SAN DIEGO — Landen Roupp bounced back quickly from an elbow scare last month. Now the Giants are hoping to get similarly good news with his next MRI.
Roupp was carted off the field Wednesday night after injuring his left knee, and he’ll head to San Francisco on Thursday to get an MRI. The Giants initially called it a left knee sprain, but they won’t know the severity until they get the tests back.
“It’s such an unfortunate moment,” shortstop Willy Adames said. “For him, obviously, but for the team, too. He has been doing really good for us all year long and he just came back and now this happened. Obviously it’s really sad.”
At the very least, Roupp will land on the IL for the second time in as many months. Given how bad Wednesday’s injury looked initially, and the fact that the Giants dropped to five games under .500 with an 8-1 loss to the San Diego Padres, the odds are relatively high that Roupp will just be shut down regardless of what the MRI says. He already has thrown about twice as many innings as he did last season.
Roupp was not available to reporters Wednesday, but manager Bob Melvin said the right-hander was optimistic. That has been his view all year when asked about the innings piling up or his elbow barking at him.
“I saw him right after,” Melvin said. “You know how he is — he said I’m going to be fine. That’s just the way he is with everything.”
The injury happened when Ramon Laureano hit a liner back to the mound that hit Roupp on the right thigh. As he tried to reposition himself to grab the ball, his left knee gave out. Adames said Roupp was in quite a bit of pain as he tried to get back up. The Giants brought a cart out, although that was in part because the visiting dugout has three sets of stairs on the way back to the trainer’s room.
Roupp has a 3.80 ERA through the first 22 starts of his sophomore MLB season. A year after he won a bullpen job in camp, he pitched so well in Scottsdale that the Giants put him in their rotation over Hayden Birdsong and Kyle Harrison. Roupp has done nothing in recent months but show that the spring decision was the right one.
Harrison got traded and Birdsong ended up back in Triple-A, but Roupp had a solid start to the year and then took off in June. He responded to a rocky night at Dodger Stadium by allowing just four earned runs over his next six appearances, which lowered his ERA to 3.11 at the time.
The dominant run was not ended by opposing hitters, but rather by his own elbow. Roupp felt some discomfort in July and was shut down for three weeks. He was charged with 10 earned in two starts after he returned, which put a damper on his overall numbers, but the Giants still are very optimistic about his future and hopeful that this isn’t too big a setback.
The season has been an unfortunate reminder for the Giants that you never can have too much pitching depth. They felt they comfortably went seven-deep at the start of the year, with three Carsons waiting in Triple-A.
From that initial depth chart, Jordan Hicks and Harrison have been traded and Roupp is now sidelined. Birdsong is trying to find his command in Triple-A, and Carson Ragsdale struggled so much there that he was DFA’d. Blade Tidwell, acquired at the deadline to bolster the group, will have an MRI on his shoulder on Thursday.
The Giants currently have Kai-Wei Teng as their fourth starter and an open spot behind him. Carson Whisenhunt and Trevor McDonald would be leading options in Triple-A if the Giants do not want to bring back Birdsong, who walked five in his Triple-A start on Wednesday. For Thursday’s game and the weekend in Milwaukee, they’ll likely need some bullpen depth.
“We’ve seen some [of those] guys, so we’re kind of filtering through it right now and what we think we need here coming up too,” Melvin said. “Obviously the bullpen was taxed a little bit [tonight] too. We’re thinking about what the need is here in the short term and the long term.”
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