Kris Bryant took one at bat in Atlanta, lining out to right field on Friday night before rain delayed the game for a little less than an hour. When the teams came back on the field, Bryant was nowhere to be found; after the game, Gabe Kapler would report that he had felt some minor tightness in his side on a check swing, and so the team took him out of the game as a precaution.
Bryant got an MRI the next day, which came back clean. He was technically available on Sunday, though the team successfully avoided using him by losing extremely badly, and then last night, three days after the minor injury, he was back in the lineup.
It was an extremely minor story in the 2021 Giants season. A guy was dinged up and sat until he wasn’t. That’s nothing.
But it didn’t have to be. Imagine a world where the Giants don’t have a red-hot Darin Ruf on their roster, or where Wilmer Flores isn’t around, or where they can’t break the glass covering Thairo Estrada in case of emergency. The media was informed before the game on Saturday that Bryant was available, but that probably wasn’t true; he was feeling decent enough that it was plausible, though, and he felt fine the next day, so it would have been justifiable to start him. The announcers mentioned on the broadcast that the only reason the Giants held off starting him was that the muggy weather in Atlanta meant that his side might have felt artificially good, so any tightness might have hid itself in the humidity.
So we can’t take it for granted that Bryant was never going to start. And we can’t take it for granted that he was fully healthy either. It would have been an entirely justifiable decision to throw Kris Bryant out there and see what happened, and what happened might have put him out for a week, or even more. He could have strained that side that had just lied to him and said he was fine. That was on the table.
Instead, Bryant got multiple days off. The Giants have been doing this all year. They’ve been able to afford to, because of their depth.
The irony is that right now, they’re not quite as deep as they have been. Donnie Barrels is out with COVID and Evan Longoria never fully worked his way back from the IL, so the infield isn’t at full strength. Mike Yastrzemski has been ice cold this month, and Alex Dickerson and Austin Slater have been unreliable all year, so the outfield has seen better days too. As a result, you could see a team pushing every player as hard as possible for their playoff push.
But the Giants haven’t done that. They’ve given every player the rest he needs to perform at his best. It’s been an operating philosophy all year, best exemplified by Buster Posey, who has started for three consecutive days just four times all season. Why are the Giants comfortable with that and able to keep winning despite giving one of their best players so much rest? Because they have a good backup in Curt Casali, and a competent third stringer in AAA in Chadwick Tromp.
Why has the team been so comfortable giving infielders rest? Because on any given day, with Brandon Crawford at shortstop and Belt at first, they’ll have some permutation of Longoria, Bryant, Estrada, Solano, Wilmer Flores, and Tommy La Stella to fill the other two infield positions. They can afford to give guys rest without sacrificing much in terms of winning. If a couple of those guys are injured, like they are right now, then the team is still fine and can still afford to let Bryant rest, like they just did. Because those guys can rest, they don’t get more injured, and they come back stronger, healthier, and more productive.
Their health, then, is a product of their depth. Even managers with the best intentions can feel forced into playing guys at 80% health because they don’t have better options and it’s not like anything will necessarily go wrong. The Giants are avoiding that. It’s easy to have the philosophy of resting your players, but much harder to put it into practice when confronted with the realities of a long season. The Giants have given themselves enough depth to avoid that trap.
Now, the Giants have not been a particularly healthy team this year. But their injuries have been from the starting-a-bunch-of-thirtysomethings pile, not in the genre of Angel-Pagan-says-he’s-fine-whoops-he’s-not-fine-we’ll-see-him-in-three-months. And their depth is what helped them weather the cavILcade and I am immediately regretting that perhaps overly cute phrase.
But depth has meant that they didn’t have to rush guys back from the Injured List, like the team did with Joe Panik time and time again, and Angel Pagan, and whoever else they felt like they desperately needed to compete. These Giants aren’t doing that, so when guys come back, they stay back (other than Longoria, who suffered a different injury almost immediately upon returning).
This is a huge part of why they’ve had the best record in baseball for months. Depth creates health. It’s possible that even with a bunch of backup Bococks they’d have stuck to their guns and given everyone the rest they needed, but that’s not a given. The Giants have given themselves opportunities to get players to 100%. That’s a huge part of why they are where they are.