Road Woe-riors

DO U GET IT

The Giants open a series in Atlanta today, and uh-oh. The Braves are simply a much more talented team than the Giants, and even with Ronald Acuña Jr out for the year, it’s not particularly close. But the Braves are also dealing with injuries — Acuña, obviously, but Spencer Strider is also out for the year, and then there are guys like AJ Minter, AJ Smith-Shawver, and non-AJ Michael Harris who are all currently on the IL (though Minter is due to come off for this series).

The Braves have also been stumbling for two months, going 13-14 in May and following that up with a 14-13 June. The Giants are coming off a great homestand, winning 3 of 4 from the Cubs and 2 of 3 from the Dodgers, so now is the time to strike, right? They actually have three starting pitchers lined up to start the next three games, and a lineup that’s finding its confidence, so why not dream big? Why not believe they can do it?

And the answer is: because they can’t, of course. Because for the last year, this team has been godawful on the road.

That seems harsh, doesn’t it? Well, not if you’ve watched the stupid Giants play a road game this year. So far in 2024, the Giants are 16-25 on the road, for a winning percentage of .390. Last year, the Giants were 34-47 on the road (a winning percentage of .420), but after July 1, they went 11-30, a .268 winning percentage. As a point of reference, the utterly godawful 2023 Oakland A’s, a team that lost 112 games because they were tanking as hard as possible in order to give themselves an excuse to skip town, had a winning percentage of .309.

So, over the last year, the Giants have had a road record of 27-55, a winning percentage of .329. Over a full season, a .329 winning percentage would come out to a record of 53-109. By contrast, at home this year, the Giants are 25-19 (.568), and after July 1 last year, they went 22-17 (.564) at home.

I should pause here for a moment and point out that this kind of difference between home and road records isn’t that unusual. The difference between the Giants’ home and road winning percentages is .178, and it is certainly noticeable. But the difference between the Royals’ home and road winning percentages is .227; the Mariners are at .235; hell, even the Braves are at .174. But every one of those teams is in playoff position because their home winning percentage is phenomenal, and the Giants are not in playoff position because their home winning percentage is fine, but nothing special.

However, since those are all contending teams, what they’re doing is working well enough that they don’t really have to look that hard at it. But the Giants are quasi-contending at best, and they need to push every advantage and figure out every disadvantage, because otherwise they’ll stay right where they are: In 9th place for a wild card spot.

So why are the Giants so awful on the road? It starts with the pitching. Over the last calendar year, the Giants have a 3.06 ERA at home and A 5.31 ERA on the road. You can talk about park effects all you want, and how it’s hard to homer in San Francisco, and that’s true, but that doesn’t cover nearly everything. In San Francisco, opposing hitters have hit .234/.279/.361 when facing the Giants staff. During away games, they’ve hit .281/.338/.481 against the Giants. That’s the difference between facing Thairo Estrada and Pete Alonso.

You can look at all the statistical measures of the pitching staff’s performance and they will tell you that they’re bad on the road, but there is no why. As a staff, since the beginning of last July, they’re striking out less people on the road (19.8% instead of 23.6%), walking more (7.1% instead of 5%), and giving up more home runs (1.5 homers per 9, 0.6 more than the 0.9 homers per 9 that the team is allowing on the road.)

This is the main problem that the team has to fix if they want to actually contend, beyond “We’re still just 3.5 games out of the 3rd wildcard.” Some of it will even itself out — a .319 BABIP and a strand rate around 65% both won’t last, and when they regress it will help the team avoid runs. But they’re also categorically, notably worse in just about every way on the road. Just as one example, Logan Webb has a 2.13 home ERA and a 4.08 ERA on the road. He’s better than those road numbers, but when he gets away from San Francisco he sure has a hard time showing it.

It’s hard to ask the bullpen for more than they’ve already given the team. They’ve doubtless worn down over the course of the season, with multiple bullpen games every time through the rotation, including sometimes back-to-back bullpen games. And yet, here I am asking the pitching coaches and pitching staff to take a hard look at why exactly they’re all so much worse on the road than they are at home. If this problem persists, then the whole team will be watching the playoffs on TV. Which would, admittedly, mean they don’t have to pitch on the road.