Seven of the thirteen men who started for the Giants cannot pitch this week

San Francisco plays its last six games of the season starting tonight, all of them at home. Minnesota for three, then the Dodgers for three, then everyone goes home for the winter.

The club has six starting pitchers available to cover those six games.

That is not a coincidence, and it is not good planning either. It is what is left.

Thirteen men started a game for the Giants in 2026. Go through the thirteen and ask a simple question about each one, which is whether he could take the ball this week if the club asked him to. Seven of them cannot.

The arithmetic#

Here is the list of the seven, with the number of starts each made and the reason he is unavailable, all of it off the league's own transaction record.

Tyler Mahle made 18 starts and was traded to Atlanta on August 2 for a pitcher named Anthony Molina. Robbie Ray made 21 and was traded to San Diego on August 3 for Miguel Mendez and Joniel Hernandez. Trevor McDonald made 14 and went on the injured list on July 21 with a right elbow strain, moved to the 60-day list on August 13. JT Brubaker made one start and went on the 10-day list on August 24 with bruised ribs. Carson Whisenhunt made 8 and went on the list the next day, August 25, with a left elbow sprain. Adrian Houser made 16 and went on the list the day after that, August 26, with a right forearm strain. Logan Webb made 27 and went on the list on September 18 with a blister on his middle finger, which ended his season.

Add the starts up. It comes to 105.

San Francisco's pitchers have made 156 starts this year, because the club has played 156 games. So 105 of 156 is 67.3 percent of the season's starting assignments handed to men who are not on the roster tonight.

The part that makes the number mean something#

Every team loses starters. A club that ends September without the rotation it began April with is describing baseball, not describing itself, and a number with no comparison attached is just a number with a decimal point in it.

So the same calculation ran for all thirty clubs this morning, off the same two feeds: every pitcher credited with a start in 2026, checked against his club's active roster as it stood a few hours ago. All thirty clubs are carrying 28 men today, so nobody gets an advantage from roster size.

The median club is at 27.2 percent. San Francisco is at 67.3.

Nobody else is close. Toronto is second at 50.0 percent, and the distance from San Francisco down to Toronto is 27 starts. The distance from Toronto down to tenth place is also 27 starts. One club sits as far above the field as the next nine clubs are spread out. At the other end, Cleveland has given 2 of its 156 starts to men who are not on the roster today, which works out to 1.3 percent, and is the sound of a pitching staff nobody had to think about.

The six who are left#

Landen Roupp, 29 starts. Blade Tidwell, 8. Matt Wilkinson, 5. Anthony Molina, 4. Cesar Perdomo, 3. Yunior Marte, 2.

Roupp is the only one of the six who has made more than eight starts, and he has made more than three and a half times as many as the next man. Take him out of the group and the other five have 22 starts between them, across a whole season, on a club that needed 156 of them.

Molina is the pitcher Atlanta sent back for Mahle in August. He has made four starts since, which means that one of the six arms available for the final homestand arrived in the trade that removed one of the seven who are not.

Tidwell goes tonight against Zebby Matthews.

Sunday#

Matt Wilkinson pitched five scoreless innings at Dodger Stadium on Sunday afternoon. Three hits, no walks, six strikeouts, 76 pitches. The six strikeouts are the most he has recorded in a major league game, which is a sentence that carries less weight than it sounds like, because his entire major league career is seven appearances and 18 strikeouts and all of it has happened since August 19.

San Francisco lost the game 3-1 and was swept.

That is the shape of this part of the season. A pitcher who had never thrown a major league pitch before August 19 goes five innings against the best team in the division, gives up nothing, and the club loses anyway, because the four relievers who followed him gave up three runs in the three innings they covered and the offense scored once.

Wilkinson is 2027's problem, or 2027's answer, and there is no way to tell which from five starts. Nobody should pretend otherwise for six more days.

What the last week is actually for#

The Giants are 64-92 and they are locked into fourth place in the West in both directions. Arizona is 18 games ahead of them with six to play, so they cannot climb. Colorado is 57-99 and cannot reach 64 wins even by sweeping out the string, so they cannot fall either. There is nothing left to play for that shows up in a standings table.

What they have is six games in which to look at Tidwell, Wilkinson, Molina, Perdomo and Marte, which is a fair description of a pitching staff that has been looking at those men all year whether it wanted to or not.

The interesting thing about the 67.3 percent is not that it is high. It is that the club did not choose most of it. Two of the seven were traded, which was a decision somebody made in a room in early August. The other five got hurt, three of them inside a 72-hour stretch in late August that nobody planned and nobody could have.

A rotation is a thing a front office builds in the winter and then spends the summer watching leave.

Sources#

Major League Baseball's own statsapi, read the morning of September 21, 2026: 2026 season pitching records for all thirty clubs, including every pitcher credited with a game started; active rosters for all thirty clubs as of that reading; the San Francisco 40-man roster and player statuses; the San Francisco transaction log from May 1 to September 21, 2026, for the trade dates, injured list placements and stated injuries; the National League standings for the 64-92 record through 156 games; the schedule for the final six games and tonight's probable pitchers; and the box score and pitching lines for the September 20 game at Los Angeles. Matt Wilkinson's career totals and game log from his own player record at the same source. League median, second place and last place computed here from those feeds rather than taken from a published table.

Called Shot#

Cesar Perdomo and Yunior Marte each start at least one of San Francisco's final six regular-season games, September 21 through September 27, 2026. Six games and six available starters says they both get a turn. A club that would rather open with a reliever, or give Roupp an extra one, says they do not.