Have you heard the news? The Giants…they’re good!
(Champagne bottles are popped)
(An endless stream of confetti pours down from the sky)
(The heavens burst open, with Mel Ott riding in on a winged steed)
We did it, folks. We did it. Our long, national nightmare of 4 consecutive under .500 seasons is clearly over. All we have to do now is-
(taps fake earpiece, a gag that I am using even though this is an entirely text-based medium)
I am being told that there are still more than 100 regular season baseball games to be played this year, and this celebration was premature. Mistakes were made on all sides, and the most important thing to do now is move on.
So far, the Giants have been good. In large part, this is due to their cavalcade of reclamation project starting pitchers, of course, but it’s not like the offense has been bad. They’ve scored 158 runs, right smack in the middle of the league, and Fangraphs has their wRC+ at 100, when league average is…100. Hey! We all just saw that number! That’s kinda neat.
Now, this isn’t the Giants’ first foray into offensive competence since the glory years. The team had a well above offense in 2020, though with the added consideration that it was a short season so players didn’t have time to regress back towards the mean, and the shortened training camp leading into the year probably had some serious negative effects on both pitchers and defenses around the league. Still, every team dealt with that, and the Giants did better than most, so it still counts.
But this year’s offense is more telling of the kind of team Farhan Zaidi and the San Francisco front office is trying to build. In 2020, the Giants hit for good power, had a slightly below average walk rate, and got lucky on balls put in play, with a team BABIP of .311. In 2021, the Giants are doing a miserable job on balls put in play, with a team BABIP of .276, but they’re fourth in the league in hitting for power, with a team ISO of .177, and they’re walking in 10.8% of their plate appearances, which is third in the majors.
This is the formula. These are the things that a player has control over: taking walks and hitting dingers. The Giants have the third most walks and the fourth most dingers in the majors, and their offense is humming along, even through some bad luck. Compare this to their last winning season, in 2016, and the differences are stark. That team walked plenty, but it was 27th in the league in power. Some of that is surely due to differences in how the ballpark played (fences have been brought in a little since then, and closing the portholes has changed the wind patterns), but still: this is a different kind of lineup.
Back in the Sabean/Evans days, the platonic ideal of a Giant was Joe Panik. Matt Duffy. Freddy Sanchez and Marco Scutaro. Strong contact skills, thoroughly capable of hitting 8-10 homers a year, but not much more than that. High floor, low ceiling kinds of players. They certainly tried to acquire power — the list of light tower power-type guys they drafted and then failed to developed isn’t not extensive — but either the scouts weren’t finding the right projects or the player development folks weren’t fixing their flaws.
Either way, the Giants didn’t see a lot of power potential come through. The 2017 squad, the most miserable Giants team in a generation, gave playing time to Ryder Jones and Eduardo Nunez, Kelby Tomlinson and Christian Arroyo. Now, this isn’t to say that they were bad players, but in a lost year, the best the team could scrounge up were four guys who would never collectively hit 20 homers in a season, much less individually. It might not have started out as a philosophy, but when it became the thing that the hitting coaches were good at, it ended up as one.
When Zaidi took over in 2019…this is where I’d like to say things turned around immediately, except they didn’t. The team did improve in ISO, going from .132 in 2017 (30th in baseball) to .129 in 2018 (29th in baseball), and then all the way up to .153 in 2019 (28th in baseball!). They found players with power and tried them out; most failed, but the team got a Yastrzemski out of it, so that was a pretty good deal. He claimed Alex Dickerson and got nice power from Stephen Vogt and Kevin Pillar, but the transformation was just getting started.
In 2020, the team jumped to a .187 ISO, 7th in baseball. This was on the strength of Yastrzemski and Dickerson, yes, but also the newly acquired Wilmer Flores and Darin Ruf, as well as the big improvements from guys already in the organization like Austin Slater and Brandon Belt. This year, the team ISO is .177, and the rejeuvenated Buster Posey is leading the charge.
The Giants have also seen big improvements in their walk rates this year. Some guys are always going to be solid (Buster Posey, Austin Slater), and some are always going to be excellent (Brandon Belt), but Evan Longoria, Flores, and Ruf have all made big strides in their walk rates this year. Those are outs that they’re not making, which mean ducks on the pond, which mean guys for their teammates to drive in when they’re hitting for all that power.
A lot of this is the individual talent of the players. We don’t want to go too far and credit Zaidi for Buster Posey being good at baseball. But the coaching staff he and Gabe Kapler have put together, the approaches they’re preaching and gameplans they’re cooking up, have clearly had an effect.
Still, a lot of the production is coming from guys who were already on the team. Belt and Posey obviously count here, as well as Longoria and Brandon Crawford. These were acquisitions by the previous regime, and they’re all hitting like gangbusters. So this isn’t all due to the players the front office has brought in. But those guys have had power and on-base skills, and combined with the old guard’s revitalization, they’re making the offense look like they can be dangerous against anyone on any day
Are they dangerous against anyone on any day? No. Kyle Gibson, for example, shut them down on Monday. But they could be! And that’s important too.
Even with several of the main core players intact, the Giants offense has been massively transformed over the last few years. They’re now more in line with industry trends and less iconoclastic, more powerful and less slap-happy. It’s nice to see them looking like a normal offense, run by people who value skills in normal ways.
There was a charm to the old way of doing things, where you half expected the Giants to sign a guy named Peaches Geffen and watch him hit .360/.380/.362 down the stretch, but the new way works better. Eventually, everyone bends to reality. It’s nice that, on the field, at least, reality has been pretty friendly this year.