Please remember how few games the Giants have played
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The Giants are 44 games into the 2020 season, which means they start their last road trip of the year today. That’s one way to look at just how abbreviated this season is, because 44 games in a normal year puts us in mid-May.
It is possible to look at a team in mid-May and know things about them. Last year, on May 18, the day the 2019 Giants played their 44th game, the Yankees, Astros, and Dodgers were all fantastic, while the Orioles, Royals, and Marlins were utterly dreadful. We all knew that these results were the natural order of things, and took them seriously.
But also: a young, hungry Phillies team was in first place and the Nationals were 7 games under .500. The A’s were a sub-.500 team looking up at the Angels in the standings, while the Pirates were quietly having a nice year and the Cubs were the dominant team in the NL Central.
If you don’t remember the 2019 baseball season particularly well, I assure you that none of those things were the case by the end of the year.
So yes, the Giants are fun right now. They are, improbably, 2 games over .500 and surging as they head into San Diego tonight. The offense is scoring runs by the boatload, and sometimes the pitching is bad and sometimes the pitching is good, but either way the offense is putting crooked numbers on the board (???) multiple times a game (?????!!!!!) and the team is winning.
That doesn’t mean this is who they are. That definitely doesn’t mean that, should MLB play a full or almost full schedule in 2021, you can expect the team to carry these gains into that season. We honestly just don’t know yet what to expect.
The sample size is too small to draw any conclusions other than “Hey, this team sure is fun to watch right now.” All these guys who are carrying the offense right now, other than Mike Yastrzemski and (depending on your definition of “carrying the offense”) Evan Longoria, are doing it in unsustainable ways.
Donovan Solano, Brandon Belt, and Joey Bart have BABIPs of .413, .415, and .417, respectively. Austin Slater, languishing in mild injury limbo, is BABIPing .385. Mauricio Dubon is at .351 and Darin Ruf is at .368. Even Yastrzemski is up at .361. All of those numbers, with a large enough sample size, would crater, and the hits that these guys are getting would disappear. The offense would stagnate
But we haven’t had to see that yet. We might even luck out and not see it at all this year. The effect of all this is that we could easily go into 2021 with a very distorted view of how good the Giants offense is. Hell, we could go into next week with a very distorted view of how good the Giants offense is.
None of this is to say that the Giants hitters are bad or that you shouldn’t be happy watching them. But remember how fast things can change in baseball: in game 44 last year, the Giants’ 1-2 hitters were Joe Panik and Steven Duggar. By the end of the year, the team had cut Panik and sent Duggar to the minors.
These things happen in baseball. The unpredictability is a big part of what makes watching it fun and interesting. But there are also predictable things, like the various regressions of guys hitting over their heads. Remember that when Brandon Belt’s ground balls stop finding holes. It’s not necessarily that other teams have devised a game plan to stop him or that he’s suddenly a much worse baseball player.
Shit happens. Nothing lasts forever. A run of good luck can transform into a run of bad luck very easily. The scarcity of games means there’s a scarcity of good information from games, which means that we have no idea how good these guys really are. Baseball evaluation is always extremely hard. This year, it got a little harder.