After a strong start from Keaton Winn last night, it’s easy to be bullish about the Giants rotation. I mean, you’ve got Logan Webb, who finished second in Cy Young voting last year and has picked up right where he left off. You’ve got Blake Snell, who won the Cy Young last year, and while he hasn’t picked up right where he left off, it is basically still Spring Training for him, and he has shown improvement with every start.
You’ve got Jordan Hicks, who throws a thousand miles an hour and has an ERA under 2 in his first 28 innings this year. You’ve got Kyle Harrison, the super-prospect whose fastball is one of the best pitches in baseball. And then there’s Winn, who casually throws 96 in the seventh inning and has quietly been a strong presence at the back of the rotation. Put that all together, and you’ve got the makings of a pretty formidable rotation.
Anyway, they’re 22nd in fWAR.
It seems like they should be better, right? I mean, look at all those nice things it took me two paragraphs to say! And I didn’t even get into their generally low walk rates! What gives?
The simple answer is this: Fangraphs’ version of pitcher WAR is based on FIP, and the Giants don’t grade out particularly well on FIP. They have the second lowest strikeout rate of any rotation in baseball, and while they’re ninth in walk rate and 12th in home run rate, those don’t make up for their weakness in racking up whiffs. Now, they are unusually good at getting grounders — second in ground ball rate — but give a formula that assigns every ground ball Sometimes A Hit and every strikeout Never A Hit, well, it’s not hard to see which one is better.
(Just to be clear, the Giants are middle of the pack in FIP, but because Oracle Park is a pitcher’s park, the park factors knock them down several rungs on the ladder. A 4.06 FIP in San Francisco is much less impressive than a 4.06 FIP in Cincinnati, for example.)
But even still, should the Giants rotation really be in the bottom third of baseball? I mean, sure, Snell has been awful. No one disputes that, and hopefully it will stop soon. But don’t the rest of the pitchers have enough good qualities to make up for that?
And the answer is no. Not really. Sorry!
Logan Webb does. Webb has had a nice start to the season, and there’s no real reason to expect him to decline anytime soon. He is good.
Logan Webb may now exit today’s newsletter. Thanks for stopping by, Logan!
Now let’s go one by one through the other starters. We’ll start with last night’s star, Keaton Winn, who’s been pretty solid. His ERA this year is 3.54, which is good, he’s striking out 7.4 batters per 9 innings, which is a little below average, he’s walking 2.9 batters per 9 innings, which is a little above average, and he’s allowing almost 1 home run per 9 innings, which is right on average. Overall, he’s been a pretty averageish pitcher, which makes him useful but unspectacular. That’s not to say that spectacular isn’t coming or can’t come or anything like that; he just hasn’t been spectacular yet.
Jordan Hicks, though, has had a great start to the year. It’s pretty hard to improve on a 1.61 ERA, and not only is he very enjoyable to watch, but now we get to feel superior to the Cardinals for trying this very simple, good idea (using Jordan Hicks as a starter instead of a reliever) that they wanted nothing to do with. Take that, Cardinals, you big dumb red idiots!
Except there’s one thing, which is that Hicks has been getting extremely lucky. His BABIP this year has been .197, and there’s just no way that’s going to last. He’s giving up homers on only 4% of his fly balls, and sure, he gets a lot of grounders, but you should still expect more homers going forward. His strikeout rate is 5.8 strikeouts per 9 innings, which compares very unfavorably to the league. Hell, it compares unfavorably 5 of the 6 years Mark Gardner spent pitching for the Giants. That’s just not going to get it done, so the stat that evaluates pitchers based on numbers is going to say, no, this guy has some flaws.
And then there’s Kyle Harrison. Gosh, we’ve all had such high hopes for Harrison this year, haven’t we? And you’ll see why sometimes. He’ll get two two strikes in a blink of an eye by throwing a couple of fastballs, and then just mow down the batter with that nasty curveball. It’s beautiful.
But when it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work. The interesting thing about Harrison is that he’s really limiting his walks well, which was not a given when you consider his entire minor league career. But he’s been incredibly homer-prone this year, and he’s given up a lot of hard contact, and his starts are often pretty tough to watch.
So no one behind Logan Webb is really a world-beater. Jordan Hicks has had the results of one, but not the process, so those results are going to dry up, probably sooner rather than later. Kyle Harrison — he’s young and this can change, so don’t in any way take this as giving up on him — has not been all too impressive. Keaton Winn has been solid, generally good and occasionally bad. Blake Snell is presumably trying very hard.
The Giants, then, do not currently have a good rotation. They can! Even before Alex Cobb and Robbie Ray come back from their injuries, this group is talented enough to comprise an above average starting rotation. But right now, they’re not much better than that. For a team with lofty Third Wild Card ambitions, they’re going to need more out of their starters.
Sorry, Maestro, but this time you drank too much of that half-empty glass.
When I wach Keaton Webb pitch, I see Logan Webb 2.0.
After that, it's all downhill.
I’m not impressed by WAR in general, and less so for pitchers. I do wonder what the results would be if you combined their IP and calculated their collective ERA. Even better - leave out Snell.