tell a significant tale:
Simply put, Webb has been putting himself in hitter’s counts with too many non-competitive pitches and getting hit hard when he comes in. Webb’s fastball has average velocity but the spin rate and vertical movement are actually well below average for MLB, so they don’t have that “hop” you’d like to see. That means honing command of the pitch is going to be necessary for his survival.
Webb’s slider, which has a strong spin rate and some elite lateral movement, has also been a problem, as batters are chasing it much less frequently this year. Last year, Webb used his slider as a “putaway” pitch 30% of the time, but in 2020 he has yet to put a batter away using the pitch. His Whiff rate on the slider has dropped significantly as well. As with the fastball, it appears Webb doesn’t quite have the command and sharpness on the slider that we saw last year, and he isn’t forcing batters into bad swing decisions. Here’s a 3D image tracking all pitches in his most recent start against Texas. You can see how far out of the zone he’s been with a lot of the sliders (yellow) and fastballs (red):
In 2019, Webb successfully enticed batters to chase the slider down and away (for RHH), but so far this year hitters have completely laid off that pitch outside the zone. Here you can see the swing and miss on sliders from 2019 (left) and 2020 (right):
Interestingly, the pitch that has saved him this year is the one that was considered far more of a work in progress last year — his changeup. While he’s still struggling with consistency of the pitch and has left some changes up in the zone for hard contact, he’s also unleashed some real beauties this year. His Whiff % on the pitch has gone up from 30% to 42%. That’s allowed him to effectively replace the slider with the change as his put away pitch this year.
Indeed, you can tell he’s felt good about the change this year, as he’s actually used it more than any other pitch. While in 2019, he used his 4-seam fastball far more than any other pitch (43% of the time) this year as he’s struggled to feel the fastball, he’s gone to almost equal numbers of 4-seams (42), sliders (42), and changes (44), with the change being the most successful of the three in inducing swings and misses.
Ultimately, this is all going to need to change. To be successful, Webb will need to find his feel for his fastball and slider again, and I think we can assume that will come at some point. And hopefully when that happens, the change won’t just as suddenly disappear (though we know from decades of listening to Mike Krukow talk about pitching that that’s exactly the kind of devilish trick that pitches like to play on their owners). Webb is developing a strong mix of pitches to deploy against major league hitters. What he needs now is to find greater consistency with all of them, He’ll also need to find that major leaguer’s ability to adjust on the fly and diagnose physically what’s him to miss the zone so he can get back in it quickly — within an inning or at bat. With his next start coming in Coors Field, it would behoove him to make some of those adjustments immediately, as it’s much harder to get away with mistakes in that environment.
But I do want to finish today by focusing on what Webb has really done right so far this year — and that’s to look at the difference between Statcast’s expected data and Webb’s actuals. The fact is, this is the profile of a pitcher who should be sporting a pretty ugly line so far this year:
By virtually every marker that can be measured, the quality of Webb’s pitches has been very bad in his two starts this year. He’s taken the mound for 8 innings so far and in all 8 of them he’s allowed at least two baserunners. In all 8 of them, he’s had at least one runner in scoring position. And yet, he’s surrendered just three runs so far, and just two earned (2.35 ERA). The data says that’s not sustainable and we should expect some regression — and truly that kind of constant traffic on the bases is no way to go through life for a major league pitcher.
But one thing Webb has done very successfully so far is compete. He’s made pitches when he’s had to and his heads up defensive play against the Dodgers (helping nab Chris Taylor trying to take 3b) may well have made the difference between a four game split and a 1-3 start to the season. It’s courting cliché to say that Webb takes a bulldog mentality to the mound, but it’s true nonetheless. The former star QB knows how to bear down and make plays. And if he can make the progress he needs to refining his pitches and his command, that competitiveness is going to be a real virtue for him — helping the entire mix play up. I would say his competitiveness is his best attribute on the mound and likely always will be. None of his pitches are really great when graded on pure stuff — they’re good enough to work certainly, but they’re not necessarily the weapons of domination. But he’s out there to beat you and that matters. If the feel for the stuff improves, he should beat batters more and more successfully.
What do you think — how do you see Webb developing over the next few years for the Giants?
Responding to a reader request, here are the previous entries in this series:
Jaylin Davis
Austin Slater
Mauricio Dubon
And, just for the fun of it, here’s where I got the title for this series. Decades ago I lived in Prague for awhile and I had a very limited selection of cassette tapes with me at the time— so I have a strong fondness for the handful of musical friends that kept me company that year and Billy Bragg’s Workers Playtime is among that group.
We have a New Giant!
While we bid farewell to here-and-gone prospect Dany Jiménez ( (and just when I’d learned how to say his name!), the Giants swung a trade this weekend to bring in a brand-new pitching prospect, sending Billy Hamilton to the Mets for RHP Jordan Humphreys.
Humphreys was taken by the Mets out of the Florida High School ranks in the 18th round of the 2015 draft. He progressed nicely enough — but slowly and relatively unnoticed in his first two seasons of pro ball. But in 2017, as a 21 year old in his first full season action, Humphreys emerged as a legitimate prospect. In 11 starts in the Sally, he posted a 1.42 ERA, threw two complete games, and struck out 80 batters to just 9 BB over 69.2 IP. His extreme command of the strike zone led to a tiny 0.70 WHIP against Sally hitters.
That led to a mid-season promotion to the Florida State League, but the optimism of his break through quickly turned to disappointment. He got knocked around for the first time in his first start in A+. The second one went much better on the scoreboard (7 shutout innings) but much worse inside his arm. The ligament in his elbow went kapfluey — and suddenly his year (and possibly more) was over. This is a great interview that the Mets production folks put together with Jordan last Fall talking about the long road back.
With the complications and additional surgery, Humphreys lost a full two years to the injury, not appearing again until a couple of short rehab games in the rookie complex Gulf Coast League in August of 2019. To get him some more innings, the Mets sent Humphreys to the Arizona Fall League last year — where he was teammates with Joey Bart, Heliot Ramos, and the rest of the Giants’ AFL contingent.
Humphreys 12 innings of work in the AFL were enough to make the Mets add him to their 40 man to protect him from the Rule 5 draft. But last week when Jake Marisnick went on the IL they had to clear space to bring a replacement CF on board, and Humphreys was DFA’d. The Giants smartly gobbled up the promising right-hander in exchange for Billy Hamilton, whose opportunity with the Giants had been on a steady decline.
Despite Humphreys eye-popping strikeouts noted above, it’s really the BB numbers that are more important. His ticket to success is command over pure stuff, though Baseball America did note that his fastball has “good spin and ride” and that he has a “high spin” curveball that pairs well with it. BA had Humphreys as the Mets #11 prospect last winter, and in their mid-season re-rankings published just last week he was #14. In the Prospect Handbook, he’s listed as a “50 Value (Solid Average Regular) — High Risk” player. In the Giants’ system that would put him in a group with Will Wilson, Logan Wyatt, Tristan Beck somewhere in the 13-16 range on BA’s Midseason re-ranking of the Giants Top 30. MLB placed Humphreys at the #23 spot in the Giants’ system on their list, just in front of Jake Wong and behind Melvin Adon and Camilo Doval.
One disadvantage for Humphreys as compared to someone like Tristan Beck, is his inclusion on the 40 man roster. This will end up being his first option year, and coming off of two years of virtually no game activity, adding a third year to that total is going to be tough on his development. Humphreys will need to develop quickly to avoid his options clock hitting zero before he’s ready.
The consensus would seem to be that Humphreys has a chance to become a back of the rotation type guy who succeeds with pinpoint control and a potential bat-missing curveball. Think something like former Giants’ prospect Clayton Blackburn — though hopefully Jordan will be able to come back from the arm injuries that ruined Blackburn’s hopes.
Welcome to the Rebuild, Jordan. Please pick up a hammer and report to Sacramento!
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In your view, what’s the best lazy comp for Webb from Giants’ starters history?
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