LOS ANGELES — In his long-awaited first inning as a Giant, Robbie Ray couldn’t buy a strike.
He fell behind hitters. He kept choking his slider and missing with his fastball. He issued two walks, one with the bases loaded. He hit two batters. He threw two wild pitches. He required two mound visits from Curt Casali, who might have been wearing goalie pads for all the lunging and blocking required of him. At least Ray wasn’t getting squeezed. Not by the plate umpire, anyway.
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His traditionally tight pants were another story.
From his sartorial style to his grunting delivery to a competitive edge that needed no sharpening, Ray looked more like a former Cy Young Award winner in prime form than a pitcher who was making his first major-league start in 16 months. He merely needed an inning to channel his adrenaline and find it. His stuff, once he got a handle on it, was as suffocating as ever. In a must-win game, Ray limited the damage to one run in a wild first inning, he flat-out dominated in four hitless innings after that, and the Giants scored a six-run eighth while breaking open an essential, 8-3 victory at Dodger Stadium Wednesday night.
“Everything felt good,” said Ray, who didn’t allow a hit in five innings. “I was just getting a little quick with my front side. But I knew that my stuff was going to play regardless. I knew if I got through that first inning, then I could settle down and everything would turn around, because my stuff in the bullpen felt really good.
“It was just a matter of getting the first one out of the way and rolling from there.”
Ray joined a team that was rolling in the wrong direction. From the time the Giants acquired him from the Seattle Mariners in the winter, offloading Mitch Haniger and Anthony DeSclafani in a trade that amounted to writing down debts for both teams, they understood that the rehabbing 32-year-old left-hander wouldn’t make an impact until after the All-Star break. The Giants weren’t getting an ace. They were getting the assembly kit for one.
Giants head athletic trainer Dave Groeschner and his staff took the baton from their Mariners counterparts while Ray was in the midst of a lengthy rehabilitation from not just Tommy John surgery to reconstruct his elbow ligament but also surgery to repair his flexor tendon. There would be no skipping steps or fast-tracking that process, even when the Giants found themselves down to two functional starting pitchers for weeks in June. The hope was that the Giants would be deep and resilient enough to remain in contention and then attack August and beyond with a potentially overwhelming rotation fronted by Ray, Logan Webb, and Blake Snell.
It hasn’t worked out that way. By the time Ray took the mound Wednesday night at Dodger Stadium, the Giants had lost four of five out of the All-Star break, they’d fallen a season-worst six games under .500, and they were maybe another loss or two from becoming no-doubt sellers ahead of Tuesday’s trade deadline.
So the Giants played a must-win game on Wednesday. They might have to run the table over their next five — a series finale here on Thursday followed by four home games against the Colorado Rockies, who usually break out in hives when they take the field in San Francisco — to prevent a week of Hug Watch for players like Michael Conforto, Mike Yastrzemski, Wilmer Flores, Taylor Rogers and perhaps even Snell.
But Ray’s dominant five innings might have been even more significant in the grander scheme. While he can opt out of the final two years and $50 million on his contract after this season, the Giants’ goal when they traded for him was to add a multiyear co-ace to pair with Webb atop their rotation. No matter how this season finishes, the Giants will face a significant retooling effort this offseason. Knowing you’ll have Webb, Ray and potentially Snell taking the ball every fifth day? That’s at least a promising place to start.
But first, Ray had to make it out of the first inning on Wednesday. And for a few minutes, especially after right-hander Sean Hjelle started to get warmed up in the bullpen, that was looking like a dicey proposition.
Ray retired Shohei Ohtani on a fly ball to the warning track in left field. Then he hit Will Smith with a pitch. He threw a wild pitch. He walked Freddie Freeman. He threw another wild pitch. He hit Teoscar Hernández. He walked Andy Pages to force in a run.
Casali made one mound visit. Then he made another. As Casali trotted back to the dish, he had the haggard look of a catcher in his 10th inning of the night, not his first.
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Then Ray struck out Miguel Vargas and got Chris Taylor to pop up. He threw just 15 strikes out of 33 pitches.
Ray had an 85-pitch limit. Giants manager Bob Melvin wasn’t going to let him throw half of that complement in the first inning.
“All of a sudden he found his arm slot and got into his rhythm,” Melvin said. “He was a completely different guy in the second inning. A lot of the time you’ve been off that long, your adrenaline is pumping pretty quick, you’re a little bit ahead of your arm and trying to find your arm slot. Once he found his rhythm and settled in, he was pretty good.”
Melvin has an art for understatement. Ray was better than pretty good. He struck out the side in the second inning and retired the last 12 batters he faced. From the second through the fourth, he threw 27 strikes out of 37 pitches. Other than his two-seamer, which he and Casali decided to ditch against left-handers, Ray was crisp and effective with all his pitches. He induced 22 whiffs and they were spread almost equally between his slider, a late-breaking curveball and a four-seam fastball that touched 97 mph.
Robbie Ray’s 5 IP is the longest no-hit bid by a Giants starter in his team debut in the expansion era (1961)
It’s the longest in a Giants debut since Juan Marichal in his MLB debut – 7 2/3 hitless on July 19, 1960, en route to a 1-hit shutout
h/t @EliasSports https://t.co/Xp5kwa8Kdt
— Sarah Langs (@SlangsOnSports) July 25, 2024
It was some comfort to have Casali, his one-time Mariners teammate, behind the plate.
“Man, once we sat down on the bench, we just took a moment and figured it out,” Casali said. “It was, ‘OK, we checked that box. Now he can do what he does.’ He gave us four more excellent innings. I mean, nobody got on base.”
“You could have expected something like that,” Casali said of Ray’s erratic first inning. “We’re grown men but we still do stupid things every once in a while. Sold out crowd, this is a big place to make his Giants debut. Sometimes the adrenaline gets the best of you. But we made some really good adjustments and … the rest was all him. He did such a good job of mixing and matching and being competitive in the zone all night long. He really set our team up. We had all the momentum. In a place like this, a hard place to win, to get that momentum on our side through five innings was huge.
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“To bring somebody with that pedigree into our team, our struggling team right now, it’s a huge boost of confidence and knowing that he’s going to go out there every fifth day and compete his butt off. You can’t really measure experience and he’s got it.”
The Giants tied it on Matt Chapman’s home run in the fourth and went ahead later in the inning when Tyler Fitzgerald hit a hustle double and scored on Yastrzemski’s single. Fitzgerald’s five-game home run streak came to an end but he continued to take impressive plate appearances, drawing a pair of walks including one that helped set the table for the team’s six-run rally in the eighth.
Prior to the game, the Giants optioned struggling outfielder Luis Matos and right-hander Randy Rodriguez but Melvin indicated that both players would return soon. Matos was pressing in a 2-for-22 slump while not getting regular playing time as his role began to mimic the right-handed platoon role previously held by Austin Slater. The Giants added outfielder and Elk Grove, Calif., native Derek Hill, whom they had claimed off waivers a day earlier, and sent Matos to play every day for Triple-A Sacramento.
“We’ll see where it goes with his role the next time he’s up here,” Melvin said. “We haven’t seen a ton of lefties and when you’re sitting around, there’s a ton of pressure. A lot of times you might only get one or two at-bats (in a series). He’s done his best work when he’s been in there every day. Obviously, he was (NL) player of the week. The ability is there. It was just a difficult role for him.”
It’s even more difficult to have no role at all. Ray hadn’t started a game since March 31, 2023, when he exited his season debut in the fourth inning and went for an MRI that showed structural damage to his flexor tendon. His ulnar collateral ligament was in bad enough shape that surgeons recommended a full reconstruction as well.
By the time Ray reported to spring training with the Giants, he was already grunting while playing catch. Melvin said it was a marvel that Ray never endured one setback while ramping up his throwing program and then gradually adding volume in what amounted to 10 minor-league rehab appearances in the Arizona Complex League, then on to Low-A San Jose and Sacramento.
“The process would suggest he was ready for this,” Melvin said. “We’ve been waiting for this for a while. … It’s a deep breath knowing he’s hitting the ground running.”
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Ray struck out Ohtani twice and overpowered him with a 95.5 mph fastball at the top of the zone in the fifth to end his night. Then he descended into the visiting dugout to a wave of congratulatory hugs and handshakes. He told Melvin that he knew Ohtani was his last batter so he wanted to empty the tank.
“But it seems like he empties the tank on every pitch,” Melvin said. “So that’s nothing new for him.”
Casali gave Ray a bear hug in the dugout. It was a triumphant moment for Groeschner and his staff, too. There were smiles all around as Ray, Groeschner, and pitching coach Bryan Price stood in the dugout and dissected the outing. Then Ray leaned against the dugout rail and turned to scan the crowd. He was looking for his wife and two eldest children to continue a tradition they’d put off for 16 months.
“That’s kind of my thing,” Ray said. “After I’m done, I wave to the kids.
“For them to experience this after the long comeback and the support that they showed me, there’s not words that can describe that. It was just a super special night all around.”
(Photo: Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)
Andrew Baggarly is a senior writer for The Athletic and covers the San Francisco Giants. He has covered Major League Baseball for more than two decades, including the Giants since 2004 for the Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News and Comcast SportsNet Bay Area. He is the author of two books that document the most successful era in franchise history: “A Band of Misfits: Tales of the 2010 San Francisco Giants” and “Giant Splash: Bondsian Blasts, World Series Parades and Other Thrilling Moments By the Bay.” Follow Andrew on Twitter @extrabaggs
