San Francisco's Active Roster Does Not List A Shortstop

Christian Koss has pitched two innings in the major leagues this season, one in a 9-0 loss to the Mets in April and one in a 13-3 loss to Pittsburgh in May, which tells you what kind of innings they were.

On Monday night at Oracle Park he was San Francisco's shortstop.

That is not a joke at Koss's expense. He is a real infielder, he has 71 innings at shortstop this year, and he went 2-for-3 batting ninth in a game the Giants won 5-0. The joke is on the roster behind him.

Major League Baseball's own active-roster page lists all 26 San Francisco players by position: thirteen pitchers, four center fielders, three third basemen, two catchers, two second basemen, one right fielder and one first baseman. Add them up and you get 26. Read them again and there is nobody listed at shortstop. Widen it to the 40-man roster and there is exactly one man listed there, and he is on the injured list. That is unusual without being unique: two of the thirty active rosters list no shortstop on Tuesday, San Francisco and the Chicago Cubs.

It took one afternoon. Willy Adames slid awkwardly into home plate scoring a run in the first inning at Fenway Park on Sunday, struck out in the fifth, and left the game. Victor Bericoto twisted his right knee in the left-field wall padding in the bottom of that same inning, going up for a fly ball under fans reaching over him. JT Brubaker bruised his ribs on a diving play. All three landed on the injured list Monday, Adames and Bericoto on the 10-day and Brubaker on the 15-day. Bryce Eldridge is on the bereavement list, away to attend his grandfather's funeral. Matt Wilkinson was optioned.

Five men came the other way in one transaction block, all recalled from Triple-A Sacramento: Nate Furman, Grant McCray, Anthony Molina, Ryan Walker and Shay Whitcomb. Five out, five in, almost twenty percent of an active roster turned over between a Sunday flight home and a Monday first pitch.

(Molina is the one to watch there. He came back from Atlanta for Tyler Mahle on August 2, was optioned the same afternoon, and has still never thrown a major league pitch for this organization. He is in the bullpen now because Brubaker's ribs are not.)

The subtraction that matters is one man#

Adames had started 121 games at shortstop and played 1,046.1 innings there. That is not "the everyday shortstop" as a figure of speech. That is one man, one position, every day, for five months, and there is no other version of it in the building. Marcelo Mayer, a shortstop by trade whom the Giants list at second base, has been on the injured list since June 26 and is now dealing with a right foot bone bruise that halted his rehab assignment. Matt Chapman had season-ending core surgery on August 11. Casey Schmitt is on the injured list too.

So the answer was already rehearsed. When Adames came out on Sunday, Koss slid from third to shortstop and Buddy Kennedy took third. Monday was the same move with a different partner: Koss at short, and Whitcomb, claimed off waivers from Houston two weeks ago, making his Giants debut at third.

Manager Tony Vitello told reporters, including Shayna Rubin of the San Francisco Chronicle, that the club expects Adames back before the season ends. MLB.com's injury page puts the expected return for all three men at "possibly September," and nobody has published a length for any of them.

Fifty-eight men, and seven of them arrived this month#

Here is the number that says whether this is depth working or depth running out. San Francisco has used 58 players in 2026, tied with the Angels and the Athletics for fifth-most in the major leagues against a median of 52 across all 30 clubs. (That counts men who have appeared in a game, not men who have held a roster spot. MLB's full-season roster adds a player the day he plays, which is why Molina is not on it.) The company up there is not all bad company: the Mets are at 61 and the Cubs at 60, and both of them are playing for something.

The rate is the part that has changed. Seven men made their first appearance as a Giant in the twenty-four days of August alone, one every three and a half days, and the newest is Whitcomb, who arrived because a shortstop got hurt. There are 31 games left, and rosters expand on September 1.

And then the starting pitcher left in the third#

Carson Whisenhunt threw 47 pitches to eleven Cincinnati hitters on Monday and walked off in the third inning holding his left elbow. He was, by his own account and his manager's, throwing the best he has thrown all year, which is a low bar he had been failing to clear. He came in with a 7.03 earned run average.

"I felt great," Whisenhunt said afterward, elbow wrapped. "It's honestly probably the best I felt all year. Everything just felt really good today until the last two pitches."

He has never felt this particular thing before, he said, and he hoped it was a pinched nerve. Vitello, who opened his postgame with it rather than with the win, said the careful thing: "He's got discomfort. Obviously, he's pitching on the elbow area. So he'll get it looked at tomorrow and see what it says."

The MRI was scheduled for Tuesday morning. No result has been published.

Which leaves the score, and the score is the strange part. San Francisco won 5-0 with a lineup missing its everyday shortstop and its left fielder, a man on his first day in the organization at third base, a man who pitches in blowouts at shortstop, and five relievers covering the last six and a third innings because the starter had gone off to get his elbow read.

The Giants are 53-78. They have also not lost a game since any of this happened, a winning streak currently one game long.

Sources: San Francisco's transaction log, active roster, 40-man roster, full-season roster, schedule and standings, and the box score for the August 24 game against Cincinnati, all from the MLB Stats API, retrieved August 25, 2026. Full-season roster counts and active rosters for all 30 clubs retrieved the same day and by the same method. Diagnoses, injured-list dates and expected returns from MLB.com's Giants injuries and roster moves page, last updated August 24, 2026. The two published wordings for Adames's elbow are the transaction log's "sprain" and MLB.com's post-MRI "moderate strain"; both are given above and neither is preferred here. The circumstances of Adames's and Bericoto's Sunday injuries and the in-game substitutions via Maria Guardado, MLB.com, August 23, 2026. Vitello's comments on Adames via Shayna Rubin, San Francisco Chronicle, August 24, 2026, as relayed by MLB Trade Rumors. Whisenhunt's and Vitello's postgame comments via Tristi Rodriguez, NBC Sports Bay Area, August 24, 2026.