In a few months, you’ll have big feelings about the Giants’ new pitching coach, Justin Meccage. Until then, though, all you can do is make educated guesses about why the team thought he was the right coach for the job. It could have been a strong recommendation from someone in the Brewers organization who tipped the scales, a trusted ex-coworker of Giants GM Zack Minasian. Maybe Meccage had the best interview and stung 116-mph line drives off every hardball question he was asked. Or maybe he ripped the sheet off a posterboard and revealed his biggest project yet: the 94-mph knuckle-shuuto.
It was probably a combination of factors, none of them scintillating enough to get you excited in November. Every team looking for a pitching coach is hoping for improved communication and a demonstration of applied knowledge, but you can whittle everything they’re looking for down into five words: fewer runs scored against them.
Every team wants fewer runs scored against them, and if Meccage seems to make that happen regularly, he’ll be a fan favorite. Dave Righetti became such a prominent Giants legend that the organization now gets to claim his July 4th no-hitter as their own. No, no, he didn’t throw it in a Yankees uniform. He threw it in a Giants uniform. I was at Candlestick Park with my parents; it’s a core memory.
Now to wait to see if Meccage excels at the job. Set an alarm for a few months from now, and we’ll all gather back here to see if the Giants’ pitching staff exceeds, meets or falls short of expectations. We won’t know how much of any of it is Meccage’s responsibility, but we’ll sure be ready to guess.
Here’s the best way to analyze the hiring of a new pitching coach in the offseason:
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— Will Harris (@sandwichpick.bsky.social) November 24, 2025 at 1:04 PM
Oh, baby. Now, while it’s been the hope that both Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki wanted to compete against Shohei Ohtani, that was just an unfounded hope. Here, Tatsuya Imai is saying exactly that on record. Well, pal, do you want to know the team that can help you with those dreams? If they don’t take your call, there’s always the Giants.
Now that you’re all riled up, here’s a question for you: How many times did you think about the new pitching coach during that last paragraph? As in, “Gee, Meccage is perfect for someone with Imai’s pitch mix” or “Meccage probably already knows how to iron out his command”? You didn’t, of course. That’s because you can get excited about any talented pitcher on your own. They could make me the pitching coach, and I’d shuffle out to the mound shoeless and with a Rick Rubin beard, saying things like, “Throw the orb where it belongs. It believes in destiny, just like you,” and you could still get excited about a talented pitcher like Imai.
The Giants aren’t hoping for a superstar-coddler or an ace-whisperer, though. That’s not what they need. The best way to describe what the Giants are actually going to need out of the organization — from Meccage to every pitching coach at every affiliate — is by looking at Meccage’s old organization, the Brewers. They had the best record in baseball last season, and they definitely used home-field advantage and the extra rest to win at least one lousy game against the Dodgers in the NLCS, if not the entire pennant. The Brewers have been an excellent organization for a long time now, reaching the postseason in seven out of the last eight seasons.
Here were the four most-used starting pitchers on both the Giants and Brewers:
If you sort that column by ERA+, you get a nice little threading effect, with a Brewers pitcher followed by a Giants pitcher, who is then followed by a Brewers pitcher, et cetera. Freddy Peralta had the best season in terms of run prevention, but Logan Webb threw a few extra starts’ worth of innings. The Brewers’ top four threw 583 ⅔ innings last season, and the Giants’ threw 648, but they weren’t too far off in overall value. The Brewers’ rotation was better, which is why they had the best record in baseball, but that’s not the point of this exercise. The point is to remind you that the Giants’ problem last season wasn’t the top of the rotation. The trendlines for Robbie Ray and Justin Verlander were going in opposite directions all year, but they could have made the postseason with the 2025 rotation. They probably should have.
No, the Giants’ problem went much deeper than that, and the top of the rotation is the wrong way to look. Here are all the Brewers pitchers who have thrown at least 50 innings with an adjusted ERA worse than the league average since 2021:
Player
Season
IP
ERA+
2025
66
95
2024
64.2
88
2024
57.1
91
2023
124.2
95
2022
71.2
75
2022
107.1
91
2022
102.2
85
And here are the Giants pitchers who threw at least 50 innings with a below-average ERA+ since 2024:
Player
Season
IP
ERA+
2025
56.2
87
2025
65.2
83
2024
72
82
2024
59
80
2024
124.1
86
2024
109.2
95
2024
52.1
91
2024
55.1
55
This is where the Brewers have excelled that the Giants have not: They’ve had depth for years, now. They had a quantity of quality last season, just like the season before that. If 50 innings is too strict a cutoff, you can take it down to 10 innings pitched and find a similar phenomenon (here’s the Brewers’ table, and here’s the Giants’). Since the start of the 2024 season, the Brewers have had pitchers with a below-average ERA+ throw 424⅓ innings for them; the Giants have had their below-average pitchers throw 962⅓ innings. They’ve doubled up on the garbage innings.
That’s where you want Meccage to help. Not because he’s coming over from the Brewers organization with a treasure trove of secrets and goodies, but because it’s where the Giants need help. They don’t need to turn Kai-Wei Teng into Logan Webb, even if he’s both welcome and encouraged to do so. They need Teng to turn into Tobias Myers. They need Tristan Beck to turn into DL Hall.
The Giants’ biggest pitching need isn’t a co-ace for Webb; it’s to purge as many of the garbage innings as possible. It doesn’t have to happen with new pitchers, either. Aaron Ashby spent years on the “bad” table before contributing this season. Still, for years and years, we’ve heard about the Giants’ rotation depth and how well prepared they are, to the point where a mea culpa was necessary from me. Depth doesn’t work if the pitchers don’t pitch as if they belong in the major leagues.
That’s the Giants’ Manhattan Project, then. It’s the biggest to-do on the checklist for Meccage and the organization. They need to find a way to get decent innings out of the fringe. They need to be able to say that they’re fine when a pitcher goes on the IL, not pull on their collar and make a Rodney Dangerfield face. For years, the latent talent has been presumed to be there. The decent innings have not.
The Giants will still need to add starting pitchers, and they’ll likely spend a lot of money to do so. However, those additions will likely fail or succeed because of their own merits, not because a pitching coach tinkered with them. The dirt will get on Meccage’s hands as the Giants cycle through the extra pitchers that every team needs in a season. If they can be more like the Brewers, they just might go back to the postseason after all.