The Giants were boring last year. A total snooze-fest. Just the most bore-inducing team of the Farhan era. Specifically, their offense was boring. Do you remember watching that team? I’m falling asleep just thinking about it.
Well, good night. See you next week!
No, I kid. I kid! Sure, thinking about the 2023 Giants might make me WANT to go to sleep, but I can resist that and bang out several hundred words for a newsletter that’s hosted on a website that loves Nazis. Why wouldn’t I do that while also searching for new hosts that are free and allow me to send emails and allow people to comment on newsletters? Of course I’ll do that!
The main problem the Giants offense had last year was that it fell apart in the second half, and when that happened, no one really hit for that much power, and no one hit for that much average, and no one was interesting to watch, and there basically just wasn’t anybody whose at bats you actually looked forward to.
Wilmer Flores is excepted here. Wilmer, you are a wonderful human being. Please grab some orange slices and then head on home holding your head high. Sorry about Matthew Perry.
So the Giants offense wasn’t good in any way, or interesting, or worth watching. That seems bad! And then the team sucked and missed the playoffs by not that many games and fan support and confidence both evaporated and the manager got fired. Not ideal!
So what’s the answer? Can Farhan make the offense good again? I mean, I don’t know. Maybe? But can he make it more interesting? Yes, absolutely.
Last year, the Giants were the slowest team in baseball. Per Fangraphs, their speed rating was 3.6, and sure, that seems like a contextless number devoid of any real meaning, but I can tell you that it was the worst speed rating of any team in the majors by a wide margin (the 29th place team was at 4.0, and the 20th place team was at 4.5, so other than the Giants they’re really not grouped too widely apart). And that feels right, doesn’t it? They felt like a bunch of lumbering oafs who couldn’t do anything right, so sure, that tracks.
But! In the second half, it was even worse. In the second half, their speed rating was 3.1. The 29th place team came in at 3.9, and the 17th place team was at 4.7. So that means the gap between the slowed team in baseball — the Giants — and the second slowest team — the White Sox — was as big as the gap between the White Sox and a team that was just below the middle of the pack.
But wait, there’s more (negative)! The 15th place team in the second half was the Astros, whose speed rating was 5.0. Of Giants who had at least 10 plate appearances in the second half, only one of them was even at a 5.0. So congrats to Tyler Fitzgerald, but the fastest guy on the team should be better than an average runner on a team with average speed.
It’s not that I think faster guys would automatically make the team better. In fact, I made this whole chart that shows that there’s very little correlation (the Giants are the leftmost dot, which is bad):
But here’s the thing about Tyler Fitzgerald: he was interesting. He was fun. He was worth watching. The guy hit .219 with a .265 on base percentage, and I’m like, yeah, let’s see more of him! I liked him! Why? Well, partially because he slugged .469, and yes I did consider being disingenuous about that, but also because he was fast. When he got on base, he made things happen. And as you’ll recall about the 2023 Giants, nothing ever fucking happened.
So I am asking the Giants front office: get more fast guys. Jung Hoo Lee is a good start, but find more. Athleticism is fun and cool. Running fast is entertaining. The Giants were a spectacularly unentertaining team last year. I have given up on the hope that the Giants will compete with the Dodgers in any meaningful way, because of course they won’t. But if they could at least be worth watching, that would be a big step forward.
In the 'Farhan debate', I generally fall on the pro side. It's a hard job, I like more things that he's done than I dislike. But the one thing that I just can't compute is how he came out of the 2022 season saying "we need to get more athletic and improve the defense" and produced ... the 2023 team.
Mission for the 2024 season? The same as the mission for the 2023 season.
Pithy, Maestro!
PITHY!!