2022 is over, and we can all be thankful for that. But before it’s entirely in our rearview mirror, let’s take a look back. Specifically, let’s take a look back at me, and all the things I said last year that were proven right, wrong, or somewhere in the middle.
(I will not give myself credit for, like, “The Reds and A’s are going to be bad.” I said that plenty of times because it was extremely obvious and I get no points for it.)
Good Predictions
In January, a couple days before everyone had reached the same conclusion, I said that Spring Training would definitely be delayed. It was! Remember the lockout? How it was 4,000 years ago? It wasn’t! It was last year.
From Spring Training: “It just seems abundantly clear that the 2022 Giants offense will be categorically worse than the 2021 Giants offense.” Sure was!
Also in Spring Training, I took an appropriately skeptical tone about Joey Bart. In April, I expanded on that, as he had a terrible start to his year.
In May, when both teams were doing pretty well, I said that the Rockies and Diamondbacks would fade. If that’s not impressive to you, yes, I understand. You can give me half credit for that one if you’d like.
At the end of May, I said that Evan Longoria might be the most important hitter on the Giants. He was okay the rest of the way, with a .751 OPS from that point until the end of the season. The Giants, too, were okay. They followed his lead!
The day that I noted that Anthony DeSclafani was perhaps not ready to make a major league start, he got shelled. He also pitched quite poorly in his next start. Then he didn’t make another appearance on the season. Because he shouldn’t have pitched again at all last year.
Are the Giants actually only okay? Yep! Sure are! The funniest thing about this one is that it came a scant few weeks after I said they were good. SPOILER: You’ll be seeing that one in the Bad Predictions category.
When the Giants were still statistically one of the better offensive teams in the league, I said that they were actually a totally average team. On the season, they ended up finishing 14th in offense. Nailed it.
From late July: “It’s still possible that they’ll pick themselves up, right the shit, and squeak out that 6th seed in October. But that’s their absolute ceiling, and at the moment it doesn’t seem likely.” That was their ceiling, and it wasn’t likely they’d hit it, and then they didn’t hit it.
I said that Wilmer Flores was going to win the Willie Mac Award a couple weeks before he actually did, citing as my source me from a couple months before that, though I assume that was on the podcast — Rate us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts! — because I didn’t have a link for it.
From November 15, and we’ll come back to, uh, the rest of it, in a little while: “I know the Giants are way more likely to end up with Michael Conforto and Brandon Drury than Judge and [Trea] Turner.” They got 50% of Conforto and Drury and 0% of Judge and Turner, so I’m calling that a win.
Bad Predictions
I didn’t look at all of my lockout #content, but I did see this line I wrote at the beginning of March: “My prediction for the last several months has been that the first game of the season will take place around mid-May.” This was wrong! The start of the season got delayed by about a week, not by a month and a half. Looking back on it, I put too much credence in the clearly planted-by-owners story that they were comfortable not playing games in April.
“The Dodgers have unequivocally proven themselves to be frauds.” Huh. Turns out, a 1-2 opening series against the Rockies doesn’t prove anything. Learn something every day!
Most of what I predicted here.
This is what a good baseball team looks like. No it isn’t, you idiot! That’s not it! This is what a mediocre team looks like!
This wasn’t even a prediction, but I tried to come up with a mock trade for Juan Soto where the Giants wouldn’t give up Marco Luciano. Stupid! That would never, ever happen ever. Even with Luciano, they weren’t going to win that deal. Without him? They weren’t even in the ballpark (baseball term).
“JD Davis is a perfectly okay hitter who’s not really an improvement over Darin Ruf.” Well, Davis had an .857 OPS post-trade and Ruf had a .413 OPS post-trade, but other than that... (the larger point in that one about half-assing the trade deadline stands, though)
Mixed Bag
I’d say this one was more good than bad, other than not predicting Jake McGee’s disastrous year. All of the guys in the bottom two tiers got DFA’d (though Santos did last the entire season on the 40-man, at least), one each got cut from my “Will be in the bullpen to start the season, but one of them will be DFA’d during the year” and “Prospects in a good spot” categories (which seems reasonable), so that part, at least, seems pretty solid.
In early May, I slapped a Jaylin Davis comp on David Villar. And Villar certainly outperformed anything Davis has ever done in the majors, which is good. But! If you look at Villar’s Baseball Savant page, you’ll see that the computers are extremely unimpressed with how he hit the ball, giving him an expected wOBA of .285 (extremely bad!) instead of his actual wOBA of .344 (pretty good!). So I’ll give myself a big ol’ Maybe on this one and wait and see. C’mon, David! Make me look extremely wrong!
There wasn’t an official prediction in this one, but around mid-May, I was lukewarm on Darin Ruf’s season and bullish on Mike Yastrzemski’s. From that point until the end of the season, Yaz had a .666 OPS and Ruf had a .633 OPS. This could be under “Bad predictions” but I already put it here, so I’ll justify that by saying that I didn’t say the hot streaks they were on would continue, simply that Yastrzemski’s was more likely to continue than Ruf’s.
I think I was right about this one, but there’s no real way to tell if it was good to demote Luis Gonzalez in August or not. He sure was bad when he came back to the majors, though.
That’s about it for predictions I made this year, right? I mean, that covers the entire regular season, so unless there’s been some kind of development afterwards that…would have necessitated…some predicting…
One last, ultra-right prediction
“They’re still not getting Correa though.”
“I am well aware that Correa will not sign here, although if there’s ever been a free agent who could be swayed solely by money and a team with the money and the need to sway him, it’s Correa and the Giants”
“The Giants were never going to be outbid for a huge star by the Minnesota Twins. Was not going to happen, full stop.”
All of these were accurate predictions! The Giants did not end up with Carlos Correa, because the cruel hand of fate has decreed that the Giants are not allowed to sign top free agent hitters. They also did not lose out on him to the Twins because, I mean, come on. The Giants have more money than the Twins. So once again, I was right about every step of the Carlos Correa process, and will continue to feel that way unless there’s one final section with a title in preset font Heading 4.
One last ultra-wrong prediction
Damn it!
“It’s possible that the Giants are right about the medicals, by the way. I don’t want to make it seem like there’s absolutely no way something in there was concerning. But the Twins, for whom Correa played last year, certainly know his medical history pretty well and they don’t have any concerns. From all accounts, the Mets are going to go through with the deal, so they must feel all right about Correa’s medicals too. So even if there’s a real issue that stopped the deal with the Giants, well, their doctors are outvoted at least 2-1.”
No, you idiot, no! No!
Basically every part of this one (other than the first sentence quoted above) was wrong. The Giants’ doctors weren’t outvoted; nobody else had taken a sufficiently comprehensive look at Correa’s ankle yet. Nobody in the ownership group got cold feet about the deal because it was too much money; it was because he was going to have to move off shortstop much earlier than they thought, making the contract an albatross. Other free agents won’t see a joke of an organization when they look at the Giants, because they signed multiple mid-level free agents almost immediately afterwards.
The only thing in there that was completely right was that they alienated Brandon Crawford with poor communication. Otherwise, no. All wrong.
It was just a perfect storm of bad timing, a decade of frustrating free agent classes, an ownership group led by someone I already don’t trust to make rational decisions, and medical issues that the team was not allowed to communicate which only arose when they did their own examination. That was it, and I (along with the entirety of Giants fandom) freaked out about it.
And I turned out to be incredibly wrong. So, sorry. As a reflection of how Giants fans were feeling when the deal went south, sure, that newsletter holds up. As a statement of true things that happened, or true assumptions about the Giants organization, it couldn’t have been more off-base. This is what happens when you (I) let emotions and frustration take over: you (I) make irrational assumptions instead of waiting a week for more information.
That they were the same spectacularly wrong conclusions that everyone else was drawing is beside the point. I was wrong. I was very, very wrong. I will be wrong again this year, about all sorts of things in the baseball world, but hopefully less harmfully so.
Still sucks they didn’t get a top free agent, though.
And I look forward to seeing what you (and I) are wrong about with the 2023 Giants! Happy New Year, Doug!