The Giants sure do struggle against good teams
That doesn't bode well for the postseason, does it?
For a team that is struggling to make the postseason, where every game is make-or-break, it seems like a bad thing that the Giants, who will face the mighty Padres for four games to close out the year, can’t beat winning teams.
Against over .500 teams this year, the Giants have a record of 7-18, which is the worst in the National League and the third worst in the majors, leading only the extremely bad Mariners and the somehow worse Rangers. They’ve done it by getting clobbered by the Padres and the A’s, losing series to the Astros and Dodgers, and just generally playing very badly when any non-bottom dweller shows its face.
There is a part of this that you can attribute to a talent gap. The Dodgers are a superteam, blessed with a neverending supply of fresh farm products to dominate the NL West until the heat death of the universe. The Padres have a young, brilliant core that’s pretty much a Death Star. The A’s have built a young, deep roster using the latest in Billy Beane Is Not Allowed To Spend Money technology.
The Giants threw a bunch of shit at a wall over and over again, and enough stuck that they were all, cool, that’s 28 guys, let’s do this thing.
That’s not to say that the Giants are bereft of good players — Yaz, Gausman, Solano, and Belt have stood out — but they weren’t assembled in a lab as The Perfect Example Of How To Play Baseball. Fernando Tatis Jr is better than anyone on the Giants, as is Manny Machado and half the Padres pitching staff (the other half would be appalled to learn that you even considered comparing them to any lowly Giants). It’s a similar story with the Dodgers, and one with the A’s too. Of course there’s a talent gap.
But that doesn’t entirely explain things either. I promise you there’s a talent gap between the Phillies and the Braves, and yet Philadelphia is still 13-17 against teams over .500, despite the fact that they just plum forgot to put together a bullpen this year. Hey, if it worked for the 2019 Nationals…
No, some of this has to be psychological. The Giants split their season opening 4-game series with the Dodgers, but since they they’ve dropped 2 of 3 to the Padres, dropped 3 of 4 to the then-good Rockies, dropped 2 of 3 to the Dodgers, dropped 2 of 3 to Houston, and then got horrifically swept by Oakland. At some point, if you’re human, there’s a part of you that will start figuring out patterns, and this one’s pretty simple: Good teams beat Giants teams.
But some of the blame behind entirely deserved losses falls on the manager, for making mistakes that he’s not going to repeat anytime soon. 2 of those A’s losses came because Gabe Kapler put Trevor Gott in the game in the ninth inning; Gott is hurt for the rest of the year, and (being as diplomatic as humanly possible) would not have been a candidate to close anyway. Some games got out of hand because Kapler was trying to figure out what he had in his bullpen, and he figured out that he should keep Rico Garcia out of high leverage situations, and medium leverage situations, and just situationsin general. Some of it was the bad defense from when Belt and Longoria were hurt over the first week or two of the year, which is now fixed.
It would be nearly impossible to quantify how much any of those factors mattered in relation to the others.
But there’s good news: it might not matter too much.
The 2010 Giants, who as you may or may not recall won the World Series of Baseball, were not good against over .500 teams. They went 33-41, for a winning percentage of .445. And yet, when they got into October and needed to beat nothing but good teams, they did it. The 2014 Giants, who were a mess for two months out of the year, and nothing special for another month or so after that, were also under .500 against the over-.500s.
There just isn’t the kind of correlation that you might expect between regular season winning percentage against good teams and postseason success. But it sure feels like it should matter, doesn’t it? That’s that same psychological aspect at work. Losing to all those good teams must have damaged the fragile psyches of the Giants, because it damaged my psyche, and I was just watching on TV.
But that isn’t necessarily how those guys think. They’ve spent their whole lived being athletes and experiencing failure; one more isn’t likely to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. That’s a fan- and media-imposed narrative that is wholly irrelevant between the ears of everyone on the team, and wholly irrelevant to what’s going on on the field. They’re not going to play differently. They can’t, really. They’re going to do their best and hope it works out.
So no, if the Giants do manage to sneak into the playoffs (extremely not a given!), then you shoudn’t worry a whole lot about their record against winning teams. You should worry about the fact that any team they faced is almost certainly much better than them, which makes it hard to get through 4 postseason series on the way to a championship. That’s not ideal.
This wasn’t supposed to be a competitive year for the Giants, but as it turns out, there’s magic inside and we’re in this thing. It might fall apart over the last few days, but even if it does, we’ve got this memory of a team that had no business competing, and yet they went out there and they just won*.
*against sub-.500 teams only, terms and conditions may apply