From Rocklin to MLB, Giants pitcher Logan Webb enjoys payoff from sticking with baseball
Logan Webb strutting to the pitching mound to Andre Nickatina’s “Killa Whale” at the San Francisco Giants’ Oracle Park almost never happened.
He was a fourth-round draft prospect who later needed Tommy John surgery. He changed his release point to mimic Chris Sale and became a young ace, dominating the rival Dodgers in Game 1 of last season’s historic National League Division Series.
Not bad for a guy who nearly gave up the game a decade ago.
“Actually I almost quit baseball my sophomore year (of high school) to focus on football,” Webb, a Rocklin native who played quarterback at Rocklin High School, recently told The Bee.
“That would have been a very big mistake.”
Webb is one of the best young pitchers in the game. It wouldn’t have happened if he chose pigskin. Until Tuesday, the Giants’ righthander hadn’t lost a decision in 24 straight starts, the longest streak in the team’s history that began in 1883. He’s the top starter on a club that won 107 games last season — and he doesn’t turn 26 until November.
“I loved football,” Webb said. “I got a lot of friends on the baseball team but my best friends were definitely my football friends. I don’t know, I feel like I just kinda meshed with them, the football-type of way, the bulldog (mentality). I liked the hitting, I liked everything. It was a lot of fun to me.
“But then I realized, I started getting more looks as a baseball player than I was as a football player.”
A rocky road
Webb signed with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to play baseball, but he forwent playing in college after the Giants selected him in the fourth round of the 2014 draft. He signed for $600,000 and made his professional debut in the Arizona Fall League at age 17.
It took a few starts and stops before Webb ascended to Major League Baseball stardom. He had Tommy John surgery to repair his throwing elbow in 2016. Three years later he was popped with an 80-game suspension for testing positive for dehydrochlormethyltestosterone, an anabolic steroid.
Webb in a statement wrote that he didn’t know how it entered his system, and “I love this game and respect it too much to ever cheat it. I am heartbroken over this and I am not sure why this is happening to me, but in life some things happen for a reason and it is my job now to find that reason.”
When he made the Giants after an impressive spring training in 2021, he was demoted to the bullpen. He returned to the starting rotation when San Francisco had an injury elsewhere, and he thrived by going 14 starts without allowing more than two runs.
Perhaps that bout with adversity armed Webb to become what he is today. He’s picked up where he left off three starts into the young season after his breakout campaign in 2021. Webb tossed six innings of one-run ball in the Giants’ season-opening win over the Marlins. Then he held the Padres scoreless over eight innings, becoming the first starter in the majors this season to last that deep into a game.
His first loss since May 5, 2021 came Tuesday in the back end of a doubleheader against the Mets. He allowed three runs in 3 2/3 innings, marking his shortest outing since last July. Clearly that type of performance is an outlier in what’s been a virtuoso start to his career which has been shaped by playing high school football.
“I had a lot of growing up to do,” Webb said of his teenage years.
From backup QB to playoff starter
Webb began his junior season in high school in as the backup quarterback to Daniel Kniffin, who would go on to become Sacramento State’s starting quarterback. Kniffin suffered a third-degree separation of his right throwing shoulder in the second game of the season, which led to Webb ascending to the starting lineup.
But Webb had some developing to do before the Rocklin coaching staff would trust him.
“We weren’t really confident in his decision-making,” said Jason Adams, the current head coach at Rocklin who served as defensive coordinator when Webb was there. “We knew there was a player there, we knew he could make every throw. But the problem was he’d try to make any throw. And so we relied on defense and special teams initially because we just didn’t want him to create turnovers.”
Webb was a gunslinger who had a lot of confidence in his rocket arm. But the game plan was heavily centered around running the ball, to limit Webb’s mistakes because of his inexperience. That changed as he became more comfortable when his knowledge of the offense and opposing defenses began to match his physical skills.
“It was six (pass attempts) the first game,” Webb said. “It was like 15 the second game. Honestly at the end of the year it was like 40 passes a game. I think one game it was 50 passes.”
That was an early sign that Webb was willing to buy in to what his coaches and teammates needed from him, which became a theme that helped launch his baseball career.
“He was all for it,” Adams said. “The last thing he wanted to do was do something that would negatively affect his team and their success. He bought in and he got better, and he got better and we got better.”
Kniffin eventually returned from the injury to play wide receiver before taking over as Sacramento State’s starting quarterback years later. But when he came back, Rocklin employed a quarterback-by-committee approach, which included shuffling Webb and Kniffin in and out of the lineup each play. Eventually, they would rotate quarters before Webb won the job and Kniffin moved to receiver.
It was an awkward situation, but it didn’t prevent Rocklin from making the playoffs. It helped Webb mature and become a good teammate, which has become a calling card in his leadership role with the Giants.
“He’s amazing to watch on the days he doesn’t pitch, because those are the days you see the real Logan,” Adams said. “You see a guy who’s just out-of-his-skin excited for buddies when they get a hit or strike somebody out. But when he’s in the middle of the game, he’s just in business mode. He controls his emotions, kind of like Tiger (Woods) walking down the fairway after a great shot. He doesn’t get too high or too low, he just keeps rolling. I think that’s why his success has been so traumatic so quick.”
‘An excellent teammate and mentor’
Webb, 25, is the second-youngest pitcher on the Giants’ staff. But that hasn’t precluded him from becoming a leading voice among the team’s pitchers.
“In a very quiet way, he’s an excellent teammate and mentor as a young starting pitcher in this league,” Giants manager Gabe Kapler said recently. “He’s taking younger players who come through the minor leagues under his wing. I think he saw how (Kevin) Gausman and others treated him as a younger starting pitcher trying to establish himself, he saw the value in that for him personally, and now he’s the guy to pay it forward.”
Gausman, who also had a starring role atop the Giants rotation last year and signed with the Blue Jays in the offseason, helped Webb out of his funk that landed him in the bullpen early in 2021. He encouraged Webb to have confidence in his pitches despite Webb pitching himself out of the rotation. The advice helped Webb become one of the best starters in the game before getting the nod in Game 1 against the Dodgers in the NLDS.
“(Gausman) was mad at me. He pretty much told me to pull my head out of my ass,” Webb told Sports Illustrated.
That he did. Webb finished the year with an 11-3 record and 3.03 ERA. He allowed just 128 hits in 148 1/3 innings while striking out 158 hitters to 36 walks.
“We talk about you’re either on offense or defense when you’re on the mound,” fellow Giants starter Alex Wood said. “And to see him move from being somewhat in the middle to really attacking guys and bearing down on them and going at them, working quickly and being aggressive — just seeing him from spring to the end was really one of the coolest things that I’ve seen from another teammate from start to finish.”
These days, Webb’s using that confidence instilled in him by Gausman to help lead San Francisco’s current staff.
“I think Webby genuinely cares about everyone around him, more so than just being a good teammate,” said Wood. “I think he wants to learn, he wants to talk to guys, he wants to know how their day’s going, he wants to watch guys (bullpen sessions) every day, and just be visible and be around. And I think he elevates everybody around him by being that way.”
To think none of this would have happened had Webb decided to drop baseball for football. But then Webb becoming this kind of teammate might not have happened without his high school football career at Rocklin, either.
This story was originally published April 24, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
