PHOENIX — Hayden Birdsong is 23 years old and made just 38 starts in the minor leagues before the Giants called him up last season. They felt strongly that he was one of their best 26 this spring, so when he didn’t make the rotation initially, they kept him in their bullpen.
The right-hander is inexperienced and learning at the big league level, but sometimes, the fix is not an easy one.
Birdsong briefly skidded off the rails Tuesday night, and that’s become a theme since he returned to the rotation. He threw 10 straight balls to open the fourth inning, and when he got back in the zone, he gave up a three-run homer. The Diamondbacks pulled away from there, winning 8-2 to get within 1 1/2 games of the Giants in the NL West standings.
“It’s the same thing every single time,” Birdsong said of his struggles. “I don’t know what it is. It almost feels like a forcefield. I don’t know why, it’s the same mindset, arm feels good — I’ve just got to find something. I don’t know what it is, but we’ll find it.”
Birdsong has allowed 21 earned runs in 37 1/3 innings since returning to the rotation, with 18 walks being the main culprit. After striking out five in the first three innings, he opened the fourth with back-to-back four-pitch walks. Afterward, he had no explanation for why his command occasionally just completely disappears.
“It needs to flip soon,” Birdsong said. “It’s getting annoying.”
Birdsong’s stuff still is good, and his fastball velocity was back in his normal range six days after he saw a slight dip. He said he feels right mechanically, but he’ll sit down with the staff and look at that to see if there’s something wrong that he’s not seeing.
Manager Bob Melvin said the issue might be something else entirely. He feels Birdsong’s blips are “more mental than anything.”
“He’s got to get through it,” Melvin said. “He’s got to just keep pitching through it. We’ve seen this guy (be) really good, we’ve seen him pitch really well out of the bullpen, come in late in games. Yeah, it’s been a little bit of a tough period for him, for whatever reason.”
The same is true of the whole team, but it’s not hard to pinpoint why the Giants keep losing, or why they went down so easily Tuesday. The lineup scored just two runs and has nine in five games on this trip. Patrick Bailey had two costly passed balls, the result, Melvin said, of trying too hard to frame pitches.
The loss was the seventh in eight games and came a few hours after a very public vote of confidence from president of baseball operations Buster Posey. The front office picked up Melvin’s 2026 option, a move that was popular in the clubhouse, and Melvin said the energy in the dugout after the two early runs was as good as he has seen all year.
“Then we just, for whatever reason, didn’t play good baseball after that,” he said.
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