So how'd I do predicting the season?
Was I great? No. But was I good? Also no. But was I at least decent? Absolutely not, and how dare you ask the question.
Before we get started, a little housekeeping: I will be taking next week off from the newsletter, because I am confident that people don’t care a lot about baseball between Christmas and New Year’s. Have a good holiday, all.
At the end of March, I took a look at an email I got from some marketing company which listed various Giants Over/Unders for the year and tried to predict how they would go. I felt I had solid reasoning on my side, and rational, well considered reasons to pick the options I did.
Then the team went out and won 107 games and a bunch of guys had career years and made me look like a damn idiot. Bless you for this, Giants. I feel very owned and hope you win another 107 games next year.
Anyway, I thought it would be fun1 to take a look at my predictions and how they went in 2021. Are you ready for me to be extremely wrong a bunch of times in a row to start off? I’m sure you are!
Mike Yastrzemski, 24.5 home runs — UNDER
Mike Yastrzemski, 76.5 RBIs — OVER
And right off the bat, we’re a quick 0/2! Yaz didn’t have a good year by his standards, but he was still a reasonably productive hitter, hitting 25 homers and driving in 71 runs. You may notice that those 25 homers just put him over 24.5, and those 71 RBIs were just a few under 76.5. So these weren’t necessarily bad guesses, just off by a little. The reasoning was fine too: he had a hand injury at the end of Spring Training, and MLB used a new ball that made it harder to hit homers (well, there’s a funny story about that, but not one I knew at the time), so that would be likely to depress his power numbers.
It turns out that the thing that depressed Yastrzemski’s power numbers was losing playing time because he became worse at hitting the ball, so I was wrong, but almost right, but for the wrong reasons. On to the next one!
Buster Posey, .263 average — UNDER
Buster Posey, 8.5 home runs — UNDER
Buster Posey, 45.5 RBIs — UNDER
Okay, that looks bad, but here was my immediate comment:
OVER I’M PICKING OVER FOR ALL OF THEM YOU’LL PRY BUSTER POSEY OPTIMISM FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS
So what did I really pick? I mean, who’s to say? There are arguments to be made on both sides.
Oh, okay, I picked the under because he was under all of those totals in 2019 and I didn’t think the year off would rejeuvenate Posey the way it ended up doing.
More to the point, though, I doubted. I lost my faith in Buster Posey, and he ended up leaving us forever, alone on a planet rotting away from disease both metaphorical and literal. Am I saying that it is my fault that Posey retired? Yes, absolutely. I am sorry, everyone. I am sorry and it won’t ever change anything.
Anyway, just to keep the scoreboard updated, now I’m 0-for-5. Not looking great for me! Maybe this next one will get me on the right track though.
Brandon Belt, 19 homers — UNDER
Well, maybe not.
Belt, like so many Giants, had a career, year, hitting 29 homers last year in just 381 plate appearances. His power output was staggering, even for someone who’s always had good power and just needed a run of good health to prove it.
Why did I say he’d be under 19 homers? Because he’d never hit 19 homers in a season in his career before 2021, and because 2021 was his age 33 season, and because I didn’t expect him to stay healthy. In fact, if you’d have told me in March that Belt would have less than 400 plate appearances in 2021, I would have immediately started counting the hell out of some chickens on this prediction. Belt was one of the best power hitters in the game last year, and even if you believed in him all along, that would have been very, very difficult to predict.
0-for-6! Let’s see if I can get one right.
Evan Longoria, 17.5 homers — OVER
Evan Longoria, 62.5 RBIs — OVER
If he doesn’t collide with Brandon Crawford, I think he gets these. At the end of May, Longoria had 9 homers and 27 RBIs, and was looking better at the plate than he had in a Giants uniform. Things were looking up.
Then things were very suddenly looking extremely down, because Longoria and Crawford collided in early June, and Longoria was left face down on the ground with a suddenly bad shoulder. He came back in August, had a hand contusion, came back again, and wasn’t the same player.
If only things had worked out a little better, I’d have avoided an 0-8 start here. Things did not work out a little better.
Brandon Crawford, 13.5 homers — UNDER
Brandon Crawford, 57.5 RBIs — OVER
Finally! I get one right! I’m a GENIUS at this sports prediction thing. I should go pro. Sure, I’m now 1-9 on Over/Unders, which haters would say is “bad” or whatever, but I knew! I knew Brandon Crawford would drive in more than 57.5 runs! Because I’m a genius!
Ah, sorry, got a little carried away there. I do love a good solid win. But let’s look at the loss first: Crawford had been declining for years. Sure, he looked good in 2020 — and he was a solid hitter too yuk yuk yuk — but, like Posey, it seemed foolish to bet on a resurgence based on I Want Him To Have A Resurgence. It didn’t cross my mind to bet on a resurgence based on The Giants Have The Greatest Hitting Minds Of The Last Several Decades, but if it had, I’d have probably dismissed that one too.
The fact is that Giants coaches and front office staff were just phenomenal, and it showed up on the field. All these wrong answers, all these players who I thought were going to continue relatively normal declines and instead had career years, they’re all tributes to the program the Giants put in place. Good job, guys. Way to make me look like an idiot.
You jerks.
Tommy La Stella, 11 homers — UNDER
Tommy La Stella, 51.5 RBIs — UNDER
Alex Dickerson, 18.5 homers — UNDER
Alex Dickerson, 62.5 RBIs — UNDER
Oh, except for these guys. The greatest hitting coaches of the 21st century did not help Tommy La Stella and Alex Dickerson this year.
But these declines are why I didn’t have faith in the Giants’ vets to rebound the way they did. This is normal. This is regular baseball. La Stella and Dickerson are proof that sometimes, conventional wisdom is right. They had bad years, and based on their ages and injury histories, it wasn’t a surprise.
Kevin Gausman, 10 wins — UNDER
Kevin Gausman, 177.5 strikeouts — UNDER
Okay, so if Kevin Gausman hadn’t been one of the best pitchers in baseball, then maybe…
Honestly, this one was a toss-up for me. It was the hardest decision I had to make (or so I thought) and I just guessed wrong. Gausman won 14 games and struck out 227, so it’s not like I was close, but you can’t just predict every player to have a career year every year, which is what I’d have had to do to take the over on Gausman, as well as Belt and Crawford. That just seemed so unlikely that I wasn’t going to do it.
Again, 107 wins. Should have just said, yes, of course, every player will have the best season of his career. In hindsight, it’s so obvious!
Johnny Cueto, 8.5 wins — OVER
I like Johnny Cueto and I wanted it to be true. I had a pretty good idea it wouldn’t be, but I wanted it to be.
Anthony DeSclafani, 8.5 wins — OVER
I don’t know why this one seemed obvious to me while Gausman didn’t, but that’s the way it worked out. Maybe I just don’t think 9 wins is that many wins, but this was a clear bet for me. And it worked out! For once.
San Francisco Giants, 77.5 wins — OVER
This one was a resounding success, at least. Here’s how I explained it at the time:
This team wasn’t constructed for the stars and everyday players to be the strength. It was constructed for platoon advantages, and to give opportunities to not just Mike Yastrzemski, but the future Mikes Yastrzemski who will then light it up.
That, at least, was extremely right, for the right reasons. Yastrzemski himself had a poor year, as did Dickerson, but unexpectedly strong performances from LaMonte Wade Jr and Steven Duggar meant that the team was able to pick them up. The team was built on platoon advantages, and that’s how the team succeeded. Darin Ruf crushed lefties, and Wade crushed righties, and the team won and won and won and kept winning.
I didn’t think they would be as good as they were. No one did, other than maybe the players themselves (though they know more than anyone what a tough row to hoe 107 wins is). But I did think that the team’s ability to play matchups would mean that they would be at least a respectable baseball team. That, at least, was right. Even if a lot of the specifics were very, very wrong.
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