Teams get off to hot starts that don’t continue every year. The 2020 Tigers started off 9-5, for example, while the Orioles went 11-7 to begin the year, and the 2020 Rockies were an incredible 11-3 over their first 14 games.
As you guessed from the sentence you read two sentences ago, none of that lasted. The Tigers went 14-30 over the rest of the season, the Orioles went 14-28, and the Rockies were 15-31. So the fact that the Giants started out the season with more wins than losses in their first 10 games, while extremely pleasant to watch, doesn’t necessarily carry a lot of meaning going forward.
On the other hand, though, the way they’ve been winning has been a surprise because they’ve been doing it with pitching. After the offense carried the team last year — a team that was held back by mediocre starting pitching and a godawful bullpen — it would have been reasonable to assume that they would be the strength of the team again in 2021. So far, though, that hasn’t been the case.
Coming into last night’s game — team stats through Monday were not available as of this writing — the Giants had the 7th most valuable pitching staff, per Fangraphs. Breaking it down even more, while the bullpen is below average so far this year, the starting staff has been fantastic in the early going.
This was, uh, unexpected. Coming into the year, the rotation consisted of: Kevin Gausman, who was excellent in the short 2020 but had been spotty before that; Johnny Cueto, who is delightful and also hasn’t had a good season since 2016; Anthony DeSclafani, who was awful in the short 2020 but had been solid before that; Alex Wood, who is oft injured and had been bad in both 2019 and 2020; and Aaron Sanchez, who was fantastic in 2016, but had been declining or injured every year since then.
During Spring Training, it became clear that Wood’s health issues would prevent him from being on the Opening Day roster, so his spot in the rotation went to Logan Webb, who has been a promising but inconsistent young pitcher since reaching the majors in late 2019.
You would not expect this group to be a world-beating rotation. And yet here they are, with their worst performance through 10 games being Logan Webb giving up 3 runs in 5 innings against the Rockies, in a game the Giants ended up winning 4-3. That’s not awful!
So how have they been doing it? The biggest thing that jumps out from their stat sheet is that they’re getting lucky on fly balls. Through Sunday, only 4% of fly balls Giants pitchers had allowed had turned into home runs. This is simply good fortune, and it can’t continue. Generally, teams allow home runs on about 10% of fly balls; last year, which was an atypically homer-happy year, the lowest rate in the majors was 11.5%, and it belonged to…the Giants. In 2019, the lowest rate was 12.9%, which belonged to the Rays, and in 2018, the Cardinals were at 10.3%. So you can see that 4% number is not going to last all year. When it goes up, the team will allow more runs, and that shiny ERA will become somewhat less shiny.
However, it’s not like the pitching is going to instantly become bad. The rotation is currently fifth in the majors with a 47% ground ball rate (league average is around 42%), so they’ll have fewer fly balls than the average team to turn into home runs. They’re also doing a good job limiting walks, and while they’ve gotten lucky on fly balls not turning into homers, they’ve had slightly below average luck on balls put into play, so it’s not like there are a bunch of singles lurking beneath the bay that will pop out and attack.
Also, they’ve been up against some pretty solid competition. Before the Reds, the Giants have faced the Rockies, Mariners, and Padres, who are 8th, 12th, and 15th, respectively, in runs scored. These aren’t the historically inept Cubs, for example. They’re solid-to-average major league offenses, and Giants pitching is beating them. That’s not nothing!
If we’re being honest, the Giants probably aren’t going to be one of the top 2 rotations in the majors this year. However, what they’ve shown so far has been a very promising start. It’s probably not right to call them a pitching-first team, unless the offense continues its implosion and the pitchers earn that title by default, but the rotation in particular is much more of a strength than it seemed like it would be during the spring. That’s a good sign for entertaining games this summer, which seems like a good goal.
Now the team has to shore up the back half of the bullpen and get Matt Wisler and Jarlin Garcia on track, and then they’ll have something real special.