2025 stats: 34 GS, 207 IP, 3.22 ERA, 2.60 FIP, 9.7 K/9, 2.0 BB/9, 0.61 HR/9, 5.5 fWAR
Writing out Logan Webb’s statline just now made me giggle. A 2.60 FIP in 207 innings? That’s not real. That’s silly. On the other hand, that sort of feeling generally defines the feeling of Logan Webb pitch. A guy who has been so dominant as a groundball pitcher that it almost feels like a fluke. And then he goes and leads the National League in strikeouts in 2025 and posting the best K/9 of his career. It’s hard not to land from the bird’s eye view of his year and think, “He can do everything!” So, it felt appropriate to (finally) end our season reviews with him.
He is the best and, certainly, the most important Giant. The perfect Giant. If the team did not have him, then in any season post-2021 there would’ve been no thought or even hope that they could contend. Certainly not for the division (for the truly delusional set of fans out there) and not for the third Wild Card deep into September (the median hope). The franchise has come to count on his innings. He is a load-bearing talent, even as ownership has all but expressed resentment over having to pay him.
2025 didn’t add to or even cement Logan Webb’s reputation across the industry or San Francisco. He did that at some point near the end of 2023. Instead, the season was yet another reminder that the Giants have a genuine talent in the fold and they’d do well to get him back into the postseason as quickly as possible. For fans who can still remember the championship era, it’s very hard not to go absolutely wild imagining how Postseason Webb might look, leading a team that has a lineup with Rafael Devers in it.
Was it a perfect season? Not exactly. In February, Steven Kennedy wrote this detailed analysis of Logan Webb’s changeup, a critical pitch in his arsenal that had faltered in 2024.
Obviously, Webb has expressed frustration with how the pitch performed last year. Though the league took some serious strides, it wasn’t just an improved plate approach that sent the pitch spiraling. Something was off. Something was weird, an apt word for the change-up’s mercurial nature. On the surface though, there was nothing noticeably problematic. Nothing as obvious as lack of command, leaving the pitch up in the zone, or throwing with his left arm instead of his right. Webb did mention to Andrew Baggarly that he made a minor grip adjustment to “restore some of its familiar fading action.” Though the induced movement between 2023 and 2024 seem pretty comparable, there is an inch-and-a-half of lost horizontal run evident in the year-to-year numbers.
Oh, wait, no Webb wound up totally fixing the changeup, getting the veritcal movement (6.1”) right back in line with 2023 (6.2”) and plussing the run value from +1 in 2024 to +11 in 2025. Admittedly, it was +30 in 2023, but still, that’s a massive improvement year over year. Also, Statcast’s Run Value is context-dependent, meaning the situation matters, so there’s perhaps a little bit of evidence that, despite executing the pitch better than the year before, the league has adjusted and can recognize it better or understand how it moves or simply knows when in a sequence he’s most likely to use it.
As great as the final line was, it’s worth pointing out that Webb’s total arsenal run value wound up just +12. That’s not just the changeup (+11), but the sinker (+7), the four-seamer (+0), the sweeper (-2), and the cutter (-4). The total run value of his arsenal was +23 the year before and +29 the year before. That’s a definite trendline worth keeping an eye on over the course of the season.
This review wouldn’t dare suggest that the Giants’ ace is on some sort of decline… even if he had the second-worst second half of his career. I mean… it was still pretty good, but here are some numbers:
2019: (8 GS, 39.2 IP, 2-3) 5.22 ERA | 1.462 WHIP | 8.5 K/9 | 3.2 BB/9 | 1.2 HR/9
2021: (16 GS, 96.1 IP, 7-0) 2.71 ERA | 1.038 WHIP| 9.3 K/9 | 1.8 BB/9 | 0.5 HR/9
2022: (13 GS, 74.2 IP, 6-6) 3.01 ERA | 1.246 WHIP| 7.5 K/9 | 2.6 BB/9 | 0.4 HR/9
2023: (14 GS, 90 IP, 3-6) 3.40 ERA | 1.022 WHIP | 6.7 K/9 | 0.8 BB/9 | 0.7 HR/9
2024: (13 GS, 80.1 IP, 6-3) 3.47 ERA| 1.220 WHIP |7.3 K/9 | 2.5 BB/9 | 0.6 HR/9
2025: (14 GS, 81.1 IP, 6-5) 3.65 ERA | 1.340 WHIP | 9.4 K/9 | 2.0 BB/9 | 0.6 HR/9
I mean, look at that… it’s terrible, right? What a collapse.
Okay, in all seriousness, though, that second half saw him throttled by the Blue Jays in Toronto (11 hits in 6 IP with 4 ER and just 1 strikeout), blasted by the New York Mets in Oracle (8 hits and 6 ER in 4 IP), frustrated by the Padres in Oracle (8 hits and 4 ER in 6.1 IP with just 3 K), and bookending this trio of letdowns during a key run of games were a pair of pastings by those Los Angeles Bums.
The Giants wound up winning the game where allowed 6 earned runs in 5.1 innings against the Dodgers in Oracle on July 11th, and that was a game where Webb seemed to run out of gas. With an 8-2 lead in the 6th, he hit Mookie Betts, gave up back-to-back doubles to Will Smith and Teoscar Hernandez and then gave up a 2-run home run to Michael Conforto. Okay, well, you know what? Michael Conforto was a corpse for all of last year except when he played the Giants, so, maybe I won’t hold that start against him.
The September start in Oracle, when the Giants had managed to recover a bit of their record and headed into the contest 75-72 having won game one of the series, was perhaps an even greater letdown. The Giants scored 4 in the bottom of the 1st to jump ahead 4-1, but then in the 5th, he walked Mookie Betts to lead it off, gave up a single to Freddie Freeman, then a walk to Max Muncy, and that was that. Jose Butto came in and did not do the job, and Webb would get tagged with 6 earned runs on top of 10 hits in just 4 completed innings of work.
He’d turn it around five days later in Dodger Stadium, holding Los Angeles to just 2 runs (1 earned) in 7 innings of work, but as ace-y as he was all season, as truly great as he was overall, there were still some unfortunate hiccups along the way against superior opponents.
That’s probably been the knock against him over the years: he might be the Giants’ ace, but he’s not necessarily an ace in the way the industry thinks of one. For his part, he was 4th in NL Cy Young voting this year, the fourth year in a row in which he’s gotten Cy Young votes, but unable to crack the finalists list (Paul Skenes, Cristopher Sanchez, Yoshinobu Yamamato). He was an NL All-Star for the second straight season and won his first Gold Glove, too. For the third straight season, he led the National League in innings pitched and it was also the second time in three seasons that he led MLB in innings pitched.
An indication that he’s a perfect San Francisco Giant is in this note: two of his three best games of the season, according to Bill James’s Game Score (which Baseball Reference tracks), wound up being Giants losses:
- April 7th against the Reds in San Francisco (Game Score: 79). He struck out 10 in 7 shutout innings and walked 0. The Giants lost 2-0.
- June 2nd against the Padres in San Francisco (Game Score: 77). He struck out 7 in 8 shutout innings and walked 0. The Giants lost 1-0 in 10 innings.
Now, you might see that and think back to all of the tough losses Logan Webb has suffered throughout the years and think, “Well, sure. He’s the new Matt Cain.” And that’s a fair starting point. But Matt Cain never had the strikeout-ability that Logan Webb did or the ability to suppress home runs at the same level. So, I’d say he’s note quite Matt Cain. He’s certainly not Tim Lincecum, of course… or… the 2010-2011 versions of Tim Lincecum are an awfully interesting comparison. Which isn’t to say that we’ve been watching the next Tim Lincecum. No, what I mean to say is that we’ve been watching some third thing, a perhaps “holy” fusion of Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum, a freak of his own flavor, frustrating hitters with groundballs when they’re not whiffing.
If you disagree with that imagery or assessment, I would hope you’d agree with me at the very least that he’s as important to the Giants as both of those pitchers were during their heyday. He compels the Giants to act — or stand pat! Why bring back Carlos Rodon? We have Logan Webb. Why stay entangled with Blake Snell? We have Logan Webb? Who needs Kevin Gausman? We’ve already got Logan Webb. Is that decision-making sound? Probably not, but Logan Webb keeps backing up their kinda nutty plan every single year. “Yeah, okay, maybe Robbie Ray doesn’t have to be that good or maybe Landen Roupp doesn’t have to become a #2 starter because we have Logan Webb.“ He’s so great that he simultaneously strengthens the team and papers over its weaknesses.
When you put it all together, it’s no wonder the Giants have pinned their entire present on Logan Webb. Every year, he shows the team that he’s perfect.