Giants right-hander Logan Webb will get an opportunity to show his former manager how much he’s grown over the past four years when he pitches against Bruce Bochy’s Texas Rangers on Sunday in San Francisco.
Returning to the site of his three World Series championships — including one over the Rangers — for the first time since 2019, Bochy has watched his new club use different means to secure 2-1 and 9-3 wins in the first two games of the interleague series.
After right-hander Jon Gray led the way in the low-scoring opener, the Rangers got a combined eight hits and seven RBIs from Corey Seager, Mitch Garver and Ezequiel Duran in Saturday’s runaway win.
In his 13th and final season as Giants skipper, Bochy filled out the lineup card on Aug. 17, 2019, and wrote the name of a 22-year-old Webb, who was making his major league debut at Arizona. The former fourth-round pick went five innings in that game and gave up two runs (one earned) in an 11-6 win.
Webb (9-9, 3.38 ERA this season) went just 2-3 with a 5.22 ERA that season under Bochy but has since become the ace of the San Francisco staff, winning 38 games since his rookie season while finishing as high as 11th in the National League Cy Young Award balloting last year.
Now 26, Webb has pitched the Giants to wins in both of his August starts, limiting the Arizona Diamondbacks and Los Angeles Angels to a total of three earned runs in 12 2/3 innings.
He’s faced the Rangers twice in his career, going 1-0 with a 1.86 ERA.
If he’s going to get anything close to the level of support he received with Bochy in his home dugout four years ago, the Giants are going to have to improve upon a woeful 1-for-12 effort with runners in scoring position that haunted Saturday’s loss. The hosts out-homered the Rangers 2-1 in the win, but both were solo shots.
Texas, meanwhile, teed off on Giants pitching for 7-for-15 success with runners in scoring position, with Garver going 3-for-3, as the Rangers won for the 10th time in their past 11 games.
“They played very well as a team, and we weren’t able to counter that,” Giants manager Gabe Kapler said. “We’re not swinging the bats well enough to put up crooked numbers. Big innings have won games for us over the last several years, and we’re not getting enough of that.”
Facing the Giants on Sunday will be right-hander Dane Dunning (9-4, 3.21), who got his team’s weeklong Bay Area stay off to a positive note with six innings of five-hit ball in his team’s 5-3 victory over the Oakland Athletics on Monday.
Like Webb, Dunning has been on the mound for two wins this month, including an 11-1 victory over the Chicago White Sox on Aug. 2 in which he struck out a season-best 11.
He has never faced the Giants.
The Rangers’ 16-hit onslaught Saturday included the first two major-league hits for J.P. Martinez, who joined the team Friday.
“We are trying to win. He is going to help us win,” Rangers general manager Chris Young explained of replacing Bubba Thompson with Martinez on the active roster. “We love Bubba Thompson, the player and the person, but we are all in on winning this year, and J.P. has had a tremendous season at Triple-A. He does a lot of things that complement our guys.”
–Field Level Media
