Why the SF Giants are willing to gamble on RHP Jordan Hicks’ arsenal

The SF Giants have made a $44 million gamble on high-octane reliever Jordan Hicks. It's easy to see what the front office envisions, writes JD Salazar.

The SF Giants are having one of their biggest offseasons ever, even if it has featured plenty of disappointment for fans. On Friday, the Giants made one of their most intriguing moves of the offseason. They agreed to a four-year, $44 million contract with former St. Louis Cardinals and Toronto Blue Jays reliever Jordan Hicks. Except the team is looking to deploy him as a starting pitcher. It sure is a very odd time to be a Giants fan.

New SF Giants pitcher Jordan Hicks during spring training with the Cardinals. (2023) / Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

Let's talk about what this deal is and what this deal isn't, because there's not really a good way to segue into a measured analysis of it otherwise. This isn't - as far as I can tell - San Francisco's way of getting "their guy" (read: ace pitcher) after failing to sign Shohei Ohtani or Yoshinobu Yamamoto and backing out of the Shota Imanaga sweepstakes. This is a value play that could end up giving the Giants a high-end starter for extraordinarily cheap, especially relative to the current market. This shouldn't be the end of the offseason for San Francisco, but it should help the Giants win more games next year and beyond.

This feels like a bet, one that Farhan Zaidi could really use a payoff on, to prove that he's still the right guy to run the Giants. At this point, basically every move is a referendum on just that, until and unless he can produce a top-2 free agent or big extension for a homegrown prospect. But setting aside the organizational weight of the move, the strategy itself is pretty interesting, because converting a veteran reliever into a starter like this is fairly unorthodox.

Let's assume that Hicks is indeed fully converting to a starter role, or at least the kind of Jakob Junis long reliever as he gets acclimated, and not completely pulling our leg with that report. If the Giants think they can make Hicks into a rotation anchor, they have to know something the Cardinals didn't. St. Louis tried the same thing in 2022, slotting Hicks into the rotation, and the results weren't great: 8 starts, 26.1 innings pitched, 16 runs allowed. His starts were Hobbesian: nasty, brutish, and short.

As a reliever, though, Hicks has been a noteworthy talent. Across five seasons, Hicks has compiled a lifetime 3.65 ERA in that role, with his biggest blemish being a walk rate that's never come close to average (4.9 lifetime BB/9). But every other part of his kit is impressive. He's got a fastball that can reach triple digits, batters struggle to hit the ball hard off of him (10 home runs allowed in 217 IP), and last year he turned his sinker into an above-average offspeed pitch. That's the kind of combination the Giants know how to work with. 

He's also never pitched more than 80 innings in a season. That's a major problem for most teams, but maybe not the Giants, who coaxed Carlos Rodón through arguably the best season of his career. The Yankees tried to do the same, and fell into the type of skill gap that's plagued me since World 1-2. If anyone can pull a 2024 starting pitcher out of a hard-throwing reliever with a promising sinker, it's the Giants.

I don't think it's a coincidence that San Francisco signed Hicks the day after a more proven starter, Marcus Stroman, agreed to a $37 million deal with the Yankees. Like Stroman, Hicks has the potential to force hitters to drive the ball into the ground with good regularity. The tradeoff from there is starting experience, track record, and durability (points: Stroman) against plus velocity and hard-hit rates (points: Hicks). It's not hard to believe that the Giants think they can get more and better production out of Hicks than Stroman, regardless of price point.

And I believe that whether it was Stroman, Hicks, or someone else, the Giants have a pretty solid strategy for the rest of the offseason: find pitchers who can get balls in the dirt, then sign Matt Chapman to shore up an infield defense that's been leaking oil the past two years. This signing tops up one half of that equation, and plenty of signs point to Chapman and his former manager Bob Melvin reuniting in San Francisco. Defense will probably have to be the best offense, especially because the only undeniable offensive difference-maker who hit free agency this year was Shohei Ohtani and he will not be playing for the SF Giants next year.