Was Andrew Bailey magic all along?
Or was the true Andrew Bailey the friends we made along the way?
The 2023 Giants pitching staff was fine. They were 16th in baseball in fWAR and 17th in ERA+, coming in at 103 (Somehow, Baseball-Reference has league average at 101, which is not how that is supposed to work, but I’m just going to let that go). They were 4th best in the league at FIP, but because they played in a pitcher’s park, park effects meant that that wasn’t as impressive as it seems at first blush. Still: a totally adequate pitching staff.
The 2023 Red Sox pitching staff was slightly worse, but still incredibly average. Their team ERA+ was right at 101. They were 20th in fWAR and barely below average in FIP, but, playing in Fenway, they gave up a lot more runs than the Giants did at Oracle.
2024 has been a different story. The 2024 Giants are miserable cretins, utterly hapless and completely unable to stop themselves from stepping on their own dicks. They are, in other words, 22nd in fWAR and 29th in ERA+, ahead of only the Rockies, Meanwhile, the Red Sox are 2nd in fWAR and 4th in ERA+. Since Andrew Bailey, pitching coach for the Giants from 2020 through 2023, has joined the Red Sox this year, this raises the question: Is this dude just magic?
Before Gabe Kapler hired him for the 2020 season, Bailey already had a reputation as a great pitching mind, and he did nothing to harm that reputation in San Francisco. The high water mark for his staff was the 2021 team, which was second in the league in ERA and 4th in fWAR. The next couple years were fair-to-middling, though they did include All-Star level performances from Carlos Rodon and Alex Cobb, as well as (perennially) Logan Webb.
But Kapler got fired and Bailey, who was from the East Coast, decided he wanted a job closer to home, so off he went to Boston. Now the Red Sox staff has gotten a lot better and the Giants staff has gotten a lot worse. Is this because of Bailey?
Oh, I don’t know. But probably!
You can certainly point to certain philosophies that Bailey has and see that they’re having an awful lot of success. For example, the standard baseball wisdom is that a pitcher should pitch off of his fastball, get ahead in the count, and then go with off-speed or breaking stuff. Current Giants pitching coach Bryan Price certainly holds to that, considering that the Giants are throwing fastballs 51% of the time.
Bailey, though, doesn’t necessarily agree. Bailey’s philosophy is that if your best pitch is a breaking pitch, you should be throwing it more. As a result, the Red Sox are throwing fastballs just 35% of the time this year, by far the lowest mark in baseball. And if you want to see how this is a Bailey-specific effect, last year’s Red Sox threw fastballs 48% of the time, and last year’s Giants threw them 45% of the time. His presence (or absence) has made a dramatic difference in how both teams approach at-bats.
There are also more quotidian aspects of coaching to consider. We obviously can’t really know how players feel about Bailey (or Price) or what they say to each other when the cameras aren’t around. But we did see Camilo Doval this year being mentally unprepared to enter a game when the Giants had a big lead. You can and should fault Doval for that, but it’s also a coaching issue. And, of course, there’s the glaring problem that we’ve been seeing all year: the stolen base.
The 2023 Giants were 21st in baseball with 124 stolen bases allowed, while the 2023 Red Sox were 13th in baseball with 108 stolen bases allowed. The 2024 Giants are last in baseball, having allowed 88 steals, including three as you’ve been reading this sentence, while the 2024 Red Sox are 7th, having allowed just 50 steals. Hilariously, through Tuesday, each team had caught exactly 17 baserunners (the Giants did nail a couple last night, admittedly), which is a sad commentary on the Giants’ inability to control the running game.
Giants pitchers have been notably slow out of the stretch all season. They haven’t been paying attention to baserunners at first. Anytime there’s a first-and-third situation, it is basically an automatic second-and-third situation, because that runner at first will take off, the catcher will bluff a throw to second, then try to catch the runner at third, who will be standing a couple feet off the base and easily get back if necessary. This comes down to a lack of mental focus from the pitcher, which is a coaching issue, and one that the team didn’t have with Andrew Bailey as their pitching coach.
Giants pitchers spent 2022 and 2023 being, overall, average-ish, and that might have lulled us all into a sense that what Andrew Bailey was doing wasn’t that special. But the step backwards they’ve taken en masse this year and the leap forward the Red Sox have taken belie that point. It seems that the Giants had someone special in their organization and either he wanted to go home, or he just wanted to leave the Giants specifically behind and being from the East Coast made for a convenient excuse.
Either way, it should have been apparent that the Giants were going to miss him. Even still, I don’t think you could have predicted just how badly things would go in Bailey’s absence. The pitching staff has been injured, but the healthy pitchers have been surprisingly ineffective, and so too has been the staff as a whole. The right guy used to be around to fix those problems. Now they’ve got someone else.
Damn. Just, DAMN, Maestro!