When the Giants carried baseball’s best record, a 57-33 mark, into last year’s All-Star break, one of their own stood above the rest in the National League.
After San Francisco splurged on a seven-year, $130 million contract in the 2016 offseason, Johnny Cueto looked like he was worth every penny.
When it came time for Mets’ manager Terry Collins to select a starting pitcher for the National League All-Star team, the New York skipper admitted no one stood on the same playing field as Cueto, who shimmied into the break with a 13-1 record and a 2.47 earned run average.
“We had a tremendous group of starting pitchers in the National League this year,” Collins said at an All-Star Game press conference. “Everybody deserves an opportunity, but I thought (Cueto) has pitched the best first half of the season and deserves the opportunity for what he’s done and what he did to us in the World Series last year.”
It was Cueto’s complete game, two-hit shutout for the Kansas City Royals in Game 2 of the 2015 World Series that jolted Collins’ memory, and it was that type of performance that spurred the Giants to pair Cueto with left-handed ace Madison Bumgarner at the front of San Francisco’s rotation.
But a year after Cueto toed the rubber at Petco Park in the All-Star Game, the Giants are headed for an iceberg, and Cueto doesn’t look like he’ll be steering the ship back on course anytime soon.
San Francisco has lost 98 of its last 162 games, and the team’s epic collapse has coincided with an extended rough stretch for the Dominican Republic native.
“But getting back to Johnny (Cueto), he just hasn’t quite been himself for the most part,” Giants’ manager Bruce Bochy said after Cueto’s Sunday outing. “He’s had some really good games, but he set the bar so high last year here that it’s hard to repeat that kind of a year.”
It’s true, Cueto set the bar so impossibly high that he never could have lived up to the expectations he set for himself. Heading into last year’s All-Star Game, the Giants had won 12 of Cueto’s previous 13 starts and he’d tossed three complete games, including a two-hit shutout against the Padres to cap off his first month with the organization.
But if Cueto couldn’t match the type of dominance he displayed through the first half of last season, the Giants were hoping he could at least drop an anchor and live up to his contract. That hasn’t happened, and San Francisco’s ship is sinking.
“He (Cueto) hasn’t been quite as sharp, that’s fair to say,” Bochy said on Sunday. “I know he dealt with the blister thing earlier but he’s just making more mistakes than we’re accustomed to.”
Bochy mentioned a blister that bothered Cueto during the early days of the regular season, but after Sunday’s start, Cueto said he feels completely healthy.
But at the midpoint of the 2017 season, the Giants’ righty carries a 4.51 ERA –more than two full points higher than his mark at this time last year– and San Francisco has lost four of his last five outings. A year after Cueto had three complete games on his All-Star resume, Cueto has yet to go the distance this year, having lasted just 5.0 innings in four different outings and having surrendered at least five earned runs on four different occasions.
So what’s to blame?
“I really don’t know, I mean I guess the difference is that I lost Spring Training,” Cueto said. “It’s very difficult for me to have done that but at the same time, I feel glad that I was able to miss Spring Training because my father is alive.”
Cueto arrived at Spring Training nearly three weeks after the rest of the Giants’ pitchers and catchers to tend to his 71-year-old father, Domingo, who was suffering from health-related issues back in the Dominican Republic. Cueto’s father needed a 10-day stint in the hospital, and the Giants’ pitcher made himself available to care for his father back home in the Dominican Republic before traveling to meet the rest of his team in Scottsdale.
While four other members of the Giants’ rotation this season logged at least 20 innings during February and March, Cueto pitched just 12 innings, less than half the total of Bumgarner and 13th-year veteran Matt Cain. By the end of spring, Cueto had started just three games for the Giants, three fewer than fellow rotation mates Jeff Samardzija and Matt Moore.
Baseball players are quick to point out that Spring Training results aren’t indicative of regular season performance. But in Cueto’s case, he didn’t have many results to build off of, and on Sunday, he finally acknowledged that his late arrival could be behind an extended downswing.
“I mean, we all know that Spring Training is for you to get ready,” Cueto said. “I don’t like to use that as an excuse, but the more I pitch, the more I feel that I’m getting ready. I did fall a little bit behind but you know, I just got to keep continue working.”
Through the first three-plus months of the 2017 campaign, it’s obvious Cueto doesn’t have the same type of command he carried through last season, especially with breaking balls. After allowing 15 home runs all of last season, Cueto has already given up 19 this year, including a 443-foot moonshot off the bat of Giancarlo Stanton on Sunday.
Stanton’s blast looked like the latest satellite NASA launched into space, and served as a not-so-subtle reminder that the Giants have rocketed to the bottom of the standings. While Bumgarner deserves plenty of blame for the Giants’ pitching struggles –his April dirt-biking accident wiped out half of his season– Cueto’s struggles are a sign of the times for a San Francisco team that just can’t get anything right this year.
A year after it appeared certain Cueto would command an even larger free agent contract should he choose to exercise the opt-out clause in his contract which kicks in at the end of this season, a pitcher who has routinely stated he wants to stay in San Francisco could be in luck.
With the Giants’ massive struggles and Cueto’s massive contract, the 31-year-old would ordinarily be considered a premier trade chip.
But almost 365 days after Cueto was the top hurler on the top team in the National League, he and the Giants are clearly not the same.
Will a team desperate to gamble try to sell the farm and acquire a pitcher who may just need a change of scenery? With each passing start, that looks more unlikely, meaning the Giants and Cueto could be stuck together as both parties attempt to come up for air.