One way I can tell that this is a weird season, aside from rare activities like watching the games or going outside, is that I have spent almost no time searching Fangraphs for whatever baseball thing I’ve suddenly decided is interesting. No bee in my bonnet to see which hitters have the highest BABIP or which pitchers are walking too many guys to make their results sustainable (spoiler alert: most of them). Just a general aloofness to the whole concept of Looking Up A Bunch Of Useless Baseball Crap.
Please do not take this as a slight on Looking Up A Bunch Of Useless Baseball Crap. Looking Up A Bunch Of Useless Baseball Crap is one of the joys of a normal season for me. It has simply fallen out of favor in 2020, The Year Of Everything Being Terrible.
So when I decided to figure out just how lucky or unlucky — and, uh, I will not be further discussing the concept of the Giants bullpen being unlucky, thank you — it felt a little weird to head over to Fangraphs, sort by relievers, and start looking through the stats.
I pushed through it, though, and took a look at the stats, and the Giants bullpen has been pitching terribly.
Before I start ripping the rest of the pen, I guess I should take some time out to praise the guys who have done an excellent job both at preventing runs and at doing the underlying things (racking up strikeouts, avoiding walks and home runs) that will allow them to prevent runs in the future.
So congrats to Sam Selman! You get your very own paragraph today, Sam. This is truly the greatest honor a baseball player can ever receive. Call your high school principal, because you have made it.
Everyone else, other than Dereck Rodriguez who has had one appearance this year, albeit a long one, has been disappointing in some way. Encouraged by the solid ERAs of Conner Menez or Trevor Gott? Oh no. No, no, no. They’re walking too many and not striking out enough to continue on so well. Intrigued by the excellent stuff flashed by Caleb Baragar or Shaun Anderson? Well, they’ve fallen real hard since the high of that first Dodgers series. Wandy Peralta has been maddeningly inconsistent, projects like Rico Garcia and Dany Jimenez have dramatically failed to pan out, and what it adds up to is the worst bullpen in the majors, per Fangraphs.
There are a couple factors at play here. First, the Giants have used their bullpen more than almost any other team in the majors. Coming into play yesterday, the Giants pen had thrown 82 innings, the most in the National League and just 6.2 innings less than the Rays, who lead the majors. Overusing your bullpen leads to a tired bullpen, which leads to a bad bullpen. Even with expanded rosters, starters consistently getting knocked out in the fourth inning (the second inning yesterday!) takes a toll on the relievers. As much as Gabe Kapler wants to pretend otherwise, Tyler Rogers can’t pitch 2 innings every day, and putting him in a position to do that hurts both him and the team.
But that can’t be the whole story. The easiest way to tell is that the Rays, who again have thrown more bullpen innings than the Giants, have a fantastic bullpen. Fangraphs has them as the most valuable in the majors, though based on pure rate stats, the Dodgers ‘pen is just absolutely dominant. But regardless of which superlative the Rays deserve, they do merit a superlative, and that puts the lie to the idea that pure overwork is behind the Giants’ woes.
No, the problem the Giants are running into is that this is what happens when you go dumpster diving for relievers. Gott, Peralta, Garcia, Jarlin Garcia, Jimenez, and Andrew Triggs were all plucked out of the $5 Nic Cage DVD bin at Walmart, and so they’ve had their issues. Baragar was rushed to the bigs (if we’re being honest, the team should probably use Andy Suarez to fill his spot instead), and Menez, Anderson, and Sam Coonrod (also bad before he got hurt) are all inexperienced at the big league level. It was bound to be a bumpy ride.
Coming into the season, the Giants had assembled an enormous bag of question marks in the hopes that if they reached their hand in enough times, eventually they’d pull out an exclamation point. So far, they’ve hit once, with Selman (with the understanding that his sample size is small because he’s pitched a single-digit number of innings so far this year), but have found a lot of disappointment otherwise.
It’s hard to watch games where the bullpen is awful, relentlessly walking runners into scoring position so they can touch home plate after an inevitable run. But this ugliness comes with the territory of trying to rebuild as quickly as possible. “Move fast and break things” became a Silicon Valley cliche a few years ago, and the Giants are applying that concept to their bullpen. As a result, a lot of things are getting broken. Mostly windows from the home run balls. And records, not in a good way (they have allowed a home run in 16 straight games, a franchise record).
One of the hallmarks of the Brian Sabean era Giants was finding good relievers who came cheap. Farhan Zaidi did that last year with Trevor Gott, and they might also see Sam Selman bear fruit this year too. There are growing pains that come with this strategy though, and we’re seeing them just about every day.