The Giants offense is better than their pitching, and that's apparently not that weird
Not my original title! But the research goes where it wants to.
The 2020 Giants are built to hit. They’re just a bunch of hitting machines, just like we all expected coming into the season. Just your typical offense-first team that wins games by outslugging their opponents, and loses games by not doing a sufficient amount of slugging.
You know, like we all expected. I know I did. Because I’m good at knowing things about baseball, which is why you’re reading my baseball newsletter.
Giants pitching, meanwhile, has been extremely bad this year. While the team has had the fifth best complement of position players in the league, their pitching is 24th. This is the main reason that the team is just barely on the outside of the expanded playoff picture this year; if the pitching staff was better, and specifically if the relievers were better, then the team could improve from the mediocre-bad range to the coveted okay-decent range.
But how unusual is it for the Giants position players to be carrying this much of the load for the team?
The last time the position players outpaced the pitchers was 2016, when the pitching was an extremely middlebrow 16th in baseball and the position players were ranked 3rd. But there’s a reason I’ve been saying “position players” instead of “hitters” this whole time, and it’s this: the 2016 team was a below average offensive team. Now, they weren’t the worst team in the league — 18th in total offense — but they weren’t really good either. It was their defense that carried the day, which makes them a far cry from the genuinely good offense that the team has enjoyed this year.
So let’s restart with the knowledge that we are only looking at offensive contributions and ignoring how a bad defense also makes pitchers look worse. You’d have to go back to 2015, when the Giants had the 4th best offense in baseball and just the 28th ranked pitching staff, to see a comparable difference. In 2014 they were 11th in offense and 26th in pitching, and in 2013 they were again 11th in offense but this time 28th in pitching.
So no, strictly by the numbers, it’s not weird for the Giants to have a very good offense and an unimpressive pitching staff. But if you look at a lot of those historic numbers on offense, a lot of them are grading on a curve. Yes, Fangraphs has the 2012 Giants offense as the 6th best in baseball, but they only scored the 11th most runs. Yes, their pitchers were ranked 22nd, but they were 7th in runs allowed, which is the entire point of pitching. You don’t want to allow runs! Only six teams did a better job of preventing earned runs than the Giants, and yet advanced rankings had 21 teams better than them.
This all comes from two things: First, the Giants defense graded out very positively for years, which decreased the number of runs the pitchers allowed, making them look better than their talent level. This is also the reason for the gap between offensive value and total position player value: the team was so good on defense for so long that it propped up their rankings.
But also, then-AT&T Park was the most extreme pitcher’s park in the game for years. It was simply extremely difficult to score runs there, which means that the solid performances of the pitching staff meant less, and the decent performances of the hitters were more impressive than it seemed at first glance. So those Fangraphs rankings of offenses and pitching staffs make plenty of sense, really, pinky swear.
But that’s all something you understand intellectually. That’s different than watching the games. Because when you watch the 2020 Giants, what you see is this: These guys can hit. That’s the weird thing, the one we’re not used to. Sure, they’ve had offenses that were good and fun to watch, like the homer parade in 2010 or the Melky-and-Buster show in 2012, but not one that was so impressive up and down the lineup every night. It’s kind of a bargain bin version of the 2000 team in that way, with thump everywhere you look.
And again, some of that is the park. Before this year, the team brought the fences in a few feet to make the park a bit friendlier to hitters; during this year, COVID meant that the team had to close the fences through which fans could watch games for free, which apparently drastically altered wind patterns. Those two changes have made the park much more hitter-friendly than it’s been for most of its existence.
But that’s not the thing that you feel when you’re watching the Giants hit. What you feel is that, other than Pablo Sandoval, anyone can get a hit at any time. There’s now nothing weird about seeing the Giants hit a 3-run homer, which for years was an endangered species in San Francisco. When the bullpen blows a game and they lose 9-6, you regret having watched it (full disclosure: I was at work yesterday and did not watch the game), but it’s not a colossal missed opportunity to have wasted the team’s only 6-run outburst in the last fortnight. It’s just another bad game from the bullpen.
The team, in short, looks transformed. And while some of this won’t last — Brandon Belt’s .429 BABIP is, uh, not sustainable over the long term — it’s still fun as hell to watch right now. It’s been a long time since the Giants offense was fun to watch, so I’ll take it.
Sure would be nice if the pitchers were just as good, though.