SAN FRANCISCO — The Giants hope there are many more days like the second Friday in May two years ago.
For one, they won.
The final score was 8-2, over the Cardinals, at Busch Stadium.
But it took a late five-run rally to blow the game open. For the first five innings, they were mostly flummoxed by a 25-year-old pumping fastballs that touched 104 mph. They scratched three runs across but mustered just three hits, the opposing starter only forced from the game because of limits on his workload.
Not quite three years later, that pitcher signed a four-year, $44 million pact with the Giants.
“I’d say it was definitely my best outing. It was the most fun,” Jordan Hicks said Thursday as he was introduced by president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi and manager Bob Melvin. “I just felt like I was out there doing what I was supposed to do, getting early outs, throwing strikes.”
Hicks will earn $6 million in 2023, and $12 million annually from 2024-26. In an indication of how the Giants view his role, Hicks can earn an additional $2 million per year for hitting milestones between 100 and 200 innings, thresholds only a starter would reach.
Despite Hicks’ onetime status as a top pitching prospect, outings like the one against the Giants haven’t been commonplace over his five-year major-league career.
Out of eight career starts — all in 2022 — it is the only time he completed five innings, compiling a 5.47 ERA with almost as many walks as strikeouts. But in 204 appearances out of the bullpen, including 65 last season between St. Louis and Toronto, Hicks’ numbers look much better: a 3.65 ERA, with more strikeouts and fewer walks.
With the Giants down two starters to begin the year, Zaidi was clear: Hicks will enter spring training in the rotation, which currently consists of Logan Webb, Ross Stripling, Kyle Harrison and Keaton Winn before Robbie Ray and Alex Cobb make it back around midseason.
Ideally, Zaidi said, Hicks won’t pitch out of the bullpen at all for the duration of his deal.
“It’s been an interesting career and evolution for Jordan. Like so many young pitchers, got drafted and started early on. He starts throwing 103 mph bowling balls, and we’ve all been in that position as front offices where you have the temptation to bring a guy to the big leagues and get the impact right away,” Zaidi said. “Sometimes you try to take a step back and when you look at the evolution of a guy’s career, is there a chance to go back to the starting route and have the opportunity to see what it looks like now that he’s evolved physically, evolved as a pitcher? We definitely see those ingredients as a starter.”
So tantalizing was Hicks’ fastball that he became a bullpen piece — a good one, growing into a late-inning arm for the Cardinals and Blue Jays. But, he said, he’s always wanted to start. It’s what he had done up until 2018, when his fastball jumped from 100 to 105 and the Cardinals fast-tracked his path to the majors as a reliever.
Hicks made his desires known to teams in free agency, and while “a few” were open to the idea, it was the Giants who got the deal done.
“I feel like I was trending in such a good direction, and just got thrown in the bullpen,” Hicks said of his time with the Cardinals. “It worked out. I’m at this point because of that and I’m very appreciative of that. But at the same time this is what I always wanted to do and what I’m most excited to do in the big leagues.”
Hicks will wear No. 12, a nontraditional number for a starter who took an unconventional path to his free-agent payday.
He likes to look to the radar gun on the scoreboard, he said, because “you want to know what you got out of the effort you put in.” However, the days of 104 and 105 mph readings may be gone with him getting stretched out for good. “I think I’ll be around 98-101,” he said, modestly.
The velocity on Hicks’ fastball is what garners most of the attention, but it was the movement profile of the pitch that drew Zaidi’s eye.
A sinker, Hicks used the pitch to generate a 60.4% ground ball rate, leading Zaidi to compare him to Webb in their ability to induce easy outs and double plays.
Paired with a sweeping slider that opponents batted .136 against last season and swung and missed at 59.5% of the time, Hicks’ two-pronged ability to get get quick outs will be the key to successfully making the leap to starting, said manager Bob Melvin, who helped Seth Lugo make a similar transition last year with the Padres. This offseason, Lugo signed a three-year, $45 million contract with the Red Sox.
“When you’re looking at pitchers, one, you’re looking at groundball rates and, two, you’re looking at missing bats. And he does both of those as well as anybody,” Melvin said. “You go from the bullpen and you have to up the pitch counts, but he has the ability to get outs early in the count and then when he’s got two strikes he has the ability to strike guys out. You don’t find too many guys like that who can do it at the rate he does.”
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It’s a risk, to be sure, but apparently one the Giants were comfortable taking with the options available on the starting pitching market.
Shōta Imanaga and Marcus Stroman signed contracts with similar total value with the Cubs and Yankees, respectively, while Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery remain unsigned as they seek nine-figure deals. After signing Hicks and trading for Ray, the Giants appear to be done adding starting pitching.
“I think we feel pretty good about where our pitching staff is,” Zaidi said, leaving open the door to pursuing more position players with an eye toward defense.
As they sought to add that last arm to their starting rotation this offseason, though, Hicks’ outing two years ago left a lasting impression on Zaidi.
“Definitely remember that,” Zaidi said. “As somebody in a front office, when somebody has special talent like Jordan has – the velocity, his fastball – it just always kind of sticks with you. As we looked at our free agency board and tried to think of ways we could really impact our team … certainly the experience of watching him pitch was embedded in our mind the whole time.”
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